To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  There are various layers of uncertainty, of having to accept something my hands could do, rather than what I sought. These layers could accrue—they’re there if I look for them—but the Opus 111 has been purified many times in that white heat of performance, where the focus is so intense that the hesitations have to drop away. All that is left is the idea—the sound. One’s limitations are simply not part of that focus. This is true particularly of the masterpieces that have seen me through the recovery from polio, the slow climbing out of the rubble.

  I try to call upon that continuous thread that stretches from the days with Boulanger in Paris through Vienna, Copenhagen, Santa Fe, Detroit, Los Angeles, Stockholm, London, and New York. Now that thread needs to be ongoing through Claremont for another day or two.

  The magnificent Arietta—Opus 111’s final movement, with its inspired variations—brings us a great, strong spirit in a gentle and transcendent mood. Beethoven has said it all; and those final, accepting chords of the Arietta tell us that we have reached the end of the road.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  To Everything There Is a Season

  Just before the release of the Beethoven recording, Lilian Aitken called me with shocking news: Webster had died suddenly at their home in Santa Fe. During our long phone conversation, Lilian filled in the details of his last days and mercifully short illness. She also reminded me how pleased Webster had been that the dreaded “one dried-up flower” had become, after all, part of a long-lasting bouquet. Lilian and I reminisced about those long Santa Fe summers more than twenty years before, when Webster had tried with all his might to help me rise from the ashes. We agreed that the Opus 111/“Appassionata” recording symbolized that intensive effort. With Lilian’s tearful appreciation, I dedicated the Beethoven recording to Webster: In memoriam, Webster Aitken (1908-1981).

  My focus soon began to change from strenuous solo tours to more recording projects, with a few tour dates sprinkled throughout. As my physical endurance was defining its limits, and I was becoming more comfortable with the microphone, the shift in emphasis seemed the natural way to go. And after daring to record the Opus 111, the pinnacle of piano sonatas, further studio projects seemed less daunting.

  The Beethoven recording received splendid reviews, as did Water Music of the Impressionists. Amelia remarked that a review in Audio magazine was especially interesting because the reviewer was the celebrated audio engineer John Eargle. John had written a series of books considered the “bibles” on modern sound recording and was revered by the international community of recording engineers. He was based in Los Angeles, though he traveled frequently to give classes and workshops in universities with outstanding graduate sound-engineering programs.

  Soon afterward, Amelia met with John, and that pivotal encounter led to a close friendship. John had been a pianist and organist before turning to audio engineering, and he was also an advisor to JBL in loudspeaker design. As our friendship grew, John took on the role of Delos Director of Engineering, attracting a steady stream of young engineering graduates, who were eager to train at Delos under his guidance.

  Tall and slender, John was focused, often amused, and so passionate about music and audio that at times his eagerness resulted in a slight stammer. He spoke clearly and precisely. He would smile and joke with the Delos team, and then say something serious like, “I think we should consider the following. . . .” And in a very few minutes, everyone would have a clear vision of how we were going to approach a project.

  Since John loved the pipe organ and relished opportunities to record celebrated instruments, a distinguished Delos organ series took shape. When the organist and recording team took a break during sessions, John would often say, with a broad smile and a twinkle in his eyes, “I’ll catch up with you in a bit.” We all knew that he looked forward to playing the organ himself when no one else was around, and often the rest of the team would return to find John still blissfully playing.

  John’s living room became a second Delos studio-listening room. It was furnished with the finest listening equipment, thanks to John’s ongoing work with JBL and other audio equipment developers. Adjoining the living-listening room was a dining room, which, instead of a table, housed a lovely Steinway B grand. I knew that John practiced almost every day on his Steinway, but whenever I was there he encouraged me to play something so that he could just listen to it.

  Meanwhile, Tom Stockham and one of his top engineers had set up an editing facility in the Los Angeles area, which opened the door for me to participate even more. Soon Delos had its own editing setup as well, supervised by Amelia and John. I continued to enjoy editing, since I could listen to takes and map out edits in a posture with minimal neuromuscular strain.

  Working “on the other side of the microphone” involved me more closely with Delos’s musical growth, which in turn limited the amount of teaching I could take on. Soon I retired from an active role on the USC faculty and kept just a few private students whose schedules could be flexible.

  One of my first ventures into the session-producer role was for my dear friend John Browning, in a Liszt solo piano album. John Eargle was the engineer, and it was fun to be part of the sessions while those two brilliant minds were interacting. A couple of years later, John Browning was easily persuaded to follow his Liszt album with an all-Rachmaninoff program.

  A new friend from Santa Monica, Phyllis Bernard, wanted to sponsor a jazz series for Delos, coordinated by jazz producer Ralph Jungheim and engineered by John Eargle. Amelia was knowledgeable about jazz, and the series brought back happy memories of her husband, Doug, and being with him when he sat in at the keyboard with high-level combos. One of the first projects was an album featuring the great jazz singer Joe Williams. His Nothin’ But the Blues turned out to be an irresistible, one-of-a-kind album, and brought Joe his first Grammy at the end of a long career.

