Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  Modern record companies began using blatantly suggestive photos of women soloists on the covers of their classical music recordings. RCA started with cellist Ofra Harnoy, using the Israeli musician’s attractive photo to sell records rather than playing up her notable accomplishments. Then came Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg—classical music’s Courtney Love —followed by Singaporean sexpot fiddler Vanessa-Mae Nicholson frolicking in a wet T-shirt with a white violin. The string quartet Bond jumped on board, earning the nickname “Spice Girls with Strings.” Next came the sister act Ahn Trio and Lara St. John, who was photographed wearing only a violin.

  Midori, Hilary Hahn, and Sarah Chang led a mostly Asian trend of pubescent female fiddlers. “It did not take a Freudian analyst to detect something suspect in a line of teenies being paraded before a concert audience—and particularly a record-buying public—that was overwhelmingly male and middle-aged,” observed Norman Lebrecht, author of Who Killed Classical Music?4

  A real Playboy Playmate, busty blond Finnish fiddler Linda Lampenius, known by her stage name of Linda Brava, recorded an EMI album of light recital fare. It received a scathing review in the American Record Guide. The Mediaeval Baebes—a twelve-woman group composed of an ex-stripper, two fire-eaters, a witch, and former members of the rock group Miranda Sex Garden—staked their claim with Virgin Records. RCA Victor didn’t even need a sexy soloist, choosing instead to recycle old recordings into anthologies that promised instant libido, with their three-album Love Notes series: Shacking Up to Chopin, Bedroom Bliss with Beethoven, and Making Out to Mozart.

  The babe angle was an easy sell. Newcomers to classical music who were interested in buying CDs faced racks of album covers featuring white men in black tuxedos. It wasn’t surprising that buyers were attracted to photos of pretty women posing much like familiar artists on pop CDs.

  Journalists, however, censured modern talents who dressed as provocatively as blue-jeaned Tchaikovsky Competition medalist Eugene Fodor or violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who always appeared in one of her trademark strapless Dior gowns. The writers’ theses leave the reader and potential classical music fan wondering why they would want to spend time and money experiencing an art form that is described to them as lacking in emotion.

  “For God’s sake, let’s put some uncompromising physical ugliness back into classical music, so we all start listening again instead of looking, before it’s too late,” wrote London’s Evening Standard. “Classical music has never struck me as an accompaniment to anything else and certainly not to amour toujours. In real life, music-making and love-making aren’t synonymous, as they often are on-screen,” said the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “There may be kids out there who lost their virginity during Brahms’s D Minor Piano Concerto, but they don’t want to tell the story and you don’t want to hear it,” wrote Alex Ross of The New Yorker.

  The New Yorker quote, written by a journalist I admire, was both amusing and sad. I had passionately lost my virginity at sixteen while a Brahms string quintet record was playing. I couldn’t imagine what created this invisible barrier between listener and performer, a boundary that cheated new audiences of the sensory thrill of classical music.

  A receptionist pointed to the Hit Factory’s main elevator, which was made accessible to studio musicians only after the caged freight lift we were once required to use plunged four floors in 1994. Several musicians reported bruises, cuts, muscle pain, and recurring nightmares after the accident, which happened following a session to record the film It Could Happen to You.

  I’d been here a month ago to perform the film score to Twilight, which starred Susan Sarandon and Paul Newman. Elmer Bernstein, the elder statesman of movie soundtracks, had conducted his own music. Starting out as a Juilliard-trained concert pianist in 1939, Bernstein studied composition with luminaries Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe, scoring such films as The Ten Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ghostbusters, and The Age of Innocence. Winner of an Oscar, he’d also won an Emmy and two Golden Globe Awards after nearly a half century of film composing.

  Watching his video monitor, Bernstein timed the music perfectly with the movie scenes, just like film recording before click tracks were used by musicians to synchronize their performance with the video.

