An Equal Music
Page 10
She taught me to enjoy art, she improved my German enormously, she even taught me bridge. She showed me things about music simply through her playing; the joy I got from making music with her, alone or in our trio, was as great as the joy which the quartet has given me. I later realised that even about music I had learned more from her than from anyone else, for what I learned from her I was not taught.
She sometimes went to church, not every Sunday but from time to time, usually when thankful or when troubled. That was a world opaque to me, who had not prayed even ritually since my schooldays. No doubt it was one of the bases of her confidence, but I felt awkward about it and it was clear that she too did not want to talk about it, though she never said so outright. She had an acuity, a gentleness unlike anything I was used to. Perhaps what she saw in me was a corresponding strangeness - a volatility, a sense of resistance, of scepticism, roughness, impulsiveness, even, at times, of dark panic, almost brainsickness. But how could any of this have been attractive? She said that because I had had to work to earn my living for years, I was different from
AN EQUAL MUSIC | 103
the other students she knew. She said she loved my company although she never knew what to expect of my moods. She must have felt how much I needed her when I sank increasingly into depression. Most of all she must have known how much I loved her.
A second winter came. Early in the year, my third finger began giving me difficulty. It responded slowly, and was only effective after a long warm-up. Carl reacted with fury and impatience: my slack trills were yet another insult to him, and my anxieties reflected my fecklessness. It was as if one of the potential diamonds on his crown was proving itself to be merely carbon, convertible to its ideal form only under intense and continuous pressure. He applied it, and I crumbled.
Through winter into spring she tried to talk to me, to coax me into courage, to stay where I had planned to stay for the rest of the year, if for nothing else, then for the sake of love. But I could not speak to her of the bleakness in my mind. She told me not to leave on bad terms with my teacher, and again and again reminded me of what I had first seen in Carl, what I could see she still saw in him: someone whose playing went deeper and farther than his virtuosity, whose music conveyed nobility of spirit in every phrase. But my conflict with him had pressed itself so deeply into my skull that her defence of him appeared to me an unbearable betrayal on her part: worse in a sense than his, for from him I no longer expected understanding.
I left. I became, in effect, a fugitive in London, for I could not bear to return home either. I did not write or call her on the phone. It was only gradually that I was able to see things through eyes less injured and less blind, to understand how honestly she had acted, and with what love, and to realise that I might well have lost her through my sudden departure and silence. I had. Two
104 | VIKRAM SETH
.;.';
months had gone by. When I at last wrote, she must have been past caring.
I tried to phone, but whoever picked up the common telephone in the students' hostel always returned, after a minute or two, to tell me she wasn't in. My letters went unanswered. Once or twice I thought of going to Vienna, but I had very little money, and I was still afraid of the memories of my collapse, and of the presence of Carl Kail, and of how Julia might greet any explanation from me. Besides, by now it was the summer holidays, and she could be anywhere. Months passed. In October the next term began, and still I heard nothing from her.
The sharp consciousness of losing her gave way in London to a numbed state of self-preservation. After a while I lost hope, and with it the edge of that anguish. I still had two-thirds of my life to live. I subscribed to a diary service that arranged work for me. After a year or so I auditioned for the Camerata Anglica, and was taken on. I played; I survived; in time, I even saved a bit, since I had no one I wanted to spend it on. I visited museums, galleries, libraries. I walked everywhere. I acquainted myself with London and the facilities of London, but could not have felt less a Londoner. My mind was elsewhere, north and south. In the paintings I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she had in many ways been the making of me.
When I listened to music, it was often to Bach. It was after all in her company, through her playing, that my feeling for his music had grown from admiration to love. Sometimes she and Maria had played the gamba sonatas, sometimes she and I had played his violin and keyboard music, a few times she had even made me thump out the pedal part of an organ work at the far left of the piano. There was one choral prelude, "An Wasserflussen Babylon", which had overcome me even as we played it. But
AN EQUAL MUSIC
105
it was when she had played by herself, to herself - a suite, say, or an invention, or a fugue - that I had most completely yielded my being to Bach, and to her.
