Extraordinary Renditions

by Andrew Ervin

  He stiffened his back and with a mild frown looked them over without making eye contact. He did nothing to establish a rapport with his orchestra. Nothing. They were strangers to him, despite the countless hours spent following his orders. A gesture as simple as a smile or even a nod would have put them—or at least it would have put her—squarely on his side. Instead, he adopted an adversarial posture. That thin sneer communicated something to the effect of, “Don’t you dare fuck up the most important concert of my stillborn career.” He raised his baton to begin the national anthem.

  Ferenc Erkel’s slow, plodding dirge was easily the world’s most depressing hymn of self-celebration. The orchestra came in unevenly, so several of the violins rushed to find their spots. Every musician made mistakes on stage from time to time; the correct thing to do in most instances was to skip a few measures and follow along with the sheet music, with eyes only, until finding one’s place and jumping back in. That these guys decided to play all the notes faster as a way of catching up to the rest of the orchestra only illustrated Melanie’s concern about the level of amateurism she contended with every day at rehearsal. They played faster, but that only made the discord more apparent. If the audience noticed the initial gaffe, it didn’t let on. Their esteemed conductor, however, grew visibly agitated. The music fell out of skew. Everything wobbled, unsure, for what felt like an hour. A train wreck was imminent. Panic grabbed hold of the reeds, who started to play faster to match the errant violins, until finally the timpanist took control of the situation—a responsibility that should have fallen squarely on the shoulders of the man with the baton—and leaned in a bit harder to establish a beat by which they could all correct themselves. It fell back into place just in time for the bleak finale. Melanie felt the music snap together more than heard it. From her seat she had a lousy view of the church and even, mercifully, of the conductor, but when they finally got into sync, the sonority of that room gave her chills. It was frigid to the point of disrespect for the musicians and audience, but the pinpricks up and down her arm derived not from the temperature, but from the immediately visceral sensation of hearing those gloriously melancholy tones reverberate through the eaves, of feeling Beethoven beside her. Within her. Locking in with other players, with a receptive audience, it was absolute joy. She even loved the usually tedious counting and keeping of time between her parts.

  The applause hit them, a hot shower of jubilation and nationalistic pride. The conductor glowered, and then turned to the cheering crowd with the same thin smile. When he bowed in gratitude, his back to the orchestra, one of the tuba players cut loose with a sharp oompah. The sound was unmistakable. The tubist pretended it was an accident, that she was clearing the spit valve and it went off in her hands. The orchestra members couldn’t reign in their laughter, their relief. That noise had unified them in direct opposition to their conductor. They staged a musical revolt, on Independence Day no less, and the conductor could only watch, dumbstruck as he lost his tenuous grip on an insolent ensemble. The tubist would certainly be fired. No question about it.

  The raucous whooping and hollering wasn’t simply the audience cheering the entrance of the soloists. It was that, but it was also the orchestra, up on the sanctuary where the altar should have been, laughing at something as inane and banal as a fart joke—a fart joke at the expense of their esteemed conductor. And that was where, less than a month later, the bestselling DVD recording of the event would begin. With this rambunctious laughter. With the conductor’s face glowing bright pink in rage. With a shot of audience members who were unaware of what they had just witnessed and of what they were about to witness.

  6.

  The three soloists strutted out, unaware, into a musical minefield: soprano Erzsébet Holló, mezzo-soprano Judit Szirmay, and contralto Sylvia Péntek. Their dresses glittered, respectively, green, white, and red. Tenor László Nógrádi, the chansonnier, followed behind. The crowd erupted even more. The conductor, overcome with game-show host conviviality, lasciviously kissed the ladies and pumped Nógrádi’s hand. Without room for sets, which were still under construction anyway, or for proper dressing rooms for costume changes, they performed a concert version of the opera. The singers sat at the front of the stage, facing the audience, except for Nógrádi, who remained standing.

