He started playing the piano at the relatively late age of seven, soon giving up tennis to protect his fingers from injury. He studied at the Prague Conservatoire with Erna Grünfeld (a niece of Alfred Grünfeld, the 19th-century Austrian pianist), winning several prizes, appearing on Czech radio in 1946 and performing in Prague. Before long this busy schedule had reignited a youthful skating injury and between the ages of 18 and 24 he was not heard in public; later he suggested that it was the pain in his neck and spine that informed how his hands touched the piano keys so carefully.