I had slept with other women before, and she had had a boyfriend once, but I was her first love, as she was mine. Nor have I ever been in love since. But then I have never fallen out of love with her - with her, I suppose, as she then was, or as I grew afterwards to realise or imagine she had been. What is she now, who is she now? Am I with such inane fidelity fixated on someone who could have utterly changed (but could she have? could she really have changed so much?), who could have grown to hate me for leaving her, who could have forgotten me or learned deliberately to expunge me from her mind. How many seconds or weeks after seeing me on that bus did I survive in her thoughts?
How could she forgive me when I cannot forgive myself? When I hear Bach, I think of her. When I play Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven or Schubert I think of their city. She showed me that city, every step and stone of which brings her back to me. I have not returned there for ten years. But that is where we are due to go next spring, and nothing, I know, can anneal me against it.
2.19 ---• -?;
For the last three months or so, a strange fellow has been following us around: a sticky fan. At first we took him to be a harmless sort of enthusiast: tie, spectacles on a string, the sort of jacket worn by an academic. He followed us here and there, greeted us in green rooms, hosted rounds of drinks, latched onto us with monopolistic mania, talked knowledgeably about what we had played, insisted we let him take us out. We slithered out
106 I VIKRAM SETH
of most of this. Helen was the most wary among us, and
- unlike her usual self - quite sharp with him a couple of times. Sometimes he seemed almost wild with excitement, but what he said was such an odd compound of irrelevance and sense that it was not easy to dismiss him completely. When he said he knew how we had got our name, Piers looked upset and angry: it is supposed to be something of a quartet secret.
Last month in York the sticky fan hijacked a party. The host, who had something to do with the local music society, had invited a number of people to his house for dinner after the concert. The sticky fan, having followed us so far north, was somehow taken to be a friend of ours. He tagged along and took over. To our host and hostess's amazement, caterers appeared from nowhere, providing food and drink to supplement needlessly what was already provided. By now it had become clear that this man was not someone the quartet had voluntarily brought along, but it was too late: he was entrenched. He became a sort of master of ceremonies, moving people here and there, summoning waiters, asking that lights be dimmed. He talked, he sang to illustrate his points, he danced. He rose to compose a paean to art and to our artistry. He fell on his knees. At this point our host discovered that he had a flight to catch very early the next morning and, with many apologies for his own inhospitality, pushed everyone out of the house. The fan danced in the street for a while, then sat in the caterers' van and sang. Every so often he coughed violently.
This was the most extreme behaviour he had ever displayed, and we didn't know what to do.
"Shouldn't we make sure he's all right?" asked Billy, starting the car.
"No," said Piers. "He's none of our responsibility. He
AN
can take care of himself. I hope to God we never see the bastard again."
"Oh, come on, Piers, he's harmless," said Billy. "But, well, I feel bad for our hosts."
"Save some sympathy for yourself. I doubt we'll be invited here again."
"Oh, Piers," said Helen.
"What on earth do you know about all this?" demanded Piers, turning around from the front seat to glare at her. "I'm the one who'll have to tell Erica about what happened and get her to repair the damage. Not that she's so brilliant at damage control. And what if he turns up at our next concert?"
Helen seemed shaken by the thought of this. I put a reassuring arm around her. Strangely enough, I think Piers's anger may have been heightened by his sense of how upset Helen was.
"If he's in the audience in Leeds," she said, "I'll just stop playing. No, keep your arm there, Michael." She sighed. "I'm so tired tonight. Here's a question: how can you end up with a million pounds as a string quartet player?"
"Start out with ten million," said Billy.
"Billy, you cheat, you've heard that one before," said Helen.
"Inherit it from your aunt," muttered Piers, not looking back this time. Helen said nothing, but I felt her shoulders tense.
"Piers," I said. "Enough's enough."
