To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  Now it is after the concert, and my dear friend Whit, in a buoyant mood, is driving me home. While he parks his car, I walk toward the front door. It’s ajar, and I hear excited voices inside. The after-concert party is well underway, as I knew it would be by the time I had greeted people backstage—hugs from acquaintances and friends, smiles from shy students, autograph requests—all most welcome.

  My dress is damp and I feel a slight chill from the outside air. I step inside the house. I should probably change to something dry, but I would rather join the party, so I wrap my stole around my shoulders. There is my mother—slim and dark-haired and beautiful in her dark wool dress that she likes so much. Her eyes are moist with emotion, and her head held proudly but tilted shyly at the same time. My father is smiling the broad Rosenberger smile, his cheeks pink, his face always looking polished when he’s excited. How can they have changed so little in twenty years? I hope I age as beautifully and as vitally as they have.

  Amelia is moving back and forth, making punch, caring about everyone, seeing that they’re comfortable, that they meet each other. I am drained; I have nothing more to give. But I know it’s OK.

  My friends gather around me—two, three, four at a time, giving me their energy and enthusiasm, giving me back something I’ve spent in the performance. Gene Ling, the screenwriter who lives down the street, brings me some punch. He and his wife, Betty, have become good friends. They keep their pool water warm all year long so that any time I’m home I can do early morning water exercises, so important for “polios.”

  Anne Baxter is there, and says, “Well, I love the dress . . . and the eyelashes. . . .” Then she stops speaking and just gazes at me, shaking her head slightly, eyes misting. Meaning that there are no words to describe the Beethoven.

  Michael Kermoyan, Broadway actor-singer and longtime friend, brings me some hummus in a pocket of bread, a treat that he has spent the day making. I’m not hungry yet, but he is standing there waiting to see if I like it, so I make an attempt.

  “You hate it,” he pronounces in his deep bass voice, trained to project from the stage.

  “No,” I protest, “it’s really delicious,” and I mean it. Even if I weren’t convincing, it wouldn’t really matter, because I’ve played. I could do absolutely anything for the remainder of this evening, and it would be all right. Giving a concert performance absolves me from any further responsibility.

  My friends not only understand, but they want to take over. I relax into their warmth. Those few hours after a performance—or two or three days after a long concert tour—are the only times I feel totally free, as if I could allow myself anything. After that “the drive,” as Amelia calls it, sets in and I have to work—whether for immediate or long term, it must be for a purpose. Without that, the story of these last twenty years would be quite different.

  Tomorrow morning I’ll have to let “the drive” take over. The Chopin/Szymanowski program is only six days away. It will take place in the same hall, with many of the same people in the audience, perhaps; but with strenuous and totally different repertoire. That means five days of slow practice, thinking through the music away from the piano, playing it through for a few friends a couple of evenings; every kind of careful preparation. Amelia suggests that I have my own piano brought to UCLA for the performance. I am more nervous about the next concert, in some ways, than I was about tonight’s program.

  March 19, 1976

  The Chopin/Szymanowski program is now a memory; a memory of slow warm-up in a hot pink gown, the surprising beauty of my own piano in the hall, the responsive feel of the instrument in its home territory—it was meant for a concert hall, of course, and I felt during that evening that I was, too.

  The most delightful memory is of two handsome little Polish boys coming on stage in native costume at intermission to present me with some red roses. Flowers from the “Disciples of Szymanowski,” as they signed themselves, with their marvelous unpronounceable Polish names. The children made the presentation midway so that they could get home in time for their regular bedtime. I sent them each an autographed program and a Szymanowski record.

  This morning I’m filing newspaper clippings in case anybody should want them: pre-concert interviews, reviews of the past week’s programs, and an announcement of my one-day “residency” at UCLA. They’ve been called workshops, discussion sessions, rap sessions, master classes—and now a residency.

  The UCLA event was an afternoon of talking with an eager group of music students. I opened it up to questions right away, and it went on for over three hours. There was some red punch in a big glass bowl and a huge plate of cookies. The discussion was so absorbing that I completely forgot about taking a break; and none of the students mentioned it. Evidently it was up to me to suggest the break. I felt embarrassed later when I realized that it was dinnertime, and that the whole point of the punch and cookies had been to give us all a break in late afternoon.

  I’ll be recording the Szymanowski Mazurkas in ten days. A year spent learning them and a year to let them settle. Two years of work and I have to record the sum of it all in two evenings. Jane Turner gave me a recipe for bran cake the other day—a basic recipe with suggestions about ways to vary it according to one’s mood and what one has in the house. Her little note said, “It’s like a Mazurka!”

  A longtime member of our play-through group, she had listened to a few of the Mazurkas and remarked on their spontaneous quality. I was showing her some of the different possibilities with one of the pieces that sound somewhat improvised. I told her that I kept playing it differently, and she found that fascinating.

