Spring Break

by Gerald Elias

  He offered Mia Cheng some insights into ways to tie her individual ideas into her understanding of the concerto’s structure, to make her interpretation a more unified whole, and had her repeat a few passages that had been technically accurate but musically unconvincing. He also made some suggestions about how she might better integrate her interpretation with the orchestral accompaniment.

  Of course, for a masterclass there’s no orchestra but merely the reduction of the orchestral score into a piano part. A Miss Lisette Broder was the staff accompanist, and Jacobus judged her first-rate at her job. The ease with which she adjusted to Mia Cheng’s playing suggested she had played the accompaniments for years and knew the violin repertoire better than the students themselves. Her playing was so eminently pliable that Jacobus had no doubt she could adapt to whatever bizarre idiosyncrasies a student might concoct. No pianist begins training with aspirations of becoming an accompanist, especially of students. They picture themselves onstage as a soloist performing Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt. The work of staff accompanists is tedious and unfulfilling, never in the limelight. For the most part, their presence is hardly even noticed, unless they make a muck of things. So Jacobus appreciated how this one fit like a glove to Mia’s playing, never forcing her out of her comfort zone.

  For that reason, Jacobus reminded Mia that playing with a full orchestra wouldn’t be so easy. ‘It’s a little harder for the Queen Mary to change course than for a speed boat,’ he said, ‘so be damn sure you’re pointing the music in the right direction.’

  ‘Yes, Maestro,’ she replied.

  When he finished with his comments, he excused her from the stage. There was more applause from the audience. For whom, he wasn’t sure.

  The next student walked onstage. Broder, the accompanist, began the piece, which Jacobus recognized from the first three languorous notes as the famous Violin Sonata in A Major by the nineteenth-century Franco-Belgian Romantic composer, Cesar Franck. A challenging piece technically, yes; more so musically, especially for a student. Even before the student began, Jacobus knew exactly how the kid was going to play because Broder’s tempo was too slow, and he knew that she wouldn’t have taken such a tempo unless she had been instructed to do so.

  Acceding to Yumi’s wishes, he forced himself to be patient, clenching and unclenching his fists, and allowed the student to play the whole first movement without interruption. But his exercise in restraint had the opposite effect. Rather than calming himself down, Jacobus only became more irritated. Clearly, the student had not paid a lick of attention to Franck’s own explicit indications how he wanted the music to be played. The student was simply mimicking some recording he had heard, and was not doing a very good job at that, either.

  The student stopped at the end of the movement. Jacobus said, ‘Don’t look at the music for a minute. Look at me and tell me what tempo Franck asks for at the beginning of the piece.’

  ‘Umm. Adagio?’

  A boy’s voice. Cocky.

  ‘Now look at it.’

  ‘Ah! Allegretto ben moderato.’

  ‘Allegretto. So why did you play it so slow?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure. Here’s another question, sonny. What does dolce mean?’

  ‘Not sure of that, either,’ he said, trying to make his response sound humorous.

  Be nice, Jacobus reminded himself. Be nice.

  ‘Not sure. Well, let’s take a look at the music, shall we? How many times does Franck write dolce in the first movement?’

  ‘The whole thing?’

  ‘It’s all of two pages, if I recall.’

  After a brief silence, ‘Does dolcissimo count?’

  ‘Yes, dolcissimo counts.’

  Another silence. Apparently, counting was a challenging task.

  ‘Seven,’ he said, finally.

  ‘So Franck writes dolce seven times within four minutes of music. That suggests he thought it was important. And you don’t know what it means.’

  The silence was uncomfortable.

  ‘One last question. Franck writes the infrequently used term con calore one time only. That also suggests he considered it important. Can you tell me what that means?’

  ‘With color?’

  ‘Sorry, son. Guesses don’t count, especially when they’re wrong. Con calore means with heat or, in common parlance, passionately. Three strikes and you’re out. Come back next time when you’ve given this music one iota of thought. Next.’

  There was some rumbling from the gallery, a few stifled gasps, and even a bit of the same kind of nervous laughter one sometimes hears when news spreads about an untimely death. But if they didn’t understand the lesson he had just given – a lesson, in Jacobus’s mind, that was more valuable than picking apart meaningless details – that was their problem.

