They came to no agreement. Neither mentioned last night. They had mated like swans in the water, then lain naked on the grass, combed their hair dry, and picked apples in the moonlight. He brought her back to the city on a borrowed moped but did not go upstairs. Now each wanted the other to reveal what went beyond sex: music, the ultimate form of nakedness, of confession.
Toward noon Maile tailed Karl to the Mozarteum’s one-room library where scores were checked out over a Dutch door. He exchanged one slim volume for another, and disappeared down a hallway. She went after him. He jumped out from under a stairwell. The score slipped down over his stomach and she bent to read the title, Schubert, Op. 15, Phantasie, Der Wanderer.
“Aha!” she said.
“Let’s go,” he told her. “I gave the custodian twenty schillings to let me use the Bechstein.”
“What’s Der Wanderer? Another piece performed only three times without a mistake? Your name carved in marble?”
They looked at each other like gamblers raising their bets beyond the point of return, then walked off together. She understood his reluctance to compete on the French horn. Piano, voice, violin and cello, the instruments most favored by composers, had vast repertoires that attracted huge audiences. A superb contest performance on French horn was never enough to win against a fine pianist or singer headed for a soloist’s career, not a seat in an orchestra.
The custodian let them into the concert hall and tapped his watch. “One hour,” he said, and left. They bumped into each other on the staircase up to the stage. Karl flipped a schilling and won. He opened the grand piano’s lid, adjusted the bench, and spread out his music.
“Allegro con fuoco, ma non troppo,” he proclaimed. “Schubert warns me not to get carried away by fire.” He shook out his wrists and assumed a tortured pose.
Maile laughed. “If you’re doing a vaudeville act, I’m leaving.”
“Test my memory,” he ordered, handing her the score. “And the tone balance.”
She had no idea what that meant but stepped off stage to sit ten rows back from the piano. “Ready.”
Karl began in a driving tempo with broad romantic chords, immersing himself in the rich Sturm und Drang of Schubert’s exiled wanderer, joyous playing that wiped out Maile’s impulse to criticize. The score drooped in her hands. She fell into a trance, as if she too were a mythic wanderer, a nineteenth-century poet traveling Europe alone on horseback, in all seasons, in all weathers, in search of . . .
An off note made her madly turn a page. “G natural, not sharp,” she called out.
Karl kept playing and called back, “Check the transition coming up.”
From that moment she trusted him not to be rattled or make excuses. She followed the notations with a fingertip, black vertical clusters in fast horizontal motion, all of it memorized. He seemed to be rushing. Ma non troppo, she remembered, and almost shouted over the rolling music, but she understood nothing about piano repertoire. He might be using too much pedal, or playing in the style of Beethoven instead of Schubert, or imitating a famous artist’s interpretation. One beautiful phrase after another swept over her—a piece rife with tricky variations, difficult runs no coloratura singer could match, opposing melodies as tightly woven as a tapestry. At the next transition he skipped five measures and continued on a dissonant ascending tremolo.
“Go back to C major,” she said loudly.
He repeated the transition four times without mistakes, raised his hands from the keyboard and announced, “Madame Manoa, your turn.”
They quibbled about who would be the accompanist. “I just chose this aria,” she said. “I don’t know it yet.”
He shrugged. “So? I’ll take you through it.”
We’ve come this far, she thought, and he showed me his. “All right.”
Karl played a cue chord and spoke the text of the first slow phrase. She sang in half voice: “Where have they gone, those moments of tenderness. . .” Light breath. As they moved on through the melody, he filled in notes or words, not pushing her, she felt, just dropping hints, but he wasn’t a Juilliard coach or a substitute for Professor Jann; he didn’t know the subtleties of her field either. She began using full voice. In small, exciting ways the aria started to feel right—the perfect choice, hers, out of so many.
“Size!” Karl declared. He jumped up to put his arms around her. “You can build a career on such womanly tone.” She felt the warmth of his palms at the small of her back. “Scriabin slept under his piano,” he whispered. “He believed it was alive and gave off secret tones and colors.” They laughed. The deerhorn buttons on his trouser fly grazed the front of her skirt, and she pictured him naked in the moonlight, his body blue-white, muscled like a surfer’s.
