“What went wrong?” Those three words toll like a funeral bell through the new Australian documentary film, The Eulogy, based on the rise and fall of Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer.

The words first emerge as Richard Gill addresses a group of students at the Sydney Conservatorium High School. Brandishing an unidentified book, Gill quizzes the students, poor young things trapped like deer before the camera’s arc lamps. The implication here – never directly stated – is that they too, fellow prodigies as some of those bright young kids could be, may suffer the same fate as Tozer.

To the average music-lover, Geoffrey Tozer (1954 – 2009) seemed to lead a charmed life. A child prodigy whose every move was determined by his piano-teacher mother Verna (echoes of Rose and Percy Grainger begin to sound here), Tozer left school at the age of 13 to pursue the gilded life of an international piano virtuoso. The youngest ever Churchill Fellow, a prize-winner in competitions like the International Rubinstein (1980), soloist with international and Australian orchestras and in 37 award-winning CD releases, he seemed to have the world at...