  Jacobus hoped the next student would be better. He’d never had the capacity to tolerate apathy as an excuse for being ill-prepared, and would not pretend it was acceptable in front of a crowd of aspiring musicians. That kind of hypocrisy drove him mad. What would happen to music if the very people playing it didn’t give a rat’s ass? Maybe it had already been happening.

  Ah! The audience is quieting. Jacobus tried to turn his thoughts away from the darkness. A student tuned to the piano and started to play. The Mozart Concerto in D Major that the youthful composer wrote when he was nineteen. Jacobus knew how unreasonable it was make comparisons with the performer who was about the same age, but still …

  Then a performance of the virtuoso Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Camille Saint-Säens that was spirited but contained fistfuls of wrong notes and rhythms.

  Finally, Vivaldi’s ‘Spring.’ It was that girl, Audrey, who had prodded him for his guidance the night before. Let’s see how much she retained. Jacobus sat back and self-consciously folded his arms. In the past he would have quite naturally folded them around his violin, but he hadn’t brought it with him. Since moving into Nathaniel’s apartment he hadn’t practiced much and was more out of shape than usual. Any point of erudition he would have tried to reinforce by demonstrating on the violin, however valid, would have been negated by his own rusty execution.

  With Audrey, he was disappointed in his hopes if not in his expectations, which he had learned in a lifetime of dealing with humanity were impossible to underestimate. Audrey had evidently spurned his advice about the accents, playing lightly, and everything else he had mentioned. Whether that was by intention or inattention, the playing was even rougher than at the rehearsal the day before. There were inexplicable inconsistencies between her and Broder, the pianist. From time to time Audrey played loudly when Broder played softly, and vice versa. Some of her notes didn’t jibe with the harmonies that Broder played on the piano. Jacobus was perplexed. She had seemed so enthusiastic. He decided he’d cut her as much slack as he could to bring her along. After all, he had promised Yumi, and for some reason, he liked the kid. He let her play all three movements, mainly because it took him that amount of time to compose what he would say.

  When she finished the applause was polite and subdued.

  ‘OK, dear,’ he said, after it quickly subsided. ‘First of all, you’ve got to be on the same page as your accompanist. It definitely is a solo for violin, but it also has to be a team effort. It’s your job to sort out the notes and dynamics and make sure the feelings are mutual.’

  ‘I played what was in my part,’ Audrey argued. ‘It’s what I’ve always been playing.’

  Before Jacobus could begin his lecture on using one’s ears as well as one’s eyes, Lisette Broder spoke up.

  ‘Mea culpa,’ she said. ‘We’ve been rehearsing from the Ricordi edition, but I seem to have lost my part, so I had to borrow a different one at the last minute. It’s an early, hand-written edition and apparently has a lot of mistakes in it.’

  Broder sounded distraught. Clearly she took pride in her accompanying ability and now had to eat crow in public.

&n
bsp; ‘Well,’ said Jacobus, ‘that clears up one mystery. But who knows what’s a mistake and what Vivaldi intended? After two-hundred-fifty years our listener’s ears have changed as well. The Ricordi edition is perfectly acceptable, though one could just as easily conjecture that it’s the Ricordi edition that has the mistakes. Sometimes there’s really no way to tell for sure, and that’s one of the challenges of playing Baroque music. You have to make a lot more of your own decisions.’

  Ah, a teaching moment!

  ‘But let’s look at this concerto with what we know Vivaldi intended to portray. We’ve got bird calls, gentle breezes, a murmuring brook, and thunderstorms in the first movement. In the Largo we’ve got a goatherd with his faithful dog sleeping beside him in a meadow. In the last movement we have nymphs and shepherds roused into dance by the intoxicating music of rustic pipes. Those are all pretty vivid images and Vivaldi translated all of them into notes. We have to figure out how to play those notes to recreate the images.’

  ‘That’s what I tried to do,’ Audrey said.

  ‘Well, let’s try them again, one at a time.’

  They went back to the beginning, and Jacobus did his best to extract some semblance of character out of Audrey’s playing. The result was inexplicably unsatisfactory, yet Jacobus patiently persevered. He stopped her in the middle of a thunderstorm that was lackluster as a morning drizzle.

