The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  It’s kind of like the way little kids always know the first few measures of a piece really well, because they’re always starting over again from the beginning.

  I went back to pacing sometimes with Mozart. It was about nine thirty one morning when Mommy came in and said Mr. Kaplan was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. She smiled at me pacing.

  “I feel like a little kid,” I said, and put my violin in the open violin case.

  She laughed. “It works, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at her and nodded my head.

  “Then pace your heart out, sweetheart,” she said.

  I went to the kitchen phone.

  “Good morning, Allegra. How would you like to play the Mozart in public next week?” Mr. Kaplan asked.

  “What do you mean, in public?” I said.

  “I mean there’s a little town up the Columbia Gorge, and the little town has a little orchestra, and their soloist has broken two fingers of her right hand windsurfing on the river, and they need somebody to come and play it. Outdoors. In their park.”

  “This concerto?” I asked.

  “This very one. The orchestra’s spent two months learning the accompaniment. I owe the conductor a favor, and you’d have fun doing it. Are you interested?”

  I didn’t say anything. Next week. In public. Mozart and Mr. Kaplan and an actual orchestra and a whole bunch of people in a park. And me.

  “I hear your wheels turning, Allegra. The concert’s on Thursday night in Trout Creek Ridge. One rehearsal, Tuesday at seven, indoors. I’ll drive you there.”

  “One rehearsal?”

  “That’s all. If she’d broken her fingers two weeks earlier, there would’ve been more. What do you think?”

  I looked around the kitchen. Mommy wasn’t in sight. Nine weeks until the competition. “Is it a kids’ orchestra?”

  “No. A community orchestra. Pharmacists, Sunday school teachers, farmers, some kids. You know, amateur. A woman conductor. She’s very good,” he said. He wasn’t actually pleading.

  Why not? Why in the world not do it?

  “Can you think of a good reason not to do it, Allegra?”

  I laughed. He was looking right into my head over the phone. “No. I think I will.”

  “Good girl, Allegra. We’ll talk about it tomorrow morning. You’ll tell your parents?”

  “Of course.”

  Of course I knew from records how the orchestral accompaniment sounded. Of course I knew I could close my eyes if looking out at the audience began to scare me. Of course I knew this would be a concert for practice. Of course I knew I wouldn’t have to throw up the way Deirdre does.

  What I had never in my life done was perform three movements and three cadenzas completely from memory with a conductor and a whole bunch of players following me. I was supposed to lead them and entertain the audience and bring Mozart into a park somewhere. With one rehearsal.

  Oh. Oh. Oh.

  Mommy and Daddy were “surprised and very much delighted.” That was what Mommy said. And “profoundly proud too,” said Daddy. Bro David said, “Maybe the other one broke her fingers on purpose so she wouldn’t have to play with that bunch; maybe there’s something you don’t know yet.”

  By the next morning, at my lesson, Mr. Kaplan had his one-rehearsal rules and advice to give me.

  One: First time through, if you feel something wrong in the tempo or in the dynamics, play to the end of the movement and then stop and tell the conductor the problem. The conductor’s name is Margaret, and she’ll listen to you. If the same thing is still wrong when you’re playing it the second time, stop exactly where it begins to be wrong. Don’t wait. You may get to play the concerto through three times, or you may not. It depends on how much time the conductor has allotted for your part of the rehearsal.

  Two: With amateur orchestras, one big problem is usually that they rush the sixteenth-notes. They see a lot of black on the page and they get urgent about it. They tend to try to pull the conductor along with them; they don’t know they’re doing it, they just do it. You may have to make a choice on the instant: follow Mozart or follow the orchestra behind you.

  Three: There’ll be some out-of-tune playing in the orchestra. You can’t do anything about that, and, as a guest, it’s not your place to say anything about it. The conductor has ears, and she deals with it as well as she can. You know a good conductor can make you play better than you can play sometimes—right? Well, she can’t do that all the time.

