The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Christine said, “The woman with the envelopes told me. They’re using a screen. Somebody insisted at the last minute. One of the judges. I don’t know. It’s very unusual.”

  It was a strangely happy moment right then. Five people, and another one over in a corner, all knowing more or less how long we’d have to wait to play, and knowing we could be really anonymous behind a screen—we wouldn’t have to look at the faces of the jury. And nobody would have an extra advantage for looking perfectly poised.

  We looked around at each other and made relieved faces. Even Steve Landauer almost glanced out of his corner. I had probably more than an hour to wait in room 104.

  Room 104 had a grand piano, and a piano bench, and a straight chair, and a window looking out on the street. I put my violin case on the floor and looked out the window. People were down there going along in their lives. I could come in last in the Bloch Competition today and it wouldn’t make any difference to them. Ernest Bloch was already dead, and the winner of a competition named after him couldn’t make any difference to him. Nuclear war could break out and we’d all be dead in a few days, and then nothing would make any difference anyway.

  I pulled the piano bench over near the window and sat on the end of it, and I leaned my chin on the windowsill. People are always saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and then somebody always says, “It’s all small stuff.” I watched a little tiny kid being pushed along in a stroller on the sidewalk across the street. I could win a dozen competitions, and I wouldn’t bring Deirdre’s baby back.

  I could play an entire concert in Carnegie Hall and have Itzhak Perlman wish he could play like me, and I wouldn’t take away Mr. Trouble’s brain damage or find him his Waltzing Tree.

  I could play the violin better than Anne-Sophie Mutter or anybody else in the world, and I wouldn’t make the people who were dead at Treblinka live to ripe old ages.

  The little kid in the stroller started crying and reaching out around the stroller for something to make him happier. I had three little groups of notes going around in my mind, and they wouldn’t stop. I even heard them when the baby in the stroller cried. I’d probably played those little groups of notes five thousand times.

  I got up off the piano bench and squatted down and opened my violin case. “Everything doesn’t have to be a matter of life or death.” “Everything does have to be.” “Why are you yelling at me?” “Because I love you.” I breathed in and out the way the Yoga lady says to, and unzipped the pocket of my case where I’d put Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse. I laid it on the piano. I tuned my violin.

  I played the cadenzas, all three of them. Then I did some stretching exercises. I rolled my neck around, I did some of Sarah’s ballet leg lifts, I swung my arms. I played D-major and A-major chromatic scales for a while. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what the embroidered design on Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse looked like. I tried to imagine somebody’s fingers embroidering it in Poland almost a hundred years ago. That was still younger than my violin. I opened my eyes and found out I’d gotten everything right except one little leaf at the lower-right-hand corner of the design. I stared at the purse for a while. Nothing was in my mind; I was just staring.

  Somebody knocked, and the lady from the Green Room said, through the door, “Allegra, about twenty minutes, half an hour till you’re on. Number Two broke a D string. May I get you anything?”

  I opened the door and looked at her. I couldn’t remember the words at first. Then they came to me. “No, thank you,” I said. I stared at her. “Broke a D string?”

  “Oh—she replaced it and finished the concerto. Don’t look so worried. It doesn’t disqualify her. Of course not. Of course not, dear. We’ll let you know when it’s time,” she said. “You may leave your case and things here while you play.” She smiled a little bit and went walking down the hallway. I watched her feet go up and down on the floor, and then I closed the door.

  As I looked at the keyboard of the piano, my mind tried to empty itself; it tried to pour all my thoughts down a chute of some kind. I could feel them sliding away. Like a big balloon deflating, like a tank of something emptying. I felt my eyes bug out with the shock of it, and I saw my arms reach out to catch what was emptying out of me. I stood there looking at the space between my arms, and tried to find Mozart. I closed my eyes and looked for the first movement first; there it was, with its cadenza. Second movement. Third. They were there, with their notes in order, with Mr. Kaplan’s blue markings on the pages.