  ‘Try beginning those thirty-second notes with the bow on the string to get the articulation clearer. We want it to sound like thunder and lightning, not just cloudy with a chance of rain.’

  ‘That’s not how my teacher told me,’ Audrey said.

  Ah! The standard counterpunch of the petulant student. How many times had Jacobus heard that one? He had even gotten it from Yumi when she’d arrived from Japan and first started studying with him. He had heard it so many times over the years his response was almost memorized.

  ‘If I told you to do it the same way as your teacher, what would the point be of me being here? The idea of a masterclass is to get different perspectives. That’s one of the things that makes music great. Try it out here. If you like it, fine. If not’ – and here Jacobus thought charitably about Dunster – ‘do it the way your teacher told you.’

  ‘This is really tiring,’ she said.

  ‘Well, suck it up, buttercup. I’m about a century older than you and can manage enough energy to put my bow on the string.’

  ‘I really don’t like men,’ Audrey said.

  There was an audible gasp from the audience.

  ‘Me, neither,’ Jacobus responded, to relieved laughter. They thought he was trying to break the ice. They were wrong. He did not abide insolence, whether there was an ‘i’ in it or not.

  ‘And I don’t care much for women, either,’ he added.

  A rumble of confusion. How to interpret his comment?

  ‘I really don’t like being badgered,’ Audrey said. ‘I think I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Her departing footsteps echoed in the silence of the acoustically excellent Feldstein Auditorium.

  SIX

  Yumi almost shoved Jacobus into the passenger seat of her Camaro.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she said, and slammed the door shut.

  He heard her tramp around the car with agitated footsteps and slide into the driver’s seat.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she repeated.

  ‘I heard you the first time. What can’t you believe?’

  ‘“Suck it up, buttercup,” for one.’

  She turned on the ignition and over-revved the engine. The car lurched forward with a screech. If not for his seatbelt, Jacobus might have gone through the windshield.

  ‘What’s so bad about that?’

  ‘It’s not only insulting and demeaning. It’s sexist.’

  ‘Sexist?’

  ‘Yes, sexist. Don’t you realize when you call women things like buttercup, or honey, or sweetheart, you objectify them? You reinforce the stereotype of women as subservient and helpless? It’s comments like that that make men think they can do whatever they want.’

  ‘You’re accusing me of abuse?’ Jacobus asked. He couldn’t decide if he was more dumbfounded or outraged.

  ‘No. Not you. But it leads to it.’

  They drove for several minutes in uneasy silence. Jacobus couldn’t let it go. Yumi just didn’t get it. He would explain.

  ‘Something’s wrong with that kid,’ he said.

  ‘Which kid? You humiliated two of them. Or don’t you recall? And not just them! What about their teacher, Professor Dunster? You made it abundantly clear you think his teaching is inadequate. He’s been a respected member of the faculty for decades.’

  ‘So I’ve been told. By him.’

  ‘And have you been told he’s been responsible for getting major donors to support the scholarship fund? What if the Feldsteins were there? That’s ninety-million dollars you might have just flushed down the toilet.’

  ‘That’s beside the point.’

  ‘Well, it’s not beside the point that you also humiliated me!’

  ‘You! And just how did I do that?’

  The car swerved unexpectedly.

  ‘Careful,’ Jacobus said.

  ‘Don’t tell me how to drive. You’re not supposed to run over animals. Number one: I was the one who pushed so hard to get you invited to give the masterclass, so I now have to take responsibility for your behavior.’

  ‘How? By committing hara-kiri?’

  Jacobus realized immediately his comment was below the belt, but he was in no mood to concede any ground.

  ‘I’ll forget you said that, Jake,’ Yumi responded, but Jacobus knew she never would. ‘The second thing is,’ she continued, ‘by fawning over my student and then trashing Elwood’s, you made it seem you were playing favorites. Don’t you understand how embarrassing that is to me?’

  ‘Your kid was prepared. The others weren’t.’

  ‘Jake, they all played well! Yes, maybe there were shades of difference. But they’re all just students! How dare you rake them over the coals like that!’

