leave my house in the morning and walk to my studio. There are few people on the street and my body is adjusting from breakfast as my mind is adjusting from the morning emails. I speak to no one, and at my studio I turn on the lights and make myself an espresso. Then to the piano. The day stretches ahead. I see no one. It’s just me and Beethoven, hour after hour. Around 6.30pm I stop, wash the coffee cup, turn off the lights, leave and go home. This is my life when I’m at home in London and not travelling. So far, there is no difference in my routine due to the coronavirus. For the past 35 years, these London days, calmly spent working between concert engagements, have been few and far between. Every morning as I wake up, there has usually been a sense of anxiety: am I ready for the next concert? When do I have to get to the airport? Is that piece memorised? The dress rehearsal next week – can I play first so that I can get back to the hotel and rest before the concert? Oh yes, I forgot to ask my management whether I was going to be met at the airport or have to take a taxi. And so on. Mundane business questions barely balanced with sublime musical questing. But now in these pandemic days, I spent one morning going through my diary erasing concert after concert, rehearsal after rehearsal, flight after flight. Weeks of activity gone. Covid-19 is a terrible thing on so many levels – there won’t be one person unaffected by it, some in the most devastating way, with lives and livelihoods hanging by a thread. At the time of writing, one major artist management company has folded as a direct consequence of coronavirus – their long list of artists are without work and the mechanism to find it when work picks up again. We will have to see whether the concert world will be able to pick up the pieces after we emerge from our isolation. For self-employed musicians, work is precarious at the best of times, every concert is in some way an audition, as hundreds of alternates waiting in the wings are ready to step into your patent leather shoes. But the wings are now closed, temporarily gathering dust. It’s impossible at this point to say where this will end. I’m trying to live in the present moment, taking each day as it comes, because now is all we have. The question is whether we embrace that fact or fight against it. While I’m in good health and have enough to eat, my London days are no different now than they were before the virus, except for the peace of disappearing deadlines. Work has become more serene and productive, and the blank days in my diary seem like the clear blue of a sky free from clouds. I feel guilty admitting that I empathise with the sentiments of one colleague who wrote to me: “I’m ecstatic. I’ve longed for this sort of time off for years and I’m enjoying these days as much as I’ve enjoyed any in my life.” Though I can’t quite rise to that level, especially as I see only debits and no credits in my bank statements for the foreseeable future. Also I miss my friends’ physical company, coffee shops, the buzz of crowds, the turns and twists of urban life. I miss arriving in a city for a concert and the awakening of the piano’s sonority as I strike the keys and vibrations fill the hall. But the music I’m practising now seems more touching and sublime than ever – as if I’ve finished a strict detox diet and then tucked into a scrumptious slice of cake. We’re told that pollution levels are dramatically lower since the physical distancing requirement came into effect and travel all but stopped; the same can be true in our souls. I’m composing a lot, too. I agreed to three commissions last year and, at the time, wondered if I was being foolhardy to take on such a commitment. Now I’m grateful that I have something to fill my time, and some of the poems I’m setting in my song cycle Songs of Love and Loss seem strangely appropriate. But the sky can never be totally clear, even on a productive day with the sun outside my window. Covid-19 is an evil messenger, bringing fear of contagion, leaving families in terrible distress, resulting in the collapse of many businesses and threatening the possibility of social unrest. These curses loom like dark shadows, until I remember the present moment. The past is gone, a phantom memory; the future may never come, a phantom dream: but if we can take one lungful of air and then another, we are alive. Existence, as the blood pumping in our hearts and the air drawn in and out of our lungs is the body’s prayer, even when we forget or lack the energy to lift up our hearts. Just to be alive is a live stream into which we can always dip. • Stephen Hough’s recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos will be released on 1 May. His book Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More is out on Faber.