  After Twilight, it was surprising to be hired so soon for Snake Eyes. The elevator opened on a crowd of musicians, dressed far better than usual, at the only film date some had been called for in years. The room buzzed with false hope that two dates a few months apart meant a recording renaissance.

  A tall violinist in her forties flirted with the new contractor, her neckline dipping low over what little bosom she had. Talking importantly into his cell phone, a violist intermittently gulped coffee from a blue cup printed with a white Acropolis. He looked the part of busy musician, nailing down another three-hour $250 recording date. Beyond the recording booth’s window, seven or eight men in suits chatted on leather sofas. They were producers, film execs, maybe an actor. A gofer refreshed their basket of finger sandwiches, fruit, and cheeses, while a producer stood over the sound board, watching a video of the film.

  They looked prosperous, but the studio air on our side of the double glass hummed with the musicians’ desperation and the unspoken hope that sessions like this one would become a regular occurrence once again. An Asian man I’d never seen—the film score’s composer—tapped the stand and introduced Brian DePalma. The director looked humble before sixty musicians but quickly retreated back to the booth.

  As I watched the violinists’ bows going up and down in unison, reflected against glass beyond which sat the film’s production team, I was struck by the contrast between the two groups of people. In the booth sat men who made careers out of trying a new idea, succeeding or failing and then trying another. On my side of the business, musicians returned to the same kinds of gigs, playing someone else’s music and earning a per-service wage. As the bows went up and down I was reminded of a scene in Ben Hur in which galley slaves rowed without much idea of where they were headed.

  There was something more personal bothering me, though. So far I hadn’t had any physical problems that affected my playing, like violinists did when they suffered from tendonitis, or flutists with shoulder problems. Now I was trying to ignore the sensation that my front tooth was coming loose. I’d knocked it out in a 1977 car accident, and when the dentists replaced it in its socket they told me it would last about twenty years. It was now 1998.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Music of the Heart

  IT WAS A scene straight from Little Shop of Horrors. My dentist straddled the chair, wielding a fierce set of tongs. He braced one foot against the chair and tugged at my front tooth. Bone creaked against bone while Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 tinkled away in the background. In 1985—Bach’s tricentennial—I’d played the piece twenty-one times, with eight different groups, on three continents. Always in the third oboe chair, I’d come to despise the exposed low C ending the slow movement.

  “Unh!” grunted the doctor as he produced my tooth, whose rotted roots resembled filigree.

  The infections had set in a few years after the 1977 car accident. My old dentist—part of a fraternity catering to musicians by advertising in the union paper—found nothing. I imagined him trading tips with the accountant famous for representing musicians at tax audits he’d caused through incompetence.

  A dental implant would come only after eighteen months of bone grafts and gum surgeries. In the meantime, I’d wear a “flipper”—an appliance like an orthodontic retainer but with a dummy tooth instead of wire—glued to the roof of my mouth each night with Poli Grip. Playing the oboe would present much more of a challenge. Nearly forty, lonely and single, and now with my teeth starting to fall out, I hated the oboe, and yet I had no other skills.

  My problems paled next to Sam’s. When I stopped by his apartment a month ago, he must have weighed only about 110 pounds. His trans-planted heart was wearing out. He stayed home to rest and
wait for a second transplant, a rarity since patients waiting for a first transplant often took priority. Like a pregnant woman, Sam had a bag packed and ready for a hospital stay, and during rare performances he clipped a beeper to his tux pants. The instant a heart was available for transplant, Sam would literally stop the music and get to the operating room.

  I hadn’t seen much of him in the three years since Itzhak’s party. I still felt like a fool for helping him through the last surgery, time I could have spent in school taking care of my own needs. Nearly sixty-two, Sam suddenly looked older than his years, as if his body had finally worn out for good. Even so, I saw defiance and fight in his face. When I left, he walked me to his apartment door and air-kissed me.

  “Love you,” he called down the hall, his voice breaking.