  Four: All these people are genuine amateurs. They play because of that thing inside them, that impulse telling them to—as it’s inside you. Where they’re different from you is that they spend most of their lives not being musicians. Many of them studied as children and then put their instruments aside—and then they try to begin playing again after—after maybe twenty years. They’re very humble, usually. They don’t have to be told they’re not perfect; they know it all too well.

  Five: They’ll be thrilled to play with you.

  I listened. I didn’t know why in Number Five they’d be so thrilled, and I just looked at Mr. Kaplan.

  “Because you’re twelve years old. Especially the older ones in the orchestra; they’ll feel very sentimental, Allegra.”

  I doubled my practice time, I took the printed music out of the music room and put it in the kitchen so I couldn’t even peek at it, I played the recordings of David Oistrakh and Anne-Sophie Mutter, alternating, while I waited to go to sleep. Among us, we had three different sets of cadenzas. In Mozart’s time, composers didn’t write actual cadenzas. The violinist was supposed to improvise. Other people came along later and wrote cadenzas to fit in the concertos. Oistrakh’s were by David, Mutter’s were by Joachim, and mine were by Herrmann. Heavenly Days lay curled up between my feet.

  Mr. Kaplan and I went to the rehearsal. We had to go about seventy miles up the Columbia River. The hills on both sides of the river looked like velvet heaps of land in the early evening sun, and we kept seeing sailboats and windsurfers. Trout Creek Ridge is built on the riverbank, so the streets are sloping. Indians used to live there. When we got off the freeway and into the town, it smelled like hay. We saw two hay mowers in fields. “Farmers and musicians work at night,” Mr. Kaplan said. The town is smack in the middle between two mountains, Mount Hood in Oregon and Mount Adams in Washington.

  When we walked in the door of the rehearsal room, a school music room in a sort of shed, the orchestra was already playing. Mr. Kaplan had said out of tune. But he hadn’t said how much. We sat down in chairs.

  I counted thirty-four people in the orchestra. One lady had a waitress costume on, with “Kitty” written on the pocket of her shirt. Three people were wearing cowboy boots. Scattered among the adults were nine kids, about high school age. I saw people squinting at the notes on the page and looking down at their instruments as if the instruments were trying to outsmart them. Out of thirty-four people, probably half of them were tapping their feet, in lots of different rhythms. They finished the piece by holding the last note very loud and long.

  Mr. Kaplan whispered to me to stand where I could see Margaret’s baton out of the corner of my left eye. That was all he said.

  Then he introduced me to her, and she introduced me to the orchestra. She said, “This is Allegra Shapiro, from Portland, who’s come to play the Mozart with us.” People kind of moved around in their chairs, and the brass players emptied their spit valves. The concertmaster said, “Welcome to Trout Creek Ridge.” He had very rosy cheeks and glasses. I said thanks and looked at Margaret. She was middle-aged, and quite tall, with big glasses.

  Margaret wanted me to give her my tempos for all three movements first. I gave them to her as well as I could, by going Da da-da da in the air. She said my tempos were fine. “Well, then, let’s do it,” she said to everybody. The orchestra began the introduction.

  In forty-one measures I heard a lot of wrong notes. Mr. Kaplan was sitting on the other side of the room with my music in his lap
. His face didn’t have any expression on it at all. “Think microrhythms” is one of the best pieces of tempo advice he’s ever given me. He said it when I was a little kid, and it makes everything easier. If a piece is in four, you divide every beat into four so you’re automatically thinking in sixteen counts. You can subdivide again into thirty-two if you need to. If you keep that rhythm in your mind, your fast notes won’t be ragged.

  The instant I started my part, I was a different player, not the player I’d been that morning. It was a very, very strange feeling, playing a solo with an orchestra behind my back. It was a sudden huge responsibility. Margaret’s baton was supposed to follow me. I discovered that this concerto was bigger than I’d had any idea of. Closing the gap between Mozart and me was all of a sudden terrifying.

  I got back to playing my familiar way in the first-movement cadenza because it was just me—no accompaniment.