  From the very beginning of her startup mission, Amelia had referred informally to Delos as “the Baby” when something was needed for its health or welfare. Usually, Baby Delos’s need would supersede anything personal on her part.

  “Where does she get her money?” I had overheard someone say about Amelia, shortly after she started the label. I felt like responding, “What money? She has a mission and close friends who want to help make this work.” As a psychologist, Amelia was fully aware that people often project onto others their own feelings or motivations or perspectives. Yet even with this awareness, Amelia still anticipated that others would treat her with the same goodwill that she felt toward them. I saw her disappointed many times, but she would approach the next situation with the same openness and lack of fear, and always with positive expectations.

  Amelia was not a businessperson. She made decisions based on musical worth and personal enthusiasm, not financial gain. After the Delos team had put a great deal of work into a song album with the superb American soprano Arleen Auger, Arleen had mixed feelings about the result. Although the renowned singer gave the go-ahead to release the final edit of her album, she apologized for not having been in the best voice. “I’m afraid I spent too much time out in the California sunshine before the sessions,” Arleen confessed to Amelia.

  Amelia responded with a question: Would Arleen prefer to rerecord the program? Arleen jumped at the chance. The resulting happy ending was that Arleen’s Love Songs album was nominated for a Grammy and singled out by Billboard as an All-Time Great Recording.

  Amelia put a lot of effort into enterprises that included trips to Washington, D.C., to request NEA funding for recording American composers—in particular, a series featuring the Seattle Symphony with Jerry Schwarz at the helm. The orchestra’s administrators assumed that Delos must be making a lot of money from these projects—otherwise, why would Amelia continue? It didn’t occur to most people that Amelia simply believed that the recordings should be made. As Jerry knew—and had expressed at the time of his first Delos recording—for Amelia, it was always about the music.

 
; Jerry kept coming up with recording plans that sounded exciting, and some of them included me. He and I recorded eight piano concertos together during the 1980s and early 1990s. Among them were Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, the Strauss Burleske, and two little-known concertos by American composer Howard Hanson. The concertos were all part of programs Jerry had planned with his own orchestras—the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, New York Chamber Symphony, and Seattle Symphony—as well as the London Symphony and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

  In London, Jerry decided to do a Beethoven program, which gave me a chance to record my all-time favorite piano concerto, the wondrous Fourth, in G Major. In Edinburgh, Jerry recorded a four-disc Haydn series. The great Janos Starker joined us to record two Haydn cello concertos, and I played a pair of Haydn’s piano concertos. We all loved spending time with Janos, and during some post-session happy hours, planned further recordings with him. Amelia had a soft spot for anything Scottish and considered that unforgettable sojourn a high point. We all called the experience a “Haydn high.”

  During the 1980s, I began to have increasingly severe post-polio episodes that limited to an even greater extent what I could accomplish, and threatened to shut down my playing yet again. This time, the ongoing medical team suggested a consultation with Dr. Jacquelin Perry, head of the Rancho Los Amigos Post-Polio Rehab Center in Downey, California (where Hope Hopkins had once worked). Dr. Perry was chief of their pathokinesiology service and a professor of orthopedics at USC. Dr. Perry and her associates diagnosed my condition as “acute post-polio syndrome representing accumulative strain from chronic overuse of muscles with less than the normal number of motor units.” She suggested some assistive devices—frames with moving parts—to support my arms and upper body when I was at the piano and at my desk. I found them cumbersome from the beginning, and never felt that they could be harmonious with my work. Nevertheless, Dr. Perry and her associates had succeeded in reminding me that only a finite amount of life was left in the areas that had been hardest hit by polio.

  Dr. Perry and her staff presented me with a plan that would increase my rest periods and decrease strain on my upper back, shoulders, and neck muscles. She also had an interesting handout for post-polio patients. It explained more precisely why and how muscle function could appear to be lost suddenly, after a period when the patient has been overusing damaged muscles, which was a technical explanation of the “burnout” Hope Hopkins had often warned me about. It also explained why such a loss of function could seem almost random.

  I kept recording anyway. After Jerry and the great clarinet virtuoso David Shifrin had completed a landmark Delos recording of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, David and I came up with the idea of recording the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas together. We made it a re-creation of a famous “soirée” at Clara Schumann’s home in 1894, which had included the Robert Schumann Fantasiestücke. That project led to another delightful experience—playing and recording the Mozart and Beethoven piano-wind quintets with David and three other wonderful wind players who led their various sections in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. David and some of the leading string players from LACO also joined me for a recording with Martha and Dady’s younger son, Bejun, who was a remarkably gifted boy soprano.

  In 1988, I made a solo recording called Night Moods, a dreamy, lyrical program suggesting evening and romance. Not long after its release, Amelia and I decided to go a step further and create a lullaby album. We both felt strongly that one of the best gifts anyone could give a young child, even from babyhood, is the experience of great music—and the younger, the better. So I began putting together a program of simple, comforting works by great composers that could be suitable for a nursery, for the elderly, and for everyone in between. I invited Amelia to listen to some of the material I was considering. Every so often she would say something like, “That’s lovely, but it’s not pre-pubertal enough.” So I would go back and choose something else that had that kind of perfect innocence.

