Vera Kooper
Biography Vera Kooper
Vera Kooper
I was born in the Netherlands. There was always music in our home: my mother played the piano every day and as a six-year-old I remember singing along to Mozart’s Requiem in the car. One day, after hearing my mother practise Asturias by Albéniz, I decided that I wanted to play the piano as well. The next day she taught me how to play the piece by ear.
Music started out as a game. I simply enjoyed the pleasant feeling I got from moving my fingers over the keyboard, seeing how fast they could move while bringing out all sorts of magical sounds. My first piano teacher took me to concerts all the time. I remember that as soon as the music started I couldn’t move anymore. I was frozen, transported to another place, and I knew then that I wanted to live with music for the rest of my life. My first love was Mozart and at the age of eight I learned my first Mozart concerto. He felt like a friend to me.
As I grew up, playing the piano evolved from a children’s game into a more complete experience. We grew together, music and me, becoming more and more intertwined as the years went on. As a teenager, playing the piano kept me out of trouble. It was my escape into a safe world where every complicated emotion had a place. Later, it did get me into different kinds of trouble. I studied in Holland, Austria, France, Switzerland and Italy and was always living a nomadic life, always searching, always traveling.
A life in music means that there is “never a dull moment” and no two days are ever the same. There is always something new to discover, learn or hear. When I’m not playing the piano I love horse-riding, being in nature and writing. I am also an obsessive reader (concert tours are really just a cover for me to read for endless hours on trains, planes and in lonely hotel rooms) with a ridiculously eclectic taste. There is something about human nature and the telling of stories. We all want to share stories, to connect with each other or simply escape from reality. I think I made the choice early on to spend most of my time living in a parallel universe made of words and sounds. It’s where I feel most at home.
