Dubai: Her mother, who taught music and science at school, made her only child attached to melodies. And when the girl, Condoleezza rice, was an infant, she received a tiny toy piano.
Many years later, the piano toy was prominently displayed, a journalists noted, on the coffee table in her apartment in Washington, D.C, where Rice lived when she served as the 66th Secretary of State between 2005 and 2009.
“They had a plan,” Rice was quoted in a long report in the New York Times titled “Condoleezza Rice on piano” that was published when she was in office.
Rice is not the only Secretary of State to pursue “amateur music-making”, the report said. Thomas Jefferson is considered the first. He was a violinist.
And Rice is the fourth-generation pianist from her mother’s side.
“My mother was a church musician, and she read music beautifully, but she didn’t play classically that much,” New York Times quoted Rice as saying. “But she had a marvelously improvisational ear, which I don’t have.”
Her mother died in 1985 of cancer and her father, who also loved music, died in 2000.
“But it was her maternal grandmother, Mattie Ray, who proved the decisive musical influence in her life,” wrote the paper. “Because both Ms. Rice’s parents worked, she was dropped off each day at the house of her grandmother, who taught piano privately and sensed her eagerness and talent. Lessons started when she was 3. ‘I don’t remember learning to read music — you know, the lines and spaces and all that,” Ms. Rice said. “From my point of view I could always read music.’”
Playing classical music became a passion to her after she got a gift from her mother: a recording of Verdi’s Aida.
Apart from being a pianist and a foreign policy expert, Rice is a good golfer. On august 20, 2012, it was announced that she, and South Carolina financier Darla Moore, were admitted as members to Augusta National Golf Club, which all its members were before that day are men.