A side door clacked open. They sprang apart as the custodian bustled in saying the rector had returned early with a Festival artist to rehearse on the Bechstein. “Took a fat risk for you students, I want twenty more schillings.”
Karl snatched up their scores and they hurried out into the corridor. Herr Rector came toward them around a corner, escorting the elderly lady Maile had seen with Professor Jann at Rappresentazione. The slender white-haired pianist wore only dove gray accented by rubies or emeralds, and only brooches, never bracelets or rings that might weigh on her marvelous hands.
“Kruzifix,” Karl murmured as she passed them. “Wish we could hear her Bach. It’s an inspiration.”
The pair entered the recital hall and Maile caught hold of his arm. “What about listening backstage?” He didn’t react. She tugged on his sleeve.
“That isn’t done.” He shook her off.
Man tut das nicht. Frau Metzger often used the same phrase to cordon off what did not constitute good manners. Maile’s spirits revolted. “Maybe ‘that’ isn’t done, but you took me for a close-up look at von Wehlen, even though it’s . . . crass? I had no idea you were such a good little citizen.”
“You have to be Austrian to understand.”
“Nationality is not an excuse. It’s unbearable, no Bach for us, not even listening to someone rehearse on the piano we just used. No tickets for students, ever. Tonight’s Othello premiere is a world event in opera, and I’m stuck listening to it on a radio.”
“All right, it’s unfair. Am I supposed to conjure up tickets because I’m Austrian? Even we can’t get in without a lot of money or contacts.”
“What about sneaking in?”
“Body of Christ.” He crossed himself backwards and upside down. “You would be caught in a minute.”
“And turned over to police?”
“Exactly.”
Twenty-four hours to leave the country, she thought. The kind of extreme penalty a foreigner could expect. “If sneaking in is too risky, what about passes? Press passes.”
He snorted. Americans simply could not accept things as they were. People from the U.S. of A. were always sure they could change the impossible. “I have an errand in town,” he added, and walked off.
She looked out a window at Mirabell Garten without noticing the yellow and white flower beds laid out in brilliant geometry. A waiter could get two hundred schillings simply for knowing who had Festival tickets to sell. Scalpers earned seven times the official price.
Downstairs she approached one student after another about alternatives to getting into the Grand Festival House tonight. Maxi said a journalist’s backstage pass required a letter from a recognized newspaper or arts magazine. Marlise suggested finding a substitute orchestra member willing to turn over his Festival House ID, something she had never managed. Brenda said there must be a trick but hadn’t found it.
Maile wandered outside, unwilling to admit that getting in was hopeless. Jean-Paul stood at the curb, about to cross the street to the schnapps bar, a private house where slumming tourists sought out local color. Off limits to any woman who valued her reputation. She eyed him with distaste. The nasty rat-goat-pig spent all day in the conservatory wrestling with Tschaikovsky until he couldn’t take it
any longer. His Stammlokal reminded her of a Waikiki dive where people did the kind of business not done in stores. Exactly.
“Alors, mon monstre!” she called out. Jean-Paul turned and she hipwalked over to him. “You are my last chance, chéri,” she said, smiling, exuding charm. “How can I get in to see Othello? One Moor must see another, non?”
He bit his tongue flirtatiously, a man relishing intrigue. “The premiere?”
“I can stand backstage. I’ll make it worth your while. Just one ticket.”
“I see.” His expression changed to a concentrated stare as though shuffling through a mental list of shady connections. She stayed carefully silent, concealing her excitement. He pursed his lips, then gave off a sputtering sound, but couldn’t hold it in, and he puffed out his cheeks in a choking laugh that exploded all over her: “Hah, hah, hah!” His head tipped back so far she saw rows of silver fillings.
She raised a hand to smack him on the chest but he darted off across the street, still laughing. As he reached the door of the bar, the Rosenkavalier materialized from behind a hedge. Briefly they spoke like old friends trading news, and went inside.
In a glum mood, Maile headed for Getreidegasse to shop for supper.
