" I, like Haneke, in so far as I know his work, am better able to criticize society from a negative perspective. Precisely because even the positive cliches in our country are so stifling, I sought to take what it most prides itself on, its music and musical geniuses, and present their negative side: the renunciation by hundreds of female piano teachers of their libido."  Elfriede Jeliken

Multi-award winning Austrian director Michael Haneke has brilliantly adapted renowned novelist and playwright Elfriede Jeliken's controversial novel 'The Piano Teacher' into a shocking and disturbing film that explores the dark side of a woman's sexuality.   Marle Rivire interviewed Jeliken on her views on Haneke's adaptation (the interview was translated by Robert Gray).
This is the first time that a work of yours has been adapted for the screen. What made you decide to let Michael Haneke go ahead with the project?
For a long time I hesitated to give permission for a film adaptation, because my prose works are so language -oriented. That is, the images are created in and are transmitted through language. I couldn't imagine that film images could add anything essential. But I always knew that I only would work with a director like Haneke, who can juxtapose his own canon of images with the text.

Like Michael Haneke, you are Austrian, and like him, you have constantly explored the dark, the monstrous side of the human heart. Should we see a strong connection in this?
That is another cliché. I, like Harteke, in so far as I know his work, am better able to criticize society from a negative perspective. Precisely because even the positive cliches in our country are so stifling, I sought to take what it most prides itself on, its music and musical geniuses, and present their negative side: the renunciation by hundreds of female piano teachers of their libido.

You were brought up by a tyrannical, middle-class Catholic mother who dreamed of your becoming a concert pianist, and your father died in a psychiatric institution. To what extent is your novel autobiographical?  
I'd prefer not to answer that, and I'd also prefer my novel not to be seen as autobiographical, although naturally it contains many autobiographical elements. What interests me in a story is its resonance - in this case the unraveling of one of the women who carry on their backs, who carry to term the high culture that Austria so idolizes. The unlived sexuality expressed in voyeurism: A woman who cannot partake in life or in desire. Even the right to watch is a masculine right: The woman is always the one who is watched, never the one who watches. In that respect, to express it psychoanalytically, we are dealing here with a phallic woman who appropriates the male right to watch, and who therefore pays for it with her life.

How do you explain Erika's insanity?
She is certainly not insane, not at all. Neurotic, but not insane. As I just tried to explain, this is all the bloody (in the truest sense of the word) consequence of the fact that a woman is not allowed to live if she claims a right that is not hers and that she obtains only in the rarest of cases: artistic fame. The right to choose a man and also to dictate how he tortures her - that is, domination in submission - this she is not permitted. Indeed for a woman almost everything beyond the bearing and raising of children is a presumption.

You are not particularly easy on women.
That isn't my role. I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men.

When it was published, certain critics in Austria qualified the novel as pornographic. Were you hurt by this response?
The novel is the opposite of pornography. Pornography suggests desire everywhere and at every moment. The novel proves that this does not exist, that it is a construct meant to keep women willing, because they are usually pornographic objects anyway, while men look at them, and can almost penetrate their bodies with their gaze. But I am used to being misunderstood. I am even blamed for what I attempt to analyze in my writing. As so often happens, the messenger is attacked, and not what she expresses. No one is interested in that.

About your characters you have said, "I strike hard so nothing can grow where my characters have been." Is redemption impossible?  
My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically (sarcastically), the horrors of reality. Redemption is the specialty of other authors, male and female. My writing, my method, is based on criticism, not utopianism.

Behind the description of a pathological case, is there not a denunciation of Austria's musical culture, which contributes to your country's identity?  
Yes, precisely. The idolization of high musical culture, which the country lives off, and how it is paid for. (Think how these great masters were often treated in their lifetimes, and how contemporary artists are treated!) A sort of Hegelian masterservant relationship. High culture is the master, the female piano teachers are the maidservants. They have no right to any creative energy, not even to a life of their own (I suppose I carried this to its extreme in the text).

Would you have made the same musical choices as Michael Haneke?  
We discussed the choice of music beforehand. Anyway most of the pieces are specified in the text.

Just like Michael Haneke with his camera, you wield your pen like a scalpel. Are there similarities in your work?  
That is why Michael Harteke is so well suited to adapt this novel for the screen, because we both proceed analytically and dispassionately, perhaps like scientists studying the life of insects. You see the mechanisms better from a distance than when you are in the middle of them.

michael haneke Born in Munich in 1942, multi-award-winning Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke studied philosophy, psychology and theatre in Vienna Worked for German television between 1967 and 1970. He has been an Independent director and screenwriter since 1970. His films include Code Unknown, Funny Games, which received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 in Biarritz 1998 and the Konrad-Wolf-Preis awarded by the Academy of Arts, Berlin in 1998); 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Change,  winning the 1994 Golden Hugo Award at the Chicago Film Festival and the Prize for Best Film, Best Screenplay and Critics' Prize at the Sitges International Fantasy Film Festival in 1994; and The Seventh Continent, receiving the Bronze Leopard, International Film Festival Locarno in 1989, the Prize for distribution of quality films in Belgium Films, Brussels 1989, and the Austrian Award of Honour from the Ministry of Education and Arts for Cinema 1990. Haneke is also a theatre director, having mainly worked for theatres in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Hamburg.

elfriede jeliken Born in Styria in 1946, Jelinek is a fervent intellectual, a famous playwright and a successful writer. She belongs to the school of the great polemicists and misanthropes such as Karl Kraus or Thomas Bernhard. Besides La Planiste (The Piano Teacher), three other novels have been published in France (Les Exclus, Lust, Les Amantes) and have confirmed Elfriede Jelinek as a major author of her generation.