  Very strange, my mind doing that. I picked up my violin and played the third-movement cadenza. It was there, solid, it hadn’t gone off anywhere. I wrapped Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse in its tissue paper and put it back in my violin case. I went down the hallway to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was just a person in a blue dress standing in dim light in a public bathroom next to a towel machine. I turned around and went back to room 104 and sat down with my violin and bow in my hand.

  The envelope woman came and got me, and we walked down the hall and then down the stairs and then through a heavy door. Suddenly the lights were very bright and the floor was very polished and there was a line of screens on my right. Several screens were lined up so the jury couldn’t see any part of me, even my feet. The woman pointed to where I was supposed to stand. I went to the spot and stood. It was the place Steve Landauer, Number Three, had just walked away from. I suddenly remembered Alice in Wonderland getting smaller and smaller. I propped myself firmly on my feet, looked down at them; they were the same size they’d been five minutes before, and I knew I wasn’t shrinking.

  I decided to look at the vertical line down one of the screens.

  A man’s voice came from the other side of the screens: “Number Four, you may begin when you’re ready.”

  I thumbed my strings and heard the D string a shade flat. While I was tuning it I closed my eyes and saw Elter Bubbe Leah’s photograph with the purse and the goose and the broom, and into my vision came a teenage hand with a quill pen in it, just at the edge of the photograph. Music being written. I listened in my mind for the rhythm and I took a medium-size breath and started.

  The start was a good one; notes came up out of the violin on time, in time, things weren’t blurred, it was fun. Through the notes, I saw Elter Bubbe Leah shooing her geese up a slope with her broom in Poland; the notes went scooting along. It was strange: I was able to hear every note clearly, every group of sixteenth-notes, every little sforzando, and at the same time I was seeing a movie of pastures and the little house in Suprasl.

  The second movement. How many times Heavenly and I’d gone to sleep listening to it, with our arms around each other. I reached inside my body for the key change and the rhythm change and I felt for the gentleness of it. I saw Leah, a little girl in a long white nightgown, climbing into her bed by candlelight, and I took a medium-size breath and played. The notes sounded like little flickerings of flame from the candle, little bright lights floating in a dark room. I played it for her to drop off to sleep in her feather bed with her braids spread out on the pillow.

  The third movement, the Rondeau. If you turn on the radio just in time to hear this movement, you think it’s such a happy thing, those alternating sections, dances. And yet, when you pay close attention, there’s a kind of fragile sound—as if something’s going to break somewhere but you don’t know where. And little silences come up between the sections. I looked into what was going on in my mind and I saw the early morning waking Leah up with the sun coming in, a blessing. I took a medium-size breath and began. She woke up in the sunshine and she was a real girl in a real house, and I could see the grass and flowers growing as she walked outside, and I could feel the solid ground under her feet, and during the cadenza she was scampering along, very happy. And I got so carried away with the little girl in the story in my mind that I played an E-sharp a little bit askew, my finger came down on it too sideways. But I was happy. I was happy with the sounds of Mozart coming up out of the wood, and as
I moved toward the ending it felt right. The last three notes came out just the way I liked them, balanced, even, each one of them getting softer until the last one just skips away into the air.

  I took my violin down off my shoulder. I was in Portland, Oregon, and I’d just finished doing what I’d promised and feared to do. I was twelve yeas old, standing with my two feet on the floor and my arms hanging down. I might never even tell anybody about Leah and her goose and her feather bed in my mind. A whole story of her had happened inside the music. I looked down at the scroll of my violin. It’s like a seashell, as if there’s such a story inside that you could never find out all of it.

  A man’s voice came from the other side of the screen. “Thank you, Number Four.”

  14

  The jury wanted to meet with us in the Green Room. The woman who’d been in charge of us told us to tell the jury our names but not our numbers, even though the winner had already been decided. “That’s our policy. We want this to be the fairest competition in America,” she said.

  After we introduced ourselves, we sat all in a line. I sat between Myra and Christine, facing the jury, which was two men and two women.

