by Ezra Glinter
Studies in Solfège
(DECEMBER 16, 2015)
Translated by Barnett Zumoff
THAT SUMMER, I finished the seventh grade of music school and prepared to take exams to study further at a music institute. At that age, when I was not quite fourteen years old, I could hardly have known that by making that decision I was taking a serious step in my life, or, as my mother used to say: “Once and for all!”
On the other hand, I don’t know whose part in the decision was bigger, my mother’s or my own. She had been dreaming about my musical career, it seemed, even before I was born. In the very delivery room, the first time they put me to her breast, my mother stuffed her nipple into my mouth and immediately took my little hand out of the swaddling clothes to look at my little fingers. She told me the story more than once; I began to clearly picture her doing it, and I even remembered her joyous cry at that moment: “Pianist!” I think I shuddered then and shunned my natural milk source. After that, my mother says, I didn’t want to take her breast, and I nursed only from a bottle with a nipple.
I had never played so much as I did that summer. Neither my mother nor my father made me; they didn’t stand over me and pester me, “Go, play a bit now; I’ve forgotten what the piano sounds like; the poor piano is standing there all alone,” or other variations on the same theme.
I used to sit at the instrument for three or four hours and repeat the program my teacher had taught me in the seventh grade, and which I had played for my final exam. I had been especially successful with Mozart’s fifth sonata; I played it at our music school’s final concert, which was held in the building of the municipal drama theater. It’s possible that it was at that moment, after the last chord, when the hall, packed with happy parents, grandparents, relatives, and friends of the young talents, erupted with heated “bravos,” that I felt the first taste of real success.
My teacher, who continued to keep an eye on me and met with me once, sometimes twice, a week in his house, was satisfied with me. Nevertheless, after one such lesson, he remarked regretfully: “It’s a shame, Lyove, that over the past seven years you didn’t devote yourself to your playing as much as you do now . . . but you have good potential.” And yet, he would sigh, something was missing from my playing, especially in Chopin’s nocturne. “There are nuances,” he would say, “that I can’t teach you. You have to feel them yourself, find them and pull them out of yourself.” At the same time, his free hand would fall artfully on the white keyboard with his fingers splayed, each touching a key and burying itself in it. “Like this, like this,” the teacher would virtually sing, as if at that moment he were actually pulling those darn “nuances,” which I was supposed to feel, out of himself. “Like this, like this,” his lips would whisper, and he would quietly, pianissimo, confirm it with a chord from the nocturne. I would return home flattened out like a mashed potato. What does he want from me, my teacher? What further “nuances”? “He’s tearing at my heart,” as my mother would say.
But there was another thing that was tearing the heart out of me back then. On the entrance exams for the music institute, there was a subject called “Solfège.” To sing and conduct a line of notes from sheet music with one hand is to “sol-fa,” or “Solfège,” in musical terminology. It presented no difficulty for me whatsoever. But there was another thing: intervals and dictations; there I needed help. Not, God forbid, because I’m tone-deaf—it was because learning to determine intervals and transcribe dictations requires that someone play them for you. In music school, it had been the Solfège teacher, but I didn’t want to go to her house to have her prepare me for the exams. Truth be told, I hated her—I don’t even know why. Maybe it was because she always had a cold, and she used to constantly blow her reddened nose in front of the whole class. They said she had once been an opera singer but had lost her voice and was forced to come out to us in the sticks to teach Solfège. She was also the director of our chorus, in which I sang and which I greatly disliked. More than once she chased me out of rehearsal because of my mischief.
As had often happened before with other problems, my mother also solved the problem of Solfège. My mother was a nurse in a hospital, but her dream had always been to be a concert pianist. “If not for the war,” my mother would sigh, “I would surely have become a pianist. The war robbed us of everything: our youth, our hope, our dreams.” So my mother had worked hard to instill in me, her only son, all her so-called “cheese.” My father used to laugh at her: “You’re putting all of your cheese in one dumpling!” By “dumpling,” of course, he meant me. “See to it that the ‘dumpling’ doesn’t burst!” he would say.
My mother used to come home from work exhausted, especially from night shifts. This time, however, her face radiated joy. Why? A guest had come from Czernowitz to Doctor Tsipkin, with whom she worked—his niece, who was a student in the music institute there. She had finished the third grade and was going into the fourth.
“What does she play?” I asked, still not understanding the relationship between my mother’s glow and Doctor Tsipkin’s niece.
“She doesn’t play, she sings,” my mother answered with a special kind of pride. “So I asked Doctor Tsipkin to ask her whether she would spend some time with you on Solfège.”
When she mentioned that Doctor Tsipkin’s niece sang, I immediately pictured my former Solfège teacher.
“She probably has a red, stuffy nose,” I said, thinking out loud.
“What are you muttering there?” asked my mother, not understanding my far-fetched assumption. “Doctor Tsipkin thinks highly of you. He immediately called home and spoke with his niece.”
Doctor Tsipkin was a surgeon, and fortunately I had not yet needed his “golden hands.” I had already heard that he was a great music lover and had a magnificent collection of records. My mother thought the world of him, but all her talk about him ended with a sigh: “And that a man like him should suffer such a misfortune!”