  Amelia wrote children’s notes for the album. She always knew how to talk with kids in a very direct, and as she used to put it, eye-level manner. My favorite phrase in her notes was that Robert and Clara Schumann “lived in Germany in a big house.” We decided to call the album Perchance to Dream: A Lullaby Album for Children and Adults.

  A whole world of listeners welcomed the “Perchance” program, which spoke to every human condition, beginning with the prenatal, and brought comfort and beauty to all ages. In her introduction to the CD, Amelia wrote,

  Good music, like good books, can provide a haven throughout life—a shelter against the heavy weather that comes to us all. At Delos it is not unusual for artists to receive grateful letters from individuals who have found refuge in the artist’s recorded music when experiencing overwhelming events. We are grateful for these letters. And we are very happy that the writers of these letters had learned to listen to good music at an early age.

  The worldwide response to Perchance to Dream inspired us to create an entire Young People’s Series on Delos: albums for babies, and albums that included both music and children’s stories. This series was one of the most satisfying projects we undertook in those years. It managed to combine the lifelong love of music Amelia and I shared, my love of teaching, and her deeply felt wish to heal.

  Amelia’s understanding of the benefits of classical music for the young led her to write a statement that was widely received across many fields:

  Developmental enrichment programs for the very young are important not only to parents but to all who care about our collective future. The healing and developmental properties of music have long been recognized. The ancient Greeks believed that music, healing, and enlightenment all come from the same source.

  One of music’s properties, rhythm, is as elemental as the mother’s heartbeat. Another of its properties, melody, is first experienced in the loving sounds the infant first hears from its mother.

  Great music is the form of beauty and symmetry that can be experienced before the eyes can focus. Great music is the form of logic and order that can be experienced before the brain can differentiate words, designs, or numbers.

  Music is often called the “universal language,” because its truths precede words and transcend words. Music speaks to the entire being, and as such engages the senses, the emotions, and the spirit. Great music thus becomes a magic potion in a child’s early brain development, an ever-renewable source of enrichment.

  Some of the most fascinating projects for the Young People’s Series involved narrations. We had a wonderful time with the great ballerina Natalia Makarova, who narrated two Russian fairy tales for us, with piano music of Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, and a Stravinsky “Firebird” story interwoven with the ballet music. Two memorable projects for the American Composers series also included narrations. For those recordings, we had the privilege of working with James Earl Jones on the voice-over narration for Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, and with Michael York for The Rubaiyat in its setting by American composer Alan Hovhaness.

  Around the time that Perchance to Dream was released, my mother began to have memory problems. The cause wasn’t entirely clear, as she had taken a fall while on a walk. But in our daily phone conversations, if I gave her items to be discussed, her thinking, judgment, and perspective were unimpaired. We continued to have our good talks until the day she took another fall, and this time the effects were indeed serious. She was hospitalized, and I dropped everything to rush to her bedside at the hospital in Tucson. (Mom and Dad had moved to Tucson from Southern California a few years earlier.)

  Dad and I couldn’t do much but just be there, and it wasn’t even clear that Mom knew who I was. “Mama?” she asked at one point when I was stroking her hair. At least she knew that I was someone who loved her very much. One day the phone by her bedside rang. Dad had gone down the hall, so I answered the phone. It was Amelia, and as we exchanged a few words, I noticed that Mom looked interested. On an impulse, I handed her the
phone. To my amazement she said, “Oh hello, Amelia!” She listened for a moment, and then answered, “Oh yes, it’s wonderful!” There were a few more snippets of conversation, and then she handed the phone back to me. When I asked Amelia what elicited the “wonderful” comment, she replied gently, “I said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to have your daughter there?’”

  Later, in the hospice, we were able to play the Perchance to Dream CD in Mom’s room. Little had I known when I was recording the program that, before long, it would be playing soothingly for my beloved mother in her last days.

  A few months earlier, I had recorded a program of serene piano music that was about to be released under the title Reverie. The last piece on the recording was the Liszt Consolation in D-flat. Dad particularly loved that piece and had once commented that he would like to have it played at his own memorial. Now, he and I agreed that I would play it at the informal memorial we were having for Mom at their home. My dedication on the Reverie recording reads:

  Dedicated to the memory of my mother

  Whilamet Gibson Rosenberger (1904–1992) whose beauty of spirit will be with me always

  I was worried about Dad being alone after Mom’s death. They had been together for sixty-seven years. He wanted to stay in their house, and it was reassuring to see that his friends were gathering around. Especially heartwarming was the support from his neighborhood friends Bob and Mary Ann Calmes. They included Dad in their plans, called unfailingly to wish him good morning and good night, and in many ways brought him into their family. Their beautiful white Samoyed, Thundress, was a daily companion as well. She adored Dad, recognized the sound of his car as he approached the Calmes’ house, and would rush to the door, wagging her tail joyously.