"Shall I give you some advice, Michael?" said Piers. "Just keep out of family matters."
"Oh, Piers," said Helen.
"Oh Piers, oh Piers, oh Piers!" said Piers. "I've had enough, Let me out. I'll walk to the hotel."
108 | VIKRAM SETH
'««**
,;,-'' «••
IS.'
"But we're already there," said Billy. "Look - there it
)j
Piers growled and let it go at that. ; .
2.20
It is 7:30 on a February evening. The skylight above the audience is dark. As we walk to our chairs, my eyes go to where Virginie is sitting. Behind us is a creamy gold curved wall and above us a semi-cupola adorned with a bizarre and beautiful relief. We sit down. The applause dies. We do a bit of fine tuning, and are ready to begin. Piers raises his bow to play the first note. Then Billy sneezes, very loudly. He quite often sneezes before a concert, never - thank God - during one. There is a swift ripple of amusement, quite sympathetic, through the audience. We look at Billy, who has flushed red, and is fumbling in his pocket for his handkerchief. Piers waits a few seconds, assures himself that we are all ready, smiles at Billy, brings his bow down, and we are off.
A winter evening in the Wigmore Hall, the sacred shoebox of chamber music. We have spent the last month practising intensively for this night. The fare is simple three classical quartets: Haydn's opus 20 no. 6 in A major, my most beloved quartet; then the first of the six quartets that Mozart himself dedicated to Haydn, in G major; and finally, after the interval, Beethoven's steeplechase-cum-marathon, the ethereal, joky, unpausing, miraculous, exhausting quartet in C sharp minor, which he composed a year before his death, and which, just as the score of the "Messiah" had consoled and delighted him on his deathbed, was to delight and console Schubert as he lay dying in the same city a year later.
Dying, undying, a dying fall, a rise: the waves of sound
AN EQUAL MUSIC | 109
well around us even as we generate them: Helen and I at the heart and, to either side, Piers and Billy. Our eyes are on our music; we hardly glance at each other, but we cue and are cued as if Haydn himself were our conductor. A strange composite being we are, not ourselves any more but the Maggiore, composed of so many disjunct parts: chairs, stands, music, bows, instruments, musicians sitting, standing, shifting, sounding - all to produce these complex vibrations that jog the inner ear, and through them the grey mass that says: joy; love; sorrow; beauty. And above us here in the apse the strange figure of a naked man surrounded by thorns and aspiring towards a grail of light, in front of us 540 half-seen beings intent on
540 different webs of sensation and cerebration and emotion, and through us the spirit of someone scribbling away in 1772 with the sharpened feather of a bird.
I love every part of the Haydn. It is a quartet that I can hear in any mood and can play in any mood. The headlong happiness of the allegro; the lovely adagio where my small figures are like a counter-lyric to Piers's song; the contrasting minuet and trio, each a minicosmos, yet each contriving to sound unfinished; and the melodious, ungrandiose, various fugue - everything delights me. But the part I like best is where I do not play at all. The trio really is a trio. Piers, Helen and Billy slide and stop away on their lowest strings, while I rest intensely, intently. My Tononi is stilled. My bow lies across my lap. My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond? A vacation, however short, from the presence of my too-present colleagues? Soberly, deeply, the melody grinds away, and now the minuet begins again. But I should be playing this, I think anxiously. It is the minuet. I should have rejoined the others, I should be playing again. And, oddly
no VIKRAM SETH
|«g**fi£?r
&P;'<+~ ^•jg^Jl '*.**; ~^^^^^^H
enough, I can hear myself playing. And yes, the fiddle is under my chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am.
••• ••••; : 2.21 • . /. .. ..-..••-
We get the last two chords of Haydn's fugue perfectly: no massive Dàmmerung of some daemonic wrestling-match
- we'll keep that for the three enormous twelve-note chords at the end of the Beethoven - but a jovial au revoir, light but not slight.