The misfortune was his son, Nyuntshik. One could see the young man walking in the street, with his father holding his hand the way you would lead a little child, though he was the same age as I was. Just from his appearance you could tell that all was not right with Nyuntshik: fat, with a big head that blended into his short neck and reminded one of a block of wood, he moved clumsily, with short steps and with his fat thighs rubbing against one another. Occasionally when I was strolling in the park with my parents, we would encounter Doctor Tsipkin with his son alongside him; I never saw his wife with them. Doctor Tsipkin would immediately begin to praise me: how good I looked, what a good student I was, and what a capable child I was in general. When he finished with my general virtues, he would turn to my special talents and would ask me what I was playing currently and whom I liked better—Gilels 169 or Richter. 170 At the same time, he would keep turning towards his son as if he were looking for confirmation as he explained my clumsy answers. “Lyove plays the piano and is graduating from music school this year.” Or, “We’ve heard Emil Gilels play the sonata—remember?” Nyuntshik, as was his custom, would look towards me in a dignified manner, not moving his block-like head. His little eyes, which were round as buttons, would rest their gaze on my face, and he would push out his little mouth with its plump lips towards me, as if he wanted to give me a kiss or was waiting for someone to stuff a pacifier into it. I could barely restrain myself—because I didn’t want to insult him—from shouting the provocative word “Fool!” Nyuntshik had Down syndrome, and often the remainder of our stroll would revolve around him, poor thing. My mother took it very much to heart, because she pitied Doctor Tsipkin and his unfortunate son.
“After all, in the delivery room your crib was right next to his,” my mother would sigh.
That “great good fortune” didn’t particularly please me, and once, after such an encounter, I even asked my mother whether Down syndrome was contagious.
Now Doctor Tsipkin’s niece, like a snowflake on a hot summer day, had fallen onto my head to teach m
e Solfège. Even more: I had to drag myself to the doctor’s house. How else?
Our lessons began immediately, the next day. The niece herself opened the door for me. I learned right away that the mistress of the house, that is, Doctor Tsipkin’s wife, had gone to a sanatorium, and that Nyuntshik was at a special dormitory. I listened to the entire introduction while following my teacher down a long, dark corridor. I was able to see her face only after we went into the upstairs room. She turned to me and ended with, “So no one will disturb us.” After a short pause, she added, “My name is Miradora.”
Her name—two intervals of augmented seconds—made such a sound in the room, which was flooded with the morning sunshine, that I felt compelled to immediately transcribe the sounds as notes, as my first musical dictation: “Mi-ra—Do-ra.”
I even transferred my cardboard folder, with my notebook, a pencil, and an eraser—everything I needed for my class—from my right hand to my left, as if I wanted to free the right hand to give the folder to Miradora and then announce my own name. But I remained standing there with my mouth open, like her cousin Nyuntshik. For a brief instant, perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt how insignificant my own name, Lyove, was. It didn’t have a drop of musicality—it sounded like the mooing of a cow: “Lyo-o-ve-e!” On the other hand, my formal name is Lyev, which means “lion” in Russian, but since I was short and skinny, to call myself Lyev . . . Just look at how a name can play games with you!
Nevertheless, I said, not loudly but firmly, “Lyev.” For a moment I saw before my eyes a whirling hoop surrounded by flames, through which the real Lyev sprang—practically a circus. Miradora was apparently not surprised by the burning hoop with the beast jumping through it. On the contrary—she simply asked me:
“Is it all right if I call you Lyove? It’s more intimate that way.”
As I recall it, Miradora was no beauty. My mother would never have said about her: “What a girl! A beauty! Blood and milk!” She was indeed plump, but her cheeks did not have the healthy pink color that could get my mother to award her highest rating: “blood and milk!” Her nose, which was rather long, with a charming bump in the middle that struck my curious gaze, showed no signs of a constant cold, thank God! What in truth fascinated and seduced me was hidden in her eyes, but I became aware of that only later.
On the first day our lesson went very productively, as my father would have said. I transcribed two dictations and trained my ear to correctly appreciate intervals: the sounds of two different pitches played together. Miradora sent them to me from the piano, like signals, and waited for me to call out: “Second, fourth, seventh . . .”
“Correct, but which second, minor or major?” My teacher didn’t let up: “Which fourth, perfect or augmented?”
Miradora didn’t spare me; she shot intervals at me, such that within ten or fifteen minutes they began to ring in my ears. Did she want to demonstrate her fluency or point out my helplessness in this part of Solfège? Try to understand girls, especially from big cities!
She closed the lid of the piano and exclaimed: “For a beginning—not bad!”
She actually spoke that summary, with her full lips, like the niece of a doctor; it was supposed to mean, “The patient is ill, but he’ll live.”
I began to put my meager possessions back into my folder—the notebook, the pencil, and the eraser. I was eager to see the other side of the door.
“Can you come tomorrow?” my teacher asked.
“Tomorrow? No!” I firmly replied.
In my head, I was already chasing the words, stringing together one word with another: not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, not the day after the day after tomorrow . . . Out loud, however, I said: “Tomorrow I’m going to my piano teacher.” And that was absolutely true.