  She’s driving far too fast for a back road, Jacobus thought. They must be on the Taconic Parkway now. He hoped so.

  ‘If I remember correctly,’ he said, ‘I was much tougher on you than I was to those kids this morning, and you’ve been thanking me for it ever since.’

  ‘Jake, those were private lessons. This was public. Those kids were performing in front of their teachers and classmates. But of course you couldn’t see that.’

  That was the first time Yumi had ever cut him with a remark about his blindness. Jacobus was hurt, but in a way also relieved. Now they were even, and he speculated that she had insulted him intentionally for that purpose.

  Two things troubled him deeply, though. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he was becoming a caricature of himself, so comfortable in his role of curmudgeon that he could no longer escape it. That he was now manufacturing scenarios, using other human beings as props, to enable him to play his role. Tough but fair! The ancient, blind guru familiar with the wondrous mysteries of music. ‘Do what I say and you shall go far, but if not, dire will be your fate!’

  Am I still an effective teacher, or is my bluster simply a tactic to massage my own ego? He had seen it often enough in other musicians – performers and teachers alike – and had always scoffed at their disingenuous pomposity. He was old, and by now he knew who he was. Or so he thought. Could it be I’m someone else entirely but have constructed an impenetrable, false façade?

  He thought about his parents, exterminated in a World War II death camp. He thought about his brother who might have perished with them but who also might have escaped and, in fact, might still be alive. In any event he was never heard from again, and Jacobus would never know. Did they ever ask themselves the question, ‘Who am I?’ he wondered. Or was that question simply the machination of an addled, narcissistic brain with
the luxury of too much time on its hands. Though he would not voice that particular concern with Yumi, he did speak about the other thing troubling him.

  ‘The girl. Audrey.’

  ‘What? What about her?’

  It must have been a long time since he had said anything. The car was now stopping and starting. They must be nearing the city already.

  ‘Something’s wrong.’

  ‘You intimidated her.’

  ‘No, no. Last night she was eager. Everything I mentioned about the Vivaldi she just soaked up like a sponge. Bounding around like a puppy with a stick. I’m telling you, even I was looking forward to hearing her this morning.’

  ‘That’s quite an admission.’

  ‘Take it for what it’s worth. But something happened between last night and this morning. Night and day. Literally.’

  Yumi took her time responding. Maybe she wasn’t agreeing. But at least she was considering.

  ‘Last night was a party,’ she said. ‘This morning she was on the spot. That’s the difference. And you didn’t help her.’

  ‘I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I was patient. She wouldn’t budge. Whatever was positive last night was negative this morning. She said, “I really don’t like being badgered.” Badgered? Kids don’t talk like that. At least not spontaneously. It sounded like she’d practiced it. Something happened, Yumi. And I’m not trying to make excuses.’

  ‘Is that a sign of remorse?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Never mind. Here we are.’

  Yumi phoned up to Nathaniel’s apartment, and Nathaniel came down to meet Jacobus on the street. Having anticipated their arrival, he had bought some bagels and lox from Shmeer Case on Columbus Avenue and invited the two of them up for a late afternoon lunch. Yumi declined politely but tersely, and drove off.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘What problem?’ Jacobus responded.

  Nathaniel knew Jacobus very well. Friends since college, long before Jacobus had lost his sight, they had played in a trio together after graduating for years of concert touring. Over time, Nathaniel bade farewell to the stresses of performing and of being a black man in a predominantly Caucasian field and utilized his musician’s knowledge of string instruments to become a highly reputed consultant in the field of instrument and art fraud. Jacobus, after being stricken with sudden blindness on the eve of his audition for concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, had gone into seclusion. His orchestra career in a shambles, when he finally reemerged he had determined to use his hard-earned skills to teach others, thus beginning his legendary legacy as a pedagogue. Not unlike great individuals in other fields, Jacobus had acquired enemies and rivals alongside admirers and acolytes. Due to his indifference to political correctness and his addiction to being honest whether or not it hurt, as time went on the ledger leaned toward the former camp. That he had been dragged into more than his share of murder investigations – reluctantly, it must be said – only weighted the scales that much more.