We are applauded off and back onto the stage several times. Helen and I are grinning from ear to ear, Piers is trying to look statesmanlike, and Billy gets in a couple of sneezes.
Next comes the Mozart. We sweated far more rehearsing this than the Haydn, although it's in a more natural key for our instruments. The others like it, though Helen has one or two reservations. Billy finds it fascinating; but then, I have rarely found a piece that Billy did not, from a compositional point of view, find fascinating.
I'm not mad about it. Piers, the most opinionated being I know, claimed that I was being opinionated when this emerged in rehearsal. I tried to explain myself. I said that I didn't like the epidemic of dynamic contrasts: they seemed fussy. Why couldn't he let us shape even the opening bars ourselves? Nor did I like the excessive chromaticism. It seemed strangely laboured, un-Mozartean even. Piers thought I was mad. Anyway, here we are, playing it well enough. Luckily, what I think about this piece hasn't conveyed itself to the others. Indeed, if anything, their enthusiasm has brought my own playing to life. As with the Haydn, the trio is my favourite bit, though this time I too have to play for my pleasure. In the fugal - or, rather, fugue-ish - last movement, it's the non-
AN EQUAL MUSIC I In
fugal bits that really come alive, and do what a fugue especially a quick one - should do: take flight. Oh well. Inspired or not, we accept our applause happily enough.
We sit in the green room in the interval, relieved and tense. I pat my violin nervously. It is sometimes a temperamental beast, and I won't be able to retune it for forty minutes: there is no gap between the seven movements of the Beethoven.
Billy is tinkling away at the upright piano, and this makes me still more tense. He is playing a few bars of the curious encore we have so carefully prepared, and humming various parts to himself, and as a result I am suffering all kinds of advance agonies. At the best of times I hate intervals.
"Please, Billy!" I say.
"What? Oh - oh, I see," says Billy, and stops. He frowns. "Tell me," he says, "why do people have to cough immediately after a movement ends? If they've held back for ten minutes, can't they hold back for two seconds more?" ;
"Audiences!" says Piers, as if that explained it all.
Helen offers me a sip of whisky from a little silver flask she keeps in her bag.
"Don't get him drunk," growls Piers.
"Just medicina
l," says Helen. "Nerves. Look, poor Michael, he's trembling."
"I'm not. Not more than usual, anyway."
"It's going very well," says Helen soothingly. "Very well indeed. They all seem to like it."
"What they really like, Helen," says Piers, "is your red dress and bare shoulders."
Helen yawns ostentatiously. "Billy, play us a bit of Brahms," she says.
"No, no - " cries Piers.
"Well, then how about silence?" asks Helen. "No
112 VIKRAM SETH
w
unpleasant remarks, no bickering, lots of collegiate love and sympathy."
"Very well," says Piers in a conciliatory tone, coming over and stroking his sister's shoulders.
"I'm looking forward to it really," I say.
"That's the spirit," says Piers.
"That slow opening fugue, it makes me shiver," says Billy to himself.
"You boys are so wet" says Helen. "Can't you be a bit less dewy about music? Then you'd be less nervous."
We are quiet for a while. I stand up and look out of the window, resting my hands against the radiator.
"I'm worried about my fiddle staying in tune," I say almost under my breath.
"It'll be fine," murmurs Helen. "It'll be fine."
..; 2.22
Forty minutes later we are taking our applause. Billy's shirt is drenched with sweat. He once said about the C sharp minor quartet: "You give everything of yourself in your first four bars, and where do you go from there?" but he, and we, have answered that in our own way.
It is a piece after which there can be no encore, and should be none. The fourth time we are called back on stage, we could have left our instruments behind to indicate as much, but we have brought them with us, as before, and this time we sit down. The applause dies instantly, as if at the downbeat of a baton. There is a murmur of expectancy, then silence. We look at each other now, concentrate entirely on each other. For what we are to play we need no music. It is in our cells.
I have made a small adjustment to the Tononi