MINUTES BEFORE THE premiere began, students gathered in the Mozarteum’s listening room. Rows of hard-backed chairs faced a brown plastic radio with a wood-grain pattern, a high-fidelity model donated by a local aristocrat. Marlise held forth to an audience. “My Viennese cousin is that city’s leading stage carpenter . . .” This afternoon she had gotten inside the Grand Festival House with a temporary daytime pass. Maile listened in a fit of jealousy.
Of course, Marlise explained, singers were in their hotels resting for the premiere, but she had been led to the main stage, as high and wide as heaven itself. Racks, cables, and backdrop flies hung from the ceiling like pages in a huge book. Dozens of workers wore color-coded jumpsuits, designed by Maestro von Wehlen. Men in red descended in a metal cage to fasten a screen of gauzy clouds in place. Floor teams in orange positioned panels of painted waves. Maile recalled her glimpse of backstage at the Met; wisecracks and beer bellies, workers in T-shirts bearing their unofficial motto: FUCK OFF, I’M UNION.
From the radio came a trumpet fanfare and a broadcaster’s voice speaking through it: “Salzburger Festspiele 1968, Festival du Salzbourg 1968, Salzburg Festival . . .” Maxi remarked that von Wehlen’s color-coded workers should man the border to intimidate the Soviet soldiers. Karl rushed in late and bent over a German translation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Maile sat down, prepared for inadequate sound from an outdated radio, not even stereo, nothing like von Wehlen’s experiments with Quadrophonie.
“Our story begins in the year 1490,” the announcer said.
Maile focused on the underlying dense hum of a packed theater, two thousand five hundred people. Row eleven, she thought, imagining herself in the middle, best seat in the house. Von Wehlen appeared in the pit, his head and then his torso visible as he approached the podium. Applause exploded down on him. He walked straight into it to shake hands with his concert master and turned his back on the audience to raise his baton. The frenzied clapping stopped so abruptly it left an echo that snapped through the air in final welcoming recognition. He swept the pit with an inclusive stare and slashed down. Sound leaped from the orchestra like a violent sheet of wind. She felt it as much as heard it, the powerful Vienna Philharmonic shaking everything in its path as Verdi’s merciless storm lashed the coast of Venice.
PROFESSOR JANN’S NOTE read, Come see me at your first opportunity. Maile wondered at the plain statement—a demand, in fact. Handwritten instead of a telegram. Initials instead of a full signature. She skipped breakfast and went straight to the Mozarteum although it was only eight o’clock.
When she entered his studio, Jann regarded her with a grave expression and said, “Close the door, if you please.”
Yesterday afternoon, he explained, his wife returned home in a distressed mood; approached, she said, by that flower seller—you know to whom I refer, Fräulein Manoa—claiming that my highly regarded student was in a compromising situation: she had attempted to bribe her way into the Othello premiere. It would be best, the Rosenkavalier advised, to stop gossip before it caused regrettable complications with authorities.
Jann didn’t mention that his wife had paid to have the rumor quashed, or that he’d slept fitfully, risen early, and given a neighbor boy a coin to deliver a message to Maile’s address. Now she faced him with an inquisitive expression that told him she had no idea of the disaster she’d nearly brought down on herself.
He cleared his throat. “Bribes are common in Austria. So ordinary we call them Vitamin B. However, a foreigner who attempts bribery attracts the immediate attention of our Kriminalpolizei.” Anger overtook him. “Anything to do with them is a disgrace! They have never set foot inside the Mozarteum. A street officer occasionally tickets a student’s Vespa, but that is the end of it.”
“Bribes,” Maile repeated, sounding baffled.
“Involvement with the police has severe consequences, such as your consul and myself having to approve your continued stay in Austria so your visa will not be revoked. You are supposed to sing Gershwin soon at the American consulate. That appearance came close to being cancelled.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Othello premiere.”
She thought hard: speaking yesterday to half a dozen students about ways of getting into the Grand Festival House. But she hadn’t offered anybody money. Except, she remembered saying, I’ll make it worth your while. Algerian.
“Jean-Paul Gardes,” she