  One of the judges stood up. He was one of those round men you see in orchestras. A round head, and a round stomach and big hands. He was wearing a tweed kind of jacket, and he had frizzy white hair and grizzly white eyebrows. He sort of patted his stomach and said to everybody, “First, we want to thank you all. You’ll each receive a tape of today’s performances. All six of the finalists have—at the very least—met our expectations, proving once again”—he laughed—“that not all of the fine student musicians are in New York. Each player has, in turn, brought members of the jury to the edges of their chairs. We would like to share with all the contestants our commentary and the results of this year’s competition.” He lifted the clipboard in front of him and then put it down again to explain some more.

  “We’ve worked very hard to make the Bloch the fairest possible young musicians’ competition. The screen, while it deprives us of the pleasure of watching you, does away with visual distractions. Likewise, we have no invited audience. It is our feeling that audience applause—much as all of you deserve it—has a slightly distorting effect. It can tip the balance, sometimes.” He looked hard at all of us. “And so, even if we recognize some faces”— he looked at Christine—“we truly don’t know whose number is what.” He smiled.

  “Ernest Bloch would surely have been pleased to be here today. Those of us who remember him, with his beret and his pipe, almost feel that he is.”

  Then he lifted his clipboard again and began to read.

  “Number One: A genuinely fluid performance, strikingly attentive to the musical fabric, sharply coherent phrasing, the melodies seem to bleed into the air.

  “Number Two: Splendid command of the subtleties of the piece; even with the unfortunate interruption to replace a string—even despite that—the concerto flows out in a stream connecting the instrument and the listener in a series of crystalline moments.

  “Number Three: Extraordinary combination of power and tenderness, extremely uncommon in young musicians; a sound that is radiant with paradox, gleaming in its coercion of notes into statements of art.

  “Number Four: A staggeringly soulful rendering, almost ethereal shaping of the themes, portraying the simultaneous whimsy and tragedy of the Mozartean vision.

  “Number Five: A pure, artless, supremely intelligent rendering, in which the buoyant surface of the music is at all times supported by an animated inner pulse.

  “Number Six: The mature depth of this interpretation, the vigor of its treatment of the musical ideas, and the astonishing sense of kinship between composer and player—these constitute an almost magical effect.

  “In short, ladies and gentlemen, there wasn’t a clinker in the bunch.” He smiled at us. I think he beamed.

  We were evidently supposed to laugh. Most of us did. The other people in the jury looked around at us and smiled and shifted in their seats.

  “And now, our decision. Young people, this job is never easy.…” He nodded at us as if he were saying yes. “This is always mysterious and exciting for the judges. Well. Here is the news. The second-prize winner, who will be the alternate in case the first-prize winner is unable to play in January—” He looked up and down the line of us. “Isn’t this an awful moment, everybody?” He chuckled. Nobody said anything.

  “Number Three.”

  Everybody went “Euuhh?” Just a little sound, not loud.

  “Number Three, stand up and show us who you are,” said the round man, cheerfully, looking down the line of us. He really didn’t know.

  Steve Landauer stood up. He wasn’t smiling. Or he was almost not smiling. He looked as if he thought there was a mistake.

  A woman read from a list, “Number Three is Steven I. Landauer. Steven is sixteen years old.” Everybody clapped. Still he didn’t smile. Christine whispered, “He’s mad.” I looked at his mouth. She was probably right.

  “Congratulations to you,” the round man said. “Now, Mr. Landauer, we want you to stay good and healthy until January, in case…” He laughed. Steve Landauer didn’t. He sat down while people were still clapping.

  The round man said, “And the moment everybody’s been waiting for, our first-prize winner, who is scheduled to play the concerto with the Symphony in January. We might say this is the performer who hit the ball all the way out of the park.” He looked down at the clipboard and then pushed it against his chest again. “Number Six.”

  I felt Christine and Myra say “Oh…” together. I think I said it with them. Karen Karen. I instantly felt a little tiny hurt inside, and I knew there was a part of me that had wanted to win. My hands started clapping, along with everyone else’s, and I remembered that she was exactly the age Mozart was when he wrote the concerto. And she loved his music so much, and she probably deserved the prize most of all. She stood up, grinning and gasping.

