Most tragedies succeed because they end in a blaze of tear-welling calamity and ruin.
A Polish-Jewish refugee who fled to Australia after losing the rest of his family in the Holocaust, Peter was passionately possessive of his children. Again and again, he mixes physical and verbal abuse with genuine love for his piano-prodigy son. And David suffers the consequences of those mixed messages for the rest of his life. In London in the 1970s, David collapses during a performance and lapses into a psychotic episode that keeps him institutionalized back in Australia for a decade. He's not even allowed to touch his beloved piano.