  Set in rural mainland China, The Golden Lotus used the practice of foot binding as a metaphor for the experience of the common man under what Harkályi described in the score’s endnotes as the “corrupting sway and influence of capital.” It had taken him thirty years to complete. He derived the title from the ideal shape that a woman’s feet could attain by binding. According to the program notes, the wrapping of a young girl’s feet—which typically started at age three or four—upheld patriarchic, feudal-era ideas of beauty. Small feet represented nobility even among peasants and raised one’s social stature and prospects of good marriage. A mother would use a twenty-foot-long ribbon to adhere her daughter’s toes to the underside of the foot, often crushing the bones in the process. She then sewed the ribbon ends together to prevent loosening and crammed the child’s feet into shoes sometimes no more than a few inches long. As the flesh deteriorated, over time the stench of blood and pus could become overwhelming. When the bandages were drenched, the mother would scrape away the putrid flesh, tighten the ribbons further, and subject the girl to smaller and smaller shoes. The process lasted up to three years. The libretto described the sensation as something like walking through a fire. Harkályi, from what Melanie had read, also intended it as a jab at American decadence. Apparently the obsession with wealth and status not only hamstrung the nation’s natural spiritual growth, but also brutally disfigured Americans in the process.

  Nógrádi’s spoken, chant-like introduction, which was in German, warned the audience and television cameras of the horrendous events they were about to witness, of the bondage to which people were subjected to in the name of beauty. In a remote Chinese village, Mother (Szirmay) defied her family, particularly Grandmother (Péntek), by refusing to bind the feet of her own infant Daughter (Holló). Mother and Daughter became objects of public scorn. Their shame cast an impenetrable shadow over the family’s fortunes. After a minute and a half, a solo cimbalom came in to accompany Nógrádi. It evoked the timbre of a pipa. A strain of Asian music ran throughout the entire piece, but it carried a distinctly Magyar tone. The cimbalom remained a fixture of every Hungarian folk music ensemble and the associations with the local Gypsy music were unmistakable to the native audience.

  Years had passed in the opera when the singing began in earnest. Nógrádi sat. This time, the orchestra came in together and the sound was staggering. They were one seamless mass: the orchestra and conductor and composer, the crowd and the cameras, the church and the city around them. The palpable spirit of Beethoven. Melanie felt it. The first part sung was the crying and moaning of the Daughter, now nine years old. Her big, unbound “peasant’s feet” made her a pariah. As the strings assembled into shifting vistas of harmony, Daughter—with the help of Grandmother—bound her own feet in secret. It was an incredibly demanding part for a singer, full of abrupt transitions from precise lyricism to howls of physical agony and emotional duress. From her seat, Melanie saw the green-black of the singer’s glittering gown, but little else.

  Every musician was now on board and in precise and undistracted synchronization. The singers unfolded their story of pain and humiliation and violence wielded in the name of motherly love. Music surged in and out of tune. Harmonies arose and dissipated like clouds, then reformed themselves as hail that landed on the timpanis. The conductor smiled. His swaying grew more pronounced, more dance-like. Soon there were no longer notes on the page, only living music: music that consumed those black dots and rests like match heads and sent the ashes spewing all the way to the eaves, finally settling on the shoulders of prime ministers and diplomats and cameramen and Nanette somewhere firing away at Melanie through a zoom lens. A woman wailed, another sang solemnly, an
d yet another sat silent and motionless. Oboes and bassoons colored the very air they breathed and in which Melanie could now see her own breath. Horns blasted holes clear through the sound. The basses creaked and moaned like floorboards and the drums flagellated themselves mercilessly over her left shoulder to punctuate the entire event. Melanie watched her bow repeatedly stretch itself out from her body and recline again, hitting against the neck as if it were a talking drum. Her fingers danced heavily on the ridged strings, the bottom rim of her violin gouged into her collarbone, but she felt nothing. She possessed no “I” capable of feeling, and from that absence she was reborn into some kind of vision.