  At the end of the first movement, I turned around to see what Margaret wanted to do. She was looking down at her conductor’s score and frowning. I glanced out at the orchestra and my eyes landed on one of the thin-haired old ladies. She was crying and wiping her nose with a handkerchief. I looked back at Margaret. “Let’s go on,” she said.

  The second movement can be so sweet and slow that you can get carried away. It has that place where I was leaning on the eighth-notes for a long time, but I didn’t play them that way with the orchestra because they wouldn’t have known what I was doing. Margaret was taking a tempo that was faster than I was used to, but I went along with it. The cadenza is a pretty song, as Mr. Kaplan would say, and I love playing it, and I sort of forgot there were all those people listening.

  At the end of that movement, I turned around again. Margaret was smiling, and I quickly looked across the top of the orchestra. I realized all of a sudden that I was almost embarrassed. I’d played the cadenza as if it were just me in the room, just a private song. Something had come up out of me. Like Deirdre said. And there they all were: all those people sitting there holding instruments. It was a moment of astonishment. I was just turning back around, because I didn’t want to see the faces, when I noticed the old lady wiping her nose again.

  I looked quickly at Mr. Kaplan. He was smiling at me, then he closed his face. I looked up at Margaret. On to the third movement.

  In the last movement, Margaret had to stop us and begin again four times because the orchestra got separated.

  I hadn’t even taken my violin down when there was a very loud clapping. For a moment, it was as if I were at the end of a telescope, looking at the orchestra from far away, and then they got close again, in normal vision. An optical illusion. They were clapping the way orchestras always clap for a soloist. I smiled at them, and a little laugh came out of my mouth. I don’t know why. Then I scrunched my bow back in my hand and clapped for them. Because we’d gotten through the concerto together.

  I told Margaret about the different tempo I’d been using in the second movement. She nodded her head, and we did the whole movement again. Then we did the whole concerto again. Then the orchestra took its break and Mr. Kaplan and Margaret wanted to talk to me.

  Mr. Kaplan stood with his head leaned to the side watching Margaret as she talked. “Your stability is particularly important in the last movement, I’ll be counting on you there,” she said to me. I nodded my head. “And the dynamics will be different in the park—you may find you’ll want to rev up your pianissimos somewhat.” I nodded. “We’ll see you Thursday,” she said. “You’ll be just fine, Allegra.”

  “Thank you,” I said. There was so much going on in my head, and that was all I said.

  Just as I walked out the door, I heard somebody saying, “But Karen took the cadenza faster, too.” “And besides that…” somebody else said, and then I was out of the rehearsal room.

  Mr. Kaplan and I got in his car and drove home. The sun hadn’t set yet, and we followed it down the river, going west. The hills are in layers of blue as you look downstream, going from very dark to very light. It’s a beautiful place. Mr. Kaplan was wearing sunglasses for driving.

  He asked me how I’d liked the hour we’d just spent. I told him about how I felt surprised to have all that responsibility. He nodded his head. And I told him about the optical illusion and he said, “Hmmm. Indeed.” I told him I was nervous about the concert, and he said, “Of course. Of course you are. It goes with the territory.”

  And he said, “In Europe you find many little orchestras like this one, in little towns. Not so many in America…” I looked at him. He said, “The sounds aren’t ever perfect. But the spirit is often quite wonderful. For some of those players, the orchestra is the only thing they have.”

  I couldn’t get the faster cadenza and the “and besides that” out of my mind. There were long silences as Mr. Kaplan drove back from Trout Creek Ridge to Portland. It was like trying not to think about elephants, of course. Which cadenza did the lady mean Karen took faster? “And besides that,” what? It was as if somebody was looking over my shoulder and having opinions about me but wasn’t telling me what they were.

  “What’s the problem, Allegra?” Mr. Kaplan asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’d better say it,” he said.

  I wanted to and at the same time I wanted to say anything else but it.