  “My gosh,” she said. “Gosh. Gosh. Oh, gosh.” Her whole dumpiness suddenly looked gorgeous. I can’t explain it. The flowers all over her dress were almost vibrating.

  The woman said, “First-prize winner is Karen Coleman. Karen is nineteen years old.”

  All the judges were standing up and everyone was crowding around Karen Karen. “Thank you, everyone, for a splendid afternoon,” one of the women judges said. We stood up. I wondered how Myra and Ezra and Christine felt. I wondered if they’d counted on winning, if they’d spent the whole summer wanting to win.

  Christine and Steve Landauer and I had just a little bit of time to get ready to play the concert in the park.

  Christine gave me a hug. “Well, Allegra, we made it through this afternoon, didn’t we? Can I call you Staggeringly Soulful from now on?”

  Her hug felt good. I laughed. “You played crystallized moments,” I said. “I don’t even know what those are.”

  She whispered, “I don’t either. Crystalline.”

  “Oh. Crystalline. Well, you played them.”

  People were moving and shuffling around; there was a sound of a lot of people talking and some laughing. Somebody hugged Karen Karen and her glasses fell off sideways. There were shoulders and violin cases and people hugging each other and shaking hands and a combination of smells almost like a locker room. Somebody called Christine “Christine Moments,” and one of the women had Ezra backed into a corner and was telling him about her grandfather who made violins. Myra came over to me and said, “Are you in?”

  “In what?”

  “In the fan club to come hear Karen play in January. We’ll all sit together and cheer.” Looking at her, I thought about each of us going to our next lesson, picking out a new concerto to learn.

  “Sure. Yes. Sure. Of course,” I said.

  We laughed. “See you then,” she said.

  Elter Bubbe Leah might have been a very old lady, very peaceful, sitting in a rocking chair somewhere.

  My mother was wai
ting for me outside the building, sitting in the car reading a book. It was still hot. I got in the car. We looked at each other. I leaned against the seat and closed my eyes, and she started the engine. “The Trout Creek Ridge girl won first,” I said. “Broken fingers and all.” I wanted to spend the whole evening at home, cuddled up with Heavenly Days, instead of playing a concert in the park.

  “And how do you feel about that?” she asked. She put her hand on my knee. I opened my eyes and looked at it. It was a bug-saving hand, a symphony-playing hand, a gear-shifting hand. Middle-aged, I suppose. She used to change my diapers with it. It went waggling up along beside her head when she was happy to see people. It was the hand she’d held tight to Deirdre with. It was a Kansas hand that had gone all the way to New York to get to Oregon to have me.

  “I feel okay about it,” I said, looking at her hand. “Pretty much.” She squeezed my knee and took hold of the steering wheel. We didn’t say anything for a while.

  “The alternate was all scowly and pouty. Guess who it is,” I said.

  “I don’t know. Christine?”

  “Mommy, think. Think who wouldn’t even be happy with second prize.”

  She drove along thinking. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “My new stand partner.”

  She opened her mouth wide and drove along with it hanging there. “Oh,” she said. She closed her mouth. “Well. How many judges?”

  “Four.”

  “Well. Four judges can’t be wrong. Good for him.”

  Daddy was making spaghetti and Bro David was garlicking the bread when we walked into the kitchen. Bro David had a pastry brush lifted above the loaf of bread, and my father was shoving pasta into the big pot of boiling water. They stopped and held still, nothing moved but the steam coming from the pot. Bro David is taller than Daddy, and neither of them ever wears an apron, and for some reason they looked like Boy Scouts standing there.

  I told them the results. They looked at me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I played it well. You’ll hear me on the tape, they’re sending everybody a tape.” They were looking at me to see how I really felt. It hit me that the three people standing there in the kitchen might never want to hear that Mozart concerto again in their lives. I laughed. “I’m fine,” I said. Their faces relaxed, and they went on getting dinner ready.