This is Life and Art from F.T. Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos.

The journalist Nadia Beard did something a few years ago that upended her life.

She was 31 and working at a magazine. And she quit her job and enrolled full-time as a piano student at a conservatory.

She didn't think she'd become a

concert pianist, but she did think there was value in being an amateur in her 30s. Nadia wrote

about it for the FT, and she's been thinking about this since, this joy of taking up challenges

later in life. Recently, she wrote another piece for us on musicians debuting on major stages in their

80s and 90s. She calls them the Wonder Alton, which is the opposite of Wonderkinder. And she thinks

that in some ways, age made them better. She's working on a book about the value of amateurism now,

and she's with us today. Nadia, hi. Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me.

So to start, can you tell me a little bit about how this all began for you? Like, when did you

decide to devote such serious time to being a pianist as an adult? And what made you decide to?

It was actually by accident, really. So I played the piano and cello quite seriously from the age of four until I went to university.

When I studied Russian and decided during my undergrad that I really wanted to become a journalist and music accidentally fell by the wayside.

And it was just by chance one evening in Berlin, I'd gone there

with another friend to visit somebody. And I just came across a beautiful concert brand Borsendorff

piano in the lobby. And it reminded me that I used to play. So I just sat down and miraculously

actually remembered a couple of things.

And it was actually on the way to dinner that night that I voiced that to my friends.

And I said, how wonderful it would be if I could practice really hard and maybe get into conservatory to study for a year.

And ever the cheerleaders, they both said, you should absolutely do that.

Okay, so I find this very inspiring.

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