  Sam was clearly dying. Everything around me was dying too. The business was shrinking. The building was disintegrating. Betty looked older and sadder every time I saw her, and Sydney had moved in with Frank, her CEO boyfriend. I wasn’t sure if it was depression or exhaustion, but no one could penetrate her fog. I would turn thirty-nine soon, having lived for over two decades in the Allendale. Les Miz had run eleven years already. It would probably close before long. Whatever it took, I would not turn forty in this dump of a building, I told myself. I filled a tumbler of jug wine, as I had begun to do almost every afternoon, and found my Johnson O’Connor aptitude test in the filing cabinet.

  Public relations. International business. Teaching. Music. Advertising. Journalism. The last word popped out as if it were in bold print. I had been noticing my aptitudes in the year since I had the Johnson O’Connor evaluation. Sydney had once complimented my ability to communicate. My mother had given me a journal when we lived in Austria in 1967 and had been encouraging me to write ever since. Why hadn’t I seen it before? There was a positive side to the life I’d led, fascinating tales to tell about people and places and a desire to make a tangible social contribution. Didn’t Columbia have the top journalism school? My neighbor from 1978, Billy Lichtenstein, had graduated from there, and I knew the program only took nine months. I could change my life by this time next year. Enrolling at a real university would minimize my two useless music conservatory degrees and, at the same time, immerse me in the world outside classical music.

  I poured the wine down the kitchen sink, suddenly disgusted by the dishes I’d allowed to pile up. It was October, and I didn’t have time to waste. I wanted to learn about journalism schools right away and apply in time for their deadlines. The elevator was taking forever, so I ran down six flights to the lobby.

  Outside, Betty was once again helping her married lover into a cab, his head trembling as she slid his cane in beside him. I turned my head away to pass them, trying to separate myself physically from the Allendale and everything it represented. My purposeful steps felt odd after so much inertia, almost as if I’d awakened after a long hibernation. I walked briskly toward the Olympia Theater, past Cannon’s pub and Amir’s Falafel to Columbia’s gates.

  Stopping inside Columbia’s journalism building, I picked up an application and a catalog. In the university bookstore, I bought a college guide that evaluated journalism schools. I couldn’t wait to get to Les Miz that night and start reading the materials.

  It was only a month before application deadlines. I chose programs at two of the top three schools, Columbia and the University of Missouri. I picked the University of Wisconsin as a safety fall-back school. Stanford University was on my list because of its small size, ten students and five professors, two of them Pulitzer winners; one of them was a journalist whose work I had long admired. I had visited my parents at Stanford in 1979, when my dad was on sabbatical at the university’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and loved the area, so dramatically different from New York City. I followed through with the Stanford application, even though I could never afford the journalism program’s $24,000 tuition. At least at Columbia I could continue working on Broadway to pay my way through school.

  Next, I attended to the other application requirements. I took the Graduate Record Examination, something I never could have completed three years before when I lacked math skills. I labored over a personal statement, the first essay I had written in sixteen years. Next I made a lunch date with my old oboe teacher, Joe Robinson, to ask him for a letter of recommendation. He stood me up. He forgot the second appointment as well, taking his BMW for an oil change instead and showing up ninety minutes later, after a phone call to his home. Sitting across from him that afternoon at Shun Lee West, I decided instead to ask Carl Schiebler, the Philharmonic’s personnel manager, for the letter.

  My efforts and energy still felt hollow and unrealistic. Journalism schools probably wouldn’t take me seriously, but I had to try.

  Two months later, I received a slim envelope from Stanford. The mailbox slammed shut, its broken lock bouncing against the wall. Thin envelopes always contained rejection letters.

  In my apartment, I tossed out the recital notice, the catalogs, and the Stanford letter. I poured myself an early afternoon wine and started scrubbing the pan from last night’s nachos. I couldn’t stop thinking about the letter.

  Oh, what the hell. I had to face the truth. Brushing coffee grounds off the Stanford envelope, I ripped it open. Inside was a single sheet with only a couple of typed paragraphs. I took a long draft of wine, unfolded the letter, and braced myself.

