“Listen to me carefully, boy. That passage you slipped on last week, yes? The master may have spent months on that passage, agonizing over exactly how it would sound, what it was to signify, how it would proceed.”
He took a deep drag from his cigarette, squinted at me through the smoke. “And a fifteen-year-old boy tells me that he wants to attempt an emotional interpretation of such a passage. Fine. I am sure the master would have been honored to hear of your desire.”
He leaned over close to me. I could see the thin pale line of his lips, and smell the rank tobacco odor of his breath. “Now you will play this passage until you have played it perfectly, until it fits precisely into the whole. You will continue to play all pieces without comment until I tell you that you have learned the mechanics and the discipline of this instrument. Then and only then will you be ready to begin with such things as interpretation and emotional analysis. Do you understand? Yes. I see that this at least is clear. Good. Then perhaps we can finish with this waste of time and get on with our work.”
****
Our final lessons before the Christmas holidays rarely lasted more than half an hour. I played what he had assigned me to study. He criticized me briefly and made me play a few passages over. When he was satisfied he would nod his head once, turn to the next assignment, explain it briefly, and dismiss me. I wondered at times if he was glad to have me leave.
In mid-January Professor Schmitz started me on a piece by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a melodious rite of spring that begged for interpretation. It cried out to be played like the flow of a river, the steadily moving currents offset by swirls and eddies and unwritten pauses that gave life to half-hidden pools of emotion. To play it with the professor’s strict sense of timing, to compress the flow into a rigid discipline, to give each note the exact same weight, was torture. I carried this burden with me through the dark weeks of winter, knowing full well what he intended. This was the challenge. If I gave in to my desire to play with flow, with interpretation, there would be no recital for me that year.
Professor Schmitz moved through the piece at a snail’s pace, taking it slower and more deliberately than ever before. He was testing me, compelling me to struggle daily with my desire to run with the music’s beauty. He forced me to clamp down hard on my emotions, to follow the written structure and timing, to learn discipline. I felt like a butcher.
Work on the piece continued on through February and into March. The pressure of the unmentioned recital grew on me steadily. I began to have vivid nightmares of smashing my guitar, raging through crowded streets, slashing out at unseen faces while I screamed a torrent of curses. I began to awaken in the morning feeling tired and listless. I entered the lessons with dread.
The first week in March Professor Schmitz explained the piece’s final passage. He let me go after less than fifteen minutes. I understood. The ultimatum had been stated as clearly as if it had been written upon my heart.
All that week I practiced the piece, ignoring the growing tumult of my feelings, afraid to even look inside. I bound myself tighter and tighter to Professor Schmitz’s rigid discipline. My exhaustion grew. I dragged myself through the days of that week.
****
I entered his office the following Thursday feeling nothing.
I went into the practice room, sat, opened my case, and began tuning my guitar. I saw the world through a blanket of fatigue. I set the sheet music on the stand, but I did not open it.
Professor Schmitz walked in, glanced at the closed music, nodded once, sat down. He did not need to say anything. I knew what I had to do. I ran through the strings once more, flexed my fingers, took a breath, and began.
Halfway through the first movement knife-like spasms cramped my back from holding myself too stiff. Yet I dared not relax. It was the only way I knew to hold back totally, by tensing myself and gritting my teeth and trying not to think. A trickle of sweat teased its way down my temple and cheek and jaw and neck. I did not move.
Toward the end of the second movement I faltered in my concentration, allowed a brief flash of feeling. I saw myself imprisoned and in chains, struggling in darkness and screaming at the night. But I caught myself in time. I pushed away the thought and clenched my teeth and bore down harder.
I finished the piece. I dropped my hands, too weak to set the guitar down. I felt totally drained. Every ounce of energy had been pummelled from my body and spirit by this battle I had fought within myself.
Professor Schmitz reached over and took the music from the stand. He stood and walked to his filing cabinet. He paused long enough to light a cigarette, then began searching through the cluttered top drawer. I watched him from the corner of my eye, my head still bowed over my guitar.
He walked back over, sat down, and placed a new score on the stand. “So. Today we will begin with Frescobaldi. I want you to study this first passage very carefully for next week.”
I was still sweating. I could feel the moisture sticking my shirt to my body. I allowed my head to roll backward. I stared at the ceiling, sighed, shook my head very slowly. For the life of me I could not remember what had ever made this whole thing seem so important.
Professor Schmitz took a drag on his cigarette, tapped at the ashtray with nervous fingers, said with the smoke, “What do you want me to say, boy? That you played well? All right. You played well. There. Are you satisfied?”
With an effort I turned my head and looked at him. It was as though I had never really seen the man before. I had been so committed to this desire to make it, to play in his recital, to become a great classical guitarist, that I had been blind to who this man really was. What he wanted.
“I understand,” I said quietly. Finally, finally, I truly understood.
“You understand nothing. You are tired and overwrought, that much I understand. Go home and rest, boy. Tomorrow look at the passage. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Study it well. It is the piece you will play in your first recital. You have seven weeks to prepare. Can you do it? I doubt it, but we will see. Now go home. I have other work to see to.”