  What would be a recipe for a Mazurka? You take a dotted rhythm like this, put the accent either on the second beat or the third, or both; elide it to the next measure or hold it back. Start it slow and dreamy and improvised, or moderate and free, or moderate and strict, or fast and free, or fast and strict. It may be a Mazur, or it may not; it may be an Oberek, or a Kujawiak. It may be like the dance or it may be an impression of several dances. It may be a mood, with mere suggestions of dance rhythms here and there to remind one of the piece’s inspiration. Or it may be, in turn, all those things. You may feel that you could dance for a few measures, and then you are left swaying dreamily while the musicians improvise.

  And then you hope that your Polish blood will aid you. Is there some understanding of the mazurka in my genes somewhere? Nana, when you taught me to say “I love music” in Polish, did you ever dream that I’d be squeezing those genes for some Polish insight?

  There are twenty-two Mazurkas in all—elusive, complex, rich in folk material, and yet the ultra-refinement of the Polish aristocrat. Can I play them so all those qualities are there?

  March 26, 1976

  Today my piano was carted off by the piano movers. Mr. Gregory, with his tam and slight Scottish brogue, turned the heavy nine-foot piano on its side, and onto the dolly, as if it were a delicate invalid. He wrapped it tenderly in the quilted blankets and wheeled it out of the house as if he were taking it for a stroll, a little fresh ocean air, and California sunshine. By now it will have arrived at the recording studio, two days early so that it can accustom itself to the temperature and humidity.

  Later today I will be going over to the studio to practice on it there. I think of the practice as being for my benefit, but I am told that the piano needs it, too. If I practice on it for two days, it will respond by going out of tune, i.e., relaxing all it wants to do, so that by the recording session on Monday, it will hold its pre-session tune more reliably. It’s odd to think that the instrument needs me.

  March 30, 1976

  This was to be the second day of my recording project. A project I looked forward to, and worried about, for the past two years. All the while the Szymanowski Mazurkas have been taking shape, I have been wondering how I could possibly let only one version stand. I’ve also been wondering how my right hand could hold up under the pressure of continued stress under the microphone-scope. Why
did Szymanowski write so many chords with just the wrong stretches for me—placed just so that a strain is put upon my weakest spot? MJ said that those very passages would build me up—to keep practicing them. But under the microphone-scope I knew I would feel the pressure, and that my arm would tense. Then the very muscles I needed the most would be stiff the next day.

  As it turned out, there was no next day. After two years of work, off and on, and at least as long of worry, I recorded all twenty-two of the Mazurkas in one five-hour session. Recording time, playback time combined. Some of them went in one take.

  The recording took place at Capitol Studios, where I had recorded the Masques three years before. There is an old scratched-up piano in one corner—hardly a fitting companion for my Steinway. Behind a screen is an enormous pile of machines of all description—tape recorders, monitors, microphones, and other recording paraphernalia, stacks of amplifiers, equalizers. . . . There is a gray couch toward the back of the studio, a lifesaver for me. I can lie down there while the others go out to dinner. I have learned by now to bring my lunch so that I can eat in solitude and quiet and use the dinner hour to rest my back “in the horizontal.”

  The recording booth is double-glazed. I can see lips moving, but can’t hear voices until someone presses the intercom button on the Big Board. Carson, the chief sound engineer, sits at this mixing board, with its multicolored buttons, knobs, levers—red, green, yellow, and white buttons, dials, and needles that swing with every sound. Hilde, the second engineer, stands at the back of the booth in front of two freestanding giant tape machines. She makes notes on the takes so that they can be located precisely on each huge reel. She controls both machines—the “A” and the “B” or backup reel.

  We started at three o’clock, adjusting microphones, moving them around. “Carol, play the biggest, loudest section of . . . Something with more bass. Better come in and listen.”

  And so I would unseal the recording studio by opening the inner door, then the outer one, and go next door to the booth, listening to what I had just done. I liked the sound—warmer, more reverberant than my last recording. Was it as easy as that? No, Carson wanted to get another equalizer. I could continue to warm up while he sent for it.

  I played slowly and lightly through some of the more treacherous Mazurkas. “Warm up, get the hands and brain ready, but don’t tire the hands. Don’t take the edge off the day’s energy or endurance by overworking now,” I kept telling myself.

  Carson came back with the equalizer. Now I was to do the same passages again. “Come and listen now. We think it’s better.” John Wright, our producer, has a cool, rather expressionless manner. He smiles at me, comes over, and touches my shoulder. Even though I know he’s working on being warmer, more supportive, it helps—I respond. The muscles can’t help relaxing if everybody thinks the session will go well.

  I open both doors and go back to the booth. The sound is beautiful. Hilde is beaming. “It is really a concert hall sound, now!” she says in her high-German accent. Hilde and I have become friends since the first session we did together three years ago. She has since heard me play in public and insisted that I try to play in the recording session more the way I do on the stage.

  “Maybe we should turn off all the lights and have a spot on you,” she suggested. “Then you would think it’s a performance, and you wouldn’t be so stiff.” We go back into the studio and try turning off the overhead lights. The spotlights are colored and strange. They make shadows on the keys, and I shake my head. “I think I’ll just have to use my imagination and the overhead lights,” I decide.

  Finally, everything is set, and we are ready to go. I pour myself some decaf tea to make sure circulation is good. I am nervous during the first Mazurka, but the sound is good. The first take goes well, but I do another just for good measure. The second Mazurka goes quickly, also; two problem spots go by without showing themselves. Carson is smiling. I begin to relax.