  “Beware the boomerang,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I squirmed a little in the seat and folded my arms in front of me. I knew I was folding them to keep things inside me, like protection. He meant the boomerang you throw in Australia and it comes back and hits you in the head if you’re not paying attention. He meant that if you throw your problems away somewhere so you won’t have to think about them, they’ll come back and hit you in the head.

  “Is Karen very, very good?” I looked away from him the minute I’d said it. I looked at the Columbia River. You can’t even tell if it’s moving.

  “Karen who?” he said.

  “Karen Karen. With the broken fingers.”

  He drove along without talking for a while. Two huge crows were sitting on the guardrail above the river, staring at us as we drove past. “Yes,” he said. “Karen’s good.”

  She was probably going to play the competition. When her fingers healed. She’d be one of the tall ones who’d never had a Waterloo in their lives. No: she’d had lots of Waterloos and won every single one of them with her magic fingers.

  Broken magic fingers now.

  Allegra, I said to myself, you are being evil and cruel. If you’re glad even for one second about her broken fingers, you’re a nasty fiend. I looked at my face in the side-view mirror of Mr. Kaplan’s car. I was looking at a nasty fiend. Clean up your act, Allegra, I said to myself.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Oh, I think Karen must be nineteen by now.”

  Remember, I said to myself, when you first heard about the finals you didn’t even want to try. Then you thought it would be better to lose. You only decided to play because you saw that picture of Joel Smirnoff. Then you got all excited about it. Did you think there wasn’t going to be anybody else playing the competition? Did you think you were going to march in there and play and have all the judges clap their hands and forget about hearing anybody else? Act your age and don’t be a nincompoop.

  “Does she go to college?”

  “Yes. Yes, she goes to college,” he said.

  That night I dreamed about the competition. It was in an auditorium. I was waiting to play and I had a raincoat on, all buttoned up. My turn was coming and I couldn’t get the buttons unbuttoned, and then I saw that everybody else was wearing bibs, the kind ski racers wear. I looked around and the bibs all said “Karen” on them. I couldn’t tell how many there were, but they were all tuning their violins and they were all very tall and beautiful. They looked like sisters. They had the same faces, all with stage makeup on. I kept trying to unbutton the raincoat so I could see what my racing bib said. I hadn’t even taken my
violin out of the case yet. One of the Karens said, “It’s too slow.” She had sharp, plucked eyebrows. I couldn’t find Mr. Kaplan. He was supposed to meet me backstage. An usher was saying, “Put the elephants in here,” and pointing to a big closet with mops and buckets and brooms in it.

  I woke up and saw the little green stereo light still on. The needle was going round and round at the end of Anne-Sophie Mutter’s third movement. I turned the stereo off and took Heavenly Days under the covers with me to wait for morning to come. I had an extra lesson scheduled.

  At 6:00 A.M., I was in the music room, playing all three cadenzas faster. I sounded horrible.

  I was a grouch at breakfast, so I took my oatmeal and stuff to my room and listened to Miles Davis, and Heavenly Days drank the leftover milk from my bowl. Miles Davis is a jazz trumpeter. It’s an old record called Kind of Blue, and my parents let me have it in my room. There’s a house rule that says you don’t have the right to make everybody else miserable just because you are. The rule is Don’t Try to Make Your Misery Contagious. Of course it’s a hard rule not to break.

  Miles Davis makes the music sound as if he’s just doing it, not even working at it. I yelled, “You stink, Miles,” and stuck my tongue out at the record on my way to the bathroom. The door was open.

  Bro David was shaving, getting water all over everything. If we had water rationing, David would be put in jail the first day. I sat down on the toilet cover.

  “Hear that sound?” David said.

  “Which sound?” I said.

  “That crowd on the lawn.”

  “What crowd?”

  “It’s the Jazz Society of America, coming to draw and quarter you.”

  I kicked him in the left shin.

  He held the razor up like a microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ‘Lifestyles of the Weird and Crazy.’…” Then he went on shaving.

  “David, you are a creep,” I said.