I walked out of the school, lightheaded in the early spring sunlight. I understand, I repeated to myself as I waited for my tram. Why had it taken so long? Why had it been so hard for me to see? The man was trying to chain me down. I had been killing myself trying to satisfy someone who could give life to nothing, not even himself. How could he impose his world of discipline and order on music? To chain it was to kill it. Did life flow to four-four time? Did the wind blow like an army march? He was wrong. I could play it as he wanted and create a corpse, or I could breathe life into it as I had wanted to do all along. What did I choose? Life or death?
I would not let it die. The words became a litany as I sat in the tram and stared blindly from the window. My father, Professor Schmitz, this cold-hearted land with its empty-eyed people, none of them would take it from me. This insane demand for discipline would not destroy it. Never again would I contort my music for the sake of form.
I went straight to the apartment and let myself in. I heard my grandmother in the kitchen, but I did not say anything. I did not want to talk to anyone. My fatigue and despair were gone. There was a fire burning inside me. I walked to my alcove, the tiny room where for weeks I had done battle with myself to produce a dead thing for Professor Schmitz. My grandmother called my name. I refused to hear her, to take my mind away from what was burning inside me. I took out my guitar. Professor Schmitz had taken the score, but I did not need it. All I had to do was close my eyes and the notes danced in front of me.
I began to play. I played as I had dreamed of playing. I played with fire. Not with my head, not bound to a lifeless clock or stomping boots or senseless discipline. Discipline was a tool, not a prison. I knew discipline. And I knew that discipline would never rule me again.
I played the golden notes with the quiet joy of a world awakening to spring. I played the wind. I played the soft sighing of new leaves. I played and the earth came alive, rejoicing to the pa
ssage of winter’s stillness. My music took on a voice of its own, a chanting soaring cadence.
When I finished and looked up, my grandmother was standing in the doorway. I sat and stared at her, seeing her anew. I saw the shadow of her illness. I saw her grim strength and determination. I saw a sadness that had built up over many years, etching itself deeply into her features, threading its gray fingers through her hair. And I saw the deep pool of calm and love that came from her prayers.
For the first time I could look and see what these prayers brought her, a foundation upon which she stood against the storms that raged about her. I saw how I had been sheltered upon that rock all my life. I did not understand her faith in someone who had allowed her to be hurt as badly as she had been. I did not see how she could turn daily to something unseen. But I could not deny the love and the wisdom that stood there beside the pain and the weight of years. I was too open, too honest with myself at that moment to deny what I was able to see.
“That was lovely, Giovanni,” she said. “What do you call it?”
I told her.
“Lovely.” She shook her head. “You have a great gift, figlio mio.”
I nodded, thinking, she has given me so much. It is right that she be the first to hear of my awakening.
In the following weeks I came to play a dual role. With Professor Schmitz I was the dutiful student, chaining myself within his ordered boundaries of style and discipline and strict timing. After each lesson I walked out drained, my throat constricted, my chest tight.
At home I dissected my work twice, first inspecting and learning and memorizing each portion as Professor Schmitz dictated. Each note was held in bondage to its proper place, each bar played to the resounding monotony of the clock in my head. I had learned his lesson of discipline, and I would use it. My rejection of the barren limitations of the man would not force me to reject the value of his lessons. I would not reject the goodness. I simply would not stop myself there.
Hesitantly at first, then with growing assurance and strength, I released myself from these self-imposed boundaries. I experimented with timing, holding notes until the tones fell away into silence. I marveled at my daring, relished the joy of knowing that it was now my decision. I ran lines together, faster and faster and faster until the notes fell like raindrops or poured like a waterfall, cascading from the mouth of my instrument in a torrent that picked me up and rushed me away, up and away to a world where the music I played and all that I was became one.
****
One day in the middle of March Fraulein Rohr was waiting for me outside my first class. Her pale blue eyes looked very excited behind her spectacles. She asked if I was ready to play for her class.
I swallowed my surprise and the sudden lurch of fear, and replied, “Yes.”
“Oh, I’m so glad.” She gave me her special smile. “I was afraid it had taken so long to organize that you would have changed your mind again. Did you know we have a long weekend holiday at the end of March? Yes, of course you do. What student doesn’t know about his holidays? Well, the principal has given me permission to bring my three afternoon classes together the Thursday before the holidays to hear you play. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Yes,” I agreed, thinking that three classes meant seventy people, maybe more. I was going to play in front of seventy strangers.
“The principal will be there too. I hope you don’t mind, Gianni. I thought it would be nice to invite him.”
“No, no, that’s fine,” I said weakly.
“He told me that if you play as well as Herr Scherer and Professor Schmitz said, he wants you to play for the school assembly before the Easter holidays.”
I was not sure that I had understood her. “Professor Schmitz told the principal that I was ready to perform?”
“Well, I didn’t hear their conversation, but the principal seemed very pleased when he got off the phone. He came to the teachers’ lounge right after the professor called, and told me I could start arranging things.”