  You have been accepted to the graduate program in journalism at Stanford University.

  I’d heard about hallucinations in the late stages of alcoholism, but didn’t they usually involve spiders? I read on.

  We are pleased to award you a full tuition fellowship in the amount of $24,000.

  Later, I received acceptances from Columbia and Wisconsin, and another full fellowship at the University of Missouri. Columbia was most students’ first choice, but I feared my age and strange background would cause me to get lost in a crowd of young competitive reporters. I picked Stanford, my dream school.

  Since I had never written anything, I decided to try to get published. Wouldn’t my solo travels through Japan after a New York Pops tour make a perfect travel essay for The New York Times? I stopped mentioning my project to other musicians and the few writers I knew, because everyone said it was impossible to land that column, especially for a neophyte like me.

  It was a long shot, but so was journalism school. However paralyzed Sydney was in her own life, she said she knew I could do it. Maybe she was living vicariously through my dreams. Sam believed in me too and asked one of his reporter friends to help me contact the Times travel editor.

  Sue called, saying Sam was slipping toward death after his second transplant. He was losing his resolve and wanted me to come see him. “He said the difference between the first transplant and this time is that you’re not here now,” Sue said. So he does admit I was there for him when no one else was, I thought, scolding myself for my selfishness. This time I hadn’t been to see him even once. Carlie, a member of Sam’s network and heir to the Thom McAn shoestore fortune, had even offered me money to spend time with him. I didn’t take it.

  The first time I went to Columbia Presbyterian after Sue’s call, Sam had been alert, even though his body was obviously ravaged. As I walked into the room, his mood changed from defeat to optimism. I told him that my travel essay on Japanese bathhouses would be published in the Sunday Times in a few weeks, probably helped along because his reporter friend had made sure my manuscript had gotten to the travel desk.

  “I’m so glad I could finally do something for you, honey,” he said earnestly. I said that the travel piece had opened the door for an assignment from The Wall Street Journal, which would appear four days after the Times essay. It was quite a debut week for a beginning journalist.

  We listened to Mahler’s Fifth on Sam’s Walkman, which was hooked to miniature speakers. Sam had closed his eyes and swooned, then turned his hands over and over, skeletal fingers bloated with
growths and bruises. “My playing days are over,” he said, wilting back into his defeated mood. I thought back on all those musicians at Itzhak’s party. Where were they?

  Sam looked about eighty pounds, curled in a helpless wad. I sat on the bed like I did after the first surgery, to prop him up. We sat there, slumped together in silence for several minutes. I rubbed his hair in the way he used to like. At last Sam spoke softly.

  “I know you never forgave me, and I don’t expect you to,” he said of Itzhak’s party. I didn’t say anything but let the quiet settle around us. I was still angry, mostly at myself for my lack of forgiveness. “Everyone’s forgotten me,” Sam said. We both knew that, on many counts, he was right. For the most self-serving of Sam’s crowd, a dying man was useless as a business connection. However, I could tell that some people had visited. One of his students, who had taken over my former role as nurse-maid, had brought an electronic keyboard, which sat in the corner. I saw cards from Sam’s daughter and the violinist Jaime Laredo.

  I stroked his arm softly, trying to soothe without hurting his sensitive body. With my free hand I searched the CDs on the table and slipped one of his favorite pieces, Schubert’s “An die Musik,” into the Walkman. Bryn Terfel’s velvety baritone filled the room:

  O sublime art,

  In how many gray hours

  When wild tumult of life ensnared me

  Have you kindled my heart to warm love?

  “Turn it off!” Sam said tensely. I hesitated. Sam’s pupils glowed, possessed.

  “Now!”

  Sam rolled his head toward the bridge he remembered crossing in 1947 on the way to his first childhood surgery. The sight of it wasn’t as comforting as it once was. It almost mocked him, as he knew it would remain long after he was gone. We sat in silence for a few minutes while he calmed down.