  I play the third Mazurka in one take. “That’s beautiful, Carol,” the monitor in the studio says. It’s John’s voice, and I can see him. He’s pleased, and thinks I should leave it at that and go on.

  We started recording at about 4:00 p.m., and by 7:00 p.m. I had completed twelve Mazurkas. I had been worried about Nos. 8 and 12—so strenuous that I didn’t think I could do certain sections enough times to get a clinker-free take. The tricky section in No. 8 had gone well on the second take; in No. 12, I got it the first time.

  We started again at 8:30, and by 10:30 I had finished six more Mazurkas. John suggested that I come in and listen. I hesitated.

  Amelia understood. “I think Carol just wants to go on through,” she said. I nodded, and plunged into the final group. I was tired by then, but still in control. When I had finished the last Mazurka, I heard excitement in John’s voice as he said over the monitor, “I think we have it!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  New Frontiers

  During the next couple of seasons, my tours brought some memorable experiences. An invitation to play in Pittsburgh turned into a kind of homecoming, where I reconnected with former classmates from Carnegie. When I appeared on Eastman School of Music’s Great Performers Series, the Rochester Times-Union reviewer mentioned my spoken comments to the audience: “The statuesque blonde appeared in a tangerine-colored gown and verbally delivered program notes on the more unusual items, Schubert’s Seventeen German Dances and four Mazurkas from Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 50, Book IV. . . . She scored a genuine triumph with Beethoven’s Sonata in C Minor, Opus 111.”

  He was the first to write about something I was doing more frequently—finding opportunities to establish rapport with an audience by saying a few words about the music. Amelia was delighted that I was beginning to feel comfortable talking to the audience, and joked, “Any excuse will do.”

  There was a new recording frontier, too. Jimmy DePreist proposed a Hindemith program, to be recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London with the Royal Philharmonic. I traded two shipboard performances on the QE2 for tickets to London for Amelia and myself, and Jimmy flew in. We were all excited to be in London and felt an instant rapport with the Royal Philharmonic musicians and with the British producers.

  My role in the project was as the soloist in The Four Temperaments, a superb work for strings and piano that had been neglected in the concert world. Since the piece’s theme and four variations portray an ancient psychological theory of personality traits (melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric), everyone told Amelia that she should write the album notes from her psychologist’s point of view. She described “Choleric” this way:

  The Choleric personality, with his overflow of yellow bile, is hot-tempered and irritable. The movement opens with a quick, emphatic pronouncement from the strings. The piano immediately reacts with a slow burn, a gritting of the teeth that erupts into an outburst. The strings insist on their earlier statement, followed by more outbursts from the piano. Suddenly, our fiery friend is contrite in two charming recitatives from the piano. But he must win his point, and soon he’s back to insisting violently that he’s right.

  To those of us who knew Amelia well, reading her notes on the music was like hearing some of her frequent insights and observations about people. Writing later about the album, she recalled:

  This recording did considerable Delos consciousness-raising worldwide. The Balanchine revival of The Four Temperaments ballet in New York around the same time came as a surprise to us—a welcome one, for ours was the new recording, and available everywhere.

  Between sessions, Jimmy and I began comparing polio treatment experiences, and he described what I considered to be basic—but far from extensive—physical therapy. When I started telling him about the benefits of further, and more targeted, therapy, he said reflectively, “Well, if I had been in your situation, I would’ve continued, but since I was still able to conduct . . .” He stopped and shrugged. His upper body was in very good shape. And because he could conduct from a wheelch
air and get onstage with a cane, he had lost only a year or two in his career trajectory. He had found considerable acceptance as a conductor abroad and, prior to his “gig” at the National Symphony in Washington, had been an assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic.

  One thing Jimmy and I shared as “polios” was a lack of overall physical endurance. We both tired quickly. Jimmy described the photo shoot at the end of The Four Temperaments sessions as “a few happy people and one worn-out conductor who couldn’t keep his eyes open.”

  Back home in Santa Monica, I found out that James Goodfriend, Music Editor of Stereo Review, had included me in a survey he called “All the Young Pianists.” There were twenty-three of us—twenty men and three women in Stereo Review’s international survey—and to my astonishment, I was the only American woman to be included.

  Around that time, my teaching took another step up when I was invited to join the University of Southern California music faculty, whose roster had long included some of the great names in music. As part of my USC faculty activity, I offered to create a Preparation for Performance course—or semester-long workshop—for music students. The course would be open to singers, organists, string players, harpists, woodwind and brass players, percussionists, and, of course, pianists. The proposed subtitle was “Psycho-Physical Elements in Performance,” as I would be sharing with normal student performers techniques and insights acquired in my long journey back from polio to professional piano playing.

  More than thirty students enrolled in the first class. The classroom was a sizable one, allowing plenty of room for everyone to stretch out on the floor for muscle-relaxing exercises. The first time we did this, I demonstrated a stretch and suggested that the students stay in that position as long as it felt helpful. One of the students, a harpist, called out, “How about all day?”