I barely followed the remainder of the conversation as Fraulein Rohr covered timing and notes for my teachers and a number of other details. It was unbelievable. In over a year of lessons he had never done anything but criticize me. I could not understand it. Why would Professor Schmitz say nothing at all to me, and then turn around and compliment me before someone he barely knew? I said goodbye to Fraulein Rohr and walked to my next class, hurt and confused. And scared. Seventy strangers.
The two weeks leading up to my playing for the class were spent in grim preparation. The work for Professor Schmitz was completed as swiftly as possible. Afterward I turned to my pieces for Fraulein Rohr’s students. Not once during those two lessons did Professor Schmitz make any reference to his conversation with the principal or speak to me about my playing at the school. I was finding it harder and harder to say anything to him at all.
I spent a great deal of time and effort deciding what to play and in what order. Most of the students would have little or no idea about classical guitar, so I decided that every other piece would be a rendition of a universally known classical composition. I would alternate these with pieces, or movements of longer works, that could be played fast and fiery to show some of the difficult lessons I had mastered. I spent several days switching pieces back and forth, until I finally gave up and forced myself to keep to the chosen order.
The classroom presentation was to be fifty-five minutes long. During the final few days I did nothing but run through the set over and over, including pauses between each piece. Each day I did the set once before school, then once again as soon as I was home, then two more times before dinner, then one final time before bed. I began to hear the pieces of that set in my dreams.
I slept in snatches the night before I was to play. I would drift through fleeting dreams until a fear surfaced about the next day, and a sharp electric shock would hit my belly, tense my muscles, and jerk me awake. I thought morning would never come.
My grandmother watched as I toyed with my breakfast, and said, “I hope you will do well in your performance at school today.”
Performance. I had not thought of it as a real performance. The knot of fear in my belly grew larger. I nodded.
“And so it begins,” she said, almost to herself. Then, “Are you afraid, figlio mio?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You know the music. I have heard you playing and playing the pieces, and I tell you what you refuse to admit. You know the pieces perfectly. You will find it much easier to face the day if you accept this.”
I stared at her. “What if I forget?”
“You will not forget,” she said flatly. She took a tiny sip of her coffee, and crumbled half of her morning roll with dry, brittle fingers. It was her way to avoid eating what she had no hunger for. She reduced her bread to crumbs that she would leave out for the birds. The birds ate more in the mornings than she did.
“I will pray for you this day, figlio mio.” She raised her eyes and gave me a small smile. “I pray for you every day, but today I will say a special prayer that you perform with majesty.”
“Thank you,” I said, managing a little smile back. With majesty. What a beautiful thought.
“May I ask something from you in return?”
“Anything.” Especially if you would promise to eat more, I thought. My grandmother seemed to sag upon her slender frame as though all the substance and the strength were slowly being drained from her body.
She nibbled at the edge of the other half of her roll, sipped her coffee, and said, “I ask that you search your mind and your heart for the answer to this question. Who gave you the gift of your music? Was it simply a matter of chance? Did it appear from thin air? Was it made out of the same dust and elements that went into the making of your body?”
As always when she spoke of these things, I was filled with a sense of uneasiness. Vague yearnings and memories of pain seemed to conflict for my attention. I was pulled in a number of directions, all
of them disturbing. I did not know what to say.
She raised her eyes from her cup and held me with a luminous gaze. “If it was indeed a God on high who gave you this magnificent gift, was it not for a purpose? And would not this purpose be to serve Him? That is my question, Giovanezzo, my beloved child. Should you not be worshiping Him with this glorious gift of musical talent which He bestowed upon you?”
I struggled for an answer and finally managed, “I will think on it.”
The light faded in her eyes, but she accepted my reply with a simple nod. “That is good, figlio mio. Now go and play with the majesty He has given you.”
After a lunch I did not touch, I followed Fraulein Rohr to her classroom. The desks had been pushed tightly together in the center of the room. Folding chairs were set down both sides and along the back. Her desk was pushed over to the window, and the long worktable was gone. At the front of the room rested one lonely chair and a tiny footstool.
“It is going to be very cramped, but all seventy-six of us will be able to sit down.” She sounded breathless. “I think they will listen much better if they are seated.”
I nodded my head, thinking that the rows of chairs seemed to stretch out endlessly.
“You have all this period to practice; I’ll leave you here by yourself. When the next bell rings, put your guitar behind my desk. It will be safe there, don’t you think? Come and meet me in the teachers’ lounge. You can wait there until everyone is settled; then I will bring you in.”
She patted me gently on the shoulder. “I’m sure you will do just fine, Gianni.” She turned and left the room.
I sat in the chair at the front of the room with my guitar in my lap. I could not think of anything to play. My mind was a blank. I could not remember the pieces I had chosen, much less the order I had placed them in. I sat listening to my heart and wondering, why am I here? Did all of the recital students go to this trouble to prepare? Did anyone else feel this terror of playing in front of people? Was this something I would have to live with for the rest of my life?
The Maestro Page 14