"The Piano Player [f.]") is a novel by Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, first published in 1983 by Rowohlt Verlag.

Erika takes large instruments on trains so that she can hit people with them and call it an accident, or kicks or steps on the feet of other passengers so that she can watch them blame someone else.

Erika sees love as a means of rebellion or escape from her mother and thus seeks complete control in the relationship, always telling Klemmer carefully what he must do to her, although she is a sexual masochist.

Thus, Erika remains the object of her mother's desire, unable to attain subjectivity which the principles of her musical education had denied her in the first place.

Worth noting is that: "the mother's power and influence increase with the absence of the father, who is admitted to an asylum and spatially exiled.

"[4]Critic Beatrice Hanssen refers to the novel as "an anti-Bildungsroman and anti-Künstlerroman" and writes further that The Piano Teacher is a "satirical critique...of the literature, popular during the 1970s and 1980s, that idealized the pre-oedipal mother-daughter bond.