“In that case, come the day after tomorrow, at eleven thirty-five.”
I stopped puttering around with the ribbons on my folder, and raised my eyes to Miradora.
“Eleven thirty-five!” she confirmed the time. She knew how to ask for what she wanted. “Come, I’ll let you out.”
That evening, when she came home from work, my mother came to my room immediately.
“Well—what happened? Are you satisfied? Doctor Tsipkin praised her highly.”
At that moment, I was reading some book, and I simply didn’t have an appetite for satisfying my mother’s curiosity. It would have been different if it had been in the afternoon, when I first came home from my strict Solfège teacher. Her words, uttered quietly in her lyrical soprano voice, scraped at my brain like the claws of a hundred cats. “Come, I’ll let you out,” as if I were a puppy—a poodle or a pinscher. Inside me, everything was simmering and boiling, and above all I was angry with my mother—why had she gotten so enthusiastic about Doctor Tsipkin’s niece? But by evening, my anger had receded. Furthermore, every time I looked at Miradora’s face (in my imagination, of course), it was as if I were watching an old silent film—as if people were moving fast on the screen, waving their hands, moving their lips; you didn’t hear a word but everything could be understood. On the screen of my boyish imagination, now she would raise an eyebrow when I didn’t guess a diminished fifth, now the bump on her nose would twitch when she confirmed with satisfaction, “Correct!” And now her lips would shape words in a silent language that echoed warmly within me: “Lyove—it’s more intimate.”
For that reason, I answered my mother with telegraphic brevity:
“The day after tomorrow—eleven thirty-five.”
“What does that mean?” asked my mother, already used to my strange speech.
“We’re meeting again.”
I arrived at the door of Doctor Tsipkin’s apartment precisely on time and rang the doorbell. Miradora led me, as before, to her uncle’s office, where there was a concert piano against one wall. Over the instrument hung two portraits of young women—Doctor Tsipkin’s two sisters. As Miradora explained to me, both of them had been killed in the ghetto, together with their parents. Only the doctor and his brother, Miradora’s father, survived, because they were able to flee and join the partisans.
“One was named Mira and the other was called Dora,” Miradora explained to me. “That’s why my name is Miradora.”
She sat down on the round piano stool and began to play the dictation. It was a familiar melody, and I quickly transcribed the notes. I could, of course, have said that I had finished it, but something held me back. In addition, my eraser, which I was rolling between my fingers, slipped out of them and fell to the floor.
That trick with the eraser was very common among the students in our grade, especially during Solfège classes. We would ostensibly lose the eraser on the floor, and after getting permission from the teacher we would bend down to look for it. From under our desks, we could see the skinny legs of the former opera singer. Her long, brown stockings were held up with rubber bands above the knee. She would be sitting at her desk, looking around at the class so the young talents would work “conscientiously,” as she loved to repeat, and not look into each other’s notebooks. Didn’t it occur to her that during a dictation we could look at something other than our neighbor’s notebook? After class, we whispered about what we had seen from under the desks during those few short moments, and again our boyhood fantasies played out fully.
Did my eraser slip out of my fingers accidentally this time, or did the thought of playing the foolish boys’ trick nudge my elbow? But I remained seated there for a moment, looking at Miradora’s face, which had turned towards me. The doctor’s desk where I was sitting was the kind of old office desk that takes up a lot of space and is intended to elicit respect for its owner. I, on the other hand, felt even smaller and more insignificant at that desk. My father had once said about a certain person that he looked like a flea on a platter. That’s probably what I looked like at the doctor’s desk.
With one motion I was under the desk. Crawling on all fours, I felt around on the floor like a blind man. After the bright sun
shine that had been falling on the surface of the desk from the tall window, I saw only blackness. At that moment, I thought that now I really looked like a yard-dog in a dark doghouse; I lacked only a chain. I could barely restrain myself from looking in the direction of where my current Solfège teacher was sitting, but a mischievous sunbeam sprang under the table after me and landed precisely next to my eraser. I immediately grabbed the eraser as if it would run away, but the audacious sunbeam started trembling, and in the blink of an eye it climbed up onto Miradora’s legs. My gaze followed the sunbeam and encountered two naked, girlish knees. A dark patch of shadow separated one knee from the other; they quickly pulled back as if they were frightened. At the same moment, I felt a blow to the head. My temporary doghouse was apparently too small for a big hound like me.
“Are you trying to break my uncle’s desk?” I heard her ask.
I crawled out from under the desk, rubbing the spot where I had been hit with one hand. In the palm of the other hand lay the eraser, a witness to my dog-like search. Miradora apparently understood my trick; at least the smile in her eyes indicated that she did.
“You know what?” she suddenly proposed. “Let’s do an entre-acte, a sort of musical intermezzo.”
She turned around on the round stool, as if the stage setting had been shifted, and began to perform. After a brief introduction, I could hear her soft, somewhat tremulous voice.
I knew the piece immediately; it was “Solveig’s Song,” by Edvard Grieg:
Winter will disappear, and Spring will go away,
and Spring will go away;
flowers will fade, covered with clear snow,
with clear snow covered.