Provided it is credible that a pianist is so high strung and mentally unbalanced that the absence of her favorite page-turner shakes her up rather badly, I find it totally and utterly unbelievable she makes so many mistakes when playing the Notturno. From a dramatic point of view, a few minor mistakes would have been much more credible. I just laughed out loud when she fumbled the way she did. Unbelievable.
shareThere's a lot things that can reasonably be called plotholes, but that's not one of them.
The scene is about the character, and Arianne is someone who has been developing stage fright after a traumatic car crash; in two years she hasn't recovered mentally from it and that's the form her scarred mental state is taking. She feels vulnerable in general, takes things to heart much more than she used to [evidenced by the comparative in her before and after scenes and the exposition - in Melanie's performance as a child she is confident and arrogant, doesn't seem compassionate enough to understand her lack of interest is off putting to a child in a stressful situation; in the post accident scenes her husband tells Melanie she has changed because of the accident then we see she is highly strung and needy for the compassion of others]. The psychological problem would exacerbate with each performance. She would perform, get distracted and shaky not able to control her stage fright enough, then that lack of control would make her more worried the next time.
So it makes sense that working with bad, distracting or sudden page turners could lead to some mistakes, which is set up nicely in the first dinner scene. Her husband proclaims that the last time she worked with a new pageturner the concert wasn't her best performance. Arianne seems hurt and stressed that her husband would bring it up explicitly to remind her it makes her place worse when she doesn't have a good page turner, and rattled he would do so in front of their new employee. The additional character element is of course that it is Melanie who abandons her to work with a new pageturner. She's in love with Melanie and believes her to be her rock and intrinsic to her career. During the performance her mind is full of feelings of betrayal, stress, performance anxiety and distraction that she has no idea whether the page turner behind her will be fine. Ultimately it's wondering what Melanie's absence means in terms of their private life as well as her career that offsets her completely. It's perfectly believeable that someone can give a terrible performance in any performance career if their mind is completely elsewhere or heartbroken.
Wow, you really went at length here to clarify your point of view, and I commend you for it.
I agree with each and every argument you put forward, but you missed the quintessential point which I tried to make: I am not questioning Arianne's state of mind, which causes her to mess up the performance, but it is the magnitude of the mistakes she makes. Just a few minor mishaps, a wrong note here and there, would have been disastrous enough. But when she manages to misplace each of her ten fingers on the keyboard and produces a sound as though a three year old is banging away on the piano, that was overkill.
I see your point; it would have achieved the same thing for the story if she had just made several minor but professionally disasterous mistakes, and it probably would have made it a more interesting scene if she was almost excellent in the performance had she not made a few tiny mistakes. I think they probably wanted the two scenes [Melanie messing up the second half of her entry performance and Ariane messing up the second performance for the Americans] to mirror each other to make it seem like Melanie had effected Ariane as much as Ariane effected Melanie as a child, and her revenge has come full circle, which is somewhat of a narrative cliche.
From a real world pov though, it's still my opinion that severe mistakes aren't implausible; if anxiety is severe enough it can be impossible to control the heartrate, the shakes and inner ear function, for some people it would be hard to even focus on the keys let alone hit the right ones more often than not. Or some people would faint and have to halt the performance altogether; the scene might not have felt convincing in the film but it wasn't unrealistic in general.
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