  Melanie’s body remained anchored to her chair—she never completely lost touch with her physical presence, yet a different part of herself became unmoored. Some kind of dream-self came removed from her body and hovered near the stage. She looked at herself there—here—playing the violin, and then she floated over the heads of the crowd and ventured through the front doors of the church. She followed the path of the river north to Margit Bridge and went down to the island, an oasis of groves and fields and footpaths. She sped over the tops of the trees. Colors appeared exceptionally vivid, yet somehow misaligned, like she was wearing a pair of wine-red lenses. She arrived at an enormous oak, one she had never seen before, and recognized it somehow as her home. She belonged in it. She joined a flock of eagles and hawks amid the branches, which elsewhere also contained bats and owls and pelicans and parrots of every color. It was the woodpeckers, however, that got her attention. Hundreds of them—woodpeckers of every variety, tap-tapping an intricate tribal rhythm. It was mesmerizing. The immediate sense of comfort overwhelmed her, like the familiarity of her own clean bed after a long trip. The voice of her violin joined the choral din of birdsong and roused her from her trance. Looking down, she nearly screamed, shaken not by the height, though she sat far higher than the top of any natural tree, but by a series of human bodies: black men dangled from the branches on ropes. They had been lynched and left to feed the amassed birds. The tops of their heads bobbed and swung heavily. Their dying moans sounded like upright basses and antique cellos tuned to some ungodly foreign scale. They accused Melanie of complicity. She fled back to Batthyány Square as the string quartet finale approached, much too suddenly. She was going to be late for her entrance. Daughter was dying from a painful gangrenous infection.

  She tuned her pegs down by another quarter tone as required—but she didn’t stop there. Instead, Melanie threw the strings wholly out of whack, even compared to the other atonal elements of Harkályi’s precious composition, and deviated wildly from the score. Zsuzsi stirred in her seat but didn’t risk looking over and losing her place; when her part ended and she stopped playing, the pronounced pocket of silence made Melanie’s violin that much louder, more jarring. It sounded beautiful, alive and natural in a way that she could only think of as sexual. The first violins in front of her began to rock in their seats, visibly distraught. The conductor eyed her entire section, trying to identify the offending party. More instruments grew hushed on cue, like confused voices silencing themselves. The singers retook their seats. Melanie ignored the score in front of her. The cello and viola died slowly until only the timpani and her own screeching violin remained, as out of tune as an upright, elementary-school piano. Disbelief passed through the orchestra, followed by something like anger—now directed fully at her—but her bow kept seesawing away. She looked for the timpanist but couldn’t see him. He struggled to keep up, to vamp along with Melanie and cover up the disaster in progress, but the combined effect soon breached that thin membrane separating music and noise. It sounded sirenlike, as natural as childbirth and just as messy. Even after the timpanist gave up, Melanie continued to play solo, exorcising herself of demons real and imagined. Filthy, infected sounds gushed from her body and every tone she dragged from her violin and ragged bow purged her of another sin until, at long last, she slid to one long, breathless glissando, then stopped.

  The final altissimo squeak rose from the sounding board of her instrument, carried itself aloft, and ascended until it found itself trapped and muted among the plaster balusters of the ceiling. Calluses pulsated on her fingertips. The conductor eyed her in disbelief, in rage. He held his empty hand in front of his face as if shaking an invisible snow globe, then dropped it at his side before she was able to breathe again.

  The church exploded. The audience’s ecstasy found expression in the whistling and clapping and stomping of leather soles. The crowd jumped to its feet. The prime minister kissed his wife, shook the hands of well-wishers in the row behind him, and applauded with gusto. Melanie didn’t dare to look at Harkályi. Her bow, a knot of horsehair tied to a stick, fell from her hand. The violinists in front of her turned around to stare without shame. The conductor took a jaunty bow and trotted off to the chancel. Beneath Melanie’s feet the heaters mercifully—miraculously—came back to life.

  The cacophony of shouts and applause solidified into a steady rollicking beat until the conductor took the stage again. Motioning to Harkályi, he held out his cupped palms the way a beggar might ask for spare change. Melanie braced herself. Lajos Harkályi stood, aglow with the triumph spilling down on him from the very walls of the church. Nothing about his composure, his countenance, gave the slightest hint of disapproval, yet Melanie’s only concern involved collecting her things from those altar boys and getting the hell out before bumping into him. She didn’t care about that wormy conductor, but she couldn’t face Harkályi, not after the damage she had done to his opera. The prime minister hugged him and mugged for the cameras. The conductor pointed to the singers, asking them to stand. Bouquets fell at their feet. Erzsébet Holló received the loudest ovation and deservedly so. Her performance would make her a household name throughout Hungary and beyond.

  The conductor waved his hand, directing those musicians who had distinguished themselves before his eyes to stand. He never took his gaze off Melanie but, needless to say, didn’t lift her from her seat. Her career in Hungary was over. But a change came over the audience, a kind of clucking disapproval. Waves of protest rippled through the pews. Men pointed at her. The conductor, in his confusion, looked at Harkályi.

  Melanie could see the composer’s warm smile. He closed his eyes and nodded in what looked like acceptance, even joy. The conductor turned. He held his hand out toward her, and she stood. Tears streaked down her cheeks. Zsuzsi looked on in utter astonishment. The roar grew exponentially. Then the whole audience was standing. People cheered, yelled, clapped at her. Cameras in the balcony twinkled like distant, long-dead suns. Nanette stood behind one of them. Harkályi bounded up to the podium, raised the conductor’s hand in triumph. The entire orchestra stood. Cameras continued to flash amid the cheers and a spontaneous eruption of a nationalistic hymn by the audience, after which they dispersed into their warm limousines.

  The stage crew started to give the priests their church back, but Melanie remained in her seat. She wanted to run but had no place to go. She struggled to understand what had just happened. In that hallucination—if it was a hallucination—she could see herself clearly, as if standing somewhere beyond her embodied self. What she had experienced was real in the same way that she knew that her dreams were real, and the vision referred to her existence in the universe in the same way that her dreams spoke about her waking life. Strangely absent, however, was the gleeful ego rub that usually accompanied being the center of attention, getting singled out and applauded by an enthusiastic crowd. For the first time, she truly didn’t care what the conductor or her fellow musicians or the audience had thought.

  At one time, before that day, Melanie had considered her violin a part of her body, an appendage. But the music she, they, had just produced existed separately. It was now outside of her, beyond herself, and set loose into the wild to fend for itself on this bitterly cold March afternoon. That music no longer belonged to her any more than it belonged to Harkályi or to the conductor or to th
e audience. It was free. And so was she. Her informal resignation from the Opera House Symphony Orchestra had already been accepted, and she felt great about it. She felt liberated, her violin separate now, no longer hers. No one could possess such a thing. It was Independence Day. She sat amid the chaos of the altar’s reconstruction and laughed until tears beaded in the corners of her eyes and a heavily accented voice addressed her. “I understand that you are an American?”

  Lajos Harkályi pulled an empty chair over to face hers, scraping it across the stone floor. Behind him, the stained-glass window blinked out and the colors of the church faded back to their natural stony gray. Yet Harkályi’s eyes still appeared bright, alive. Musical. An entourage of orchestra representatives and autograph seekers remained, for now, a respectful distance away. A reporter with a tape recorder cornered Harkályi’s girlfriend.

  Melanie wanted to apologize, but he cut her off.

  “Do not be sorry,” he said. “I have no problem with what has occurred today. What is your name?”

  “Melanie Scholes.”

  “I am pleased to meet you, Melanie. I am Lajos.”

  She shook his hand, which was warm enough to bring the feeling flooding back to her fingers and toes. “I … I’m sorry I ruined the recording. Your premiere.”

  Nanette appeared among the clutter of stagehands and altar boys. Melanie shot her a give-me-a-sec look over Harkályi’s shoulder. She snapped off a couple photos of the two of them, and it occurred to Melanie that she didn’t need to act natural this time.

  “On the contrary, I think that you may have saved it. I am flattered that my music moved you in such a way. It shows me that perhaps I did something correctly, and that you—” He yawned into the back of his hand. “Forgive me, I am extremely tired. It tells me that you have real music inside of you.” Reporters clamored for his attention. “This is something we can discuss on another day.” He pulled his billfold and a rotund ballpoint pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “Here is my telephone number at home in Philadelphia. I will be there before the end of this month. Call me—collect, if that is what you prefer.” He had the borderline-illegible handwriting of a child, but the surface of his business card was as smooth as marble. She tucked it between the strings of her violin. She stood when Harkályi did, and he hugged her in front of all those people, a public gesture of support. More cameras whirred and flashed at them. She got it, finally: Harkályi’s popularity and subsequent wealth had rendered him invisible. But she now saw him, the real him, or at least believed that she did. In becoming an icon he had sacrificed his complexity, the fluid motion of his humanity. And it seemed like he had accepted that, made his peace with it. Of his millions of fans, Melanie alone knew him, understood who he was. She held him tighter. The shoulder of his luxuriously soft jacket absorbed her tears before he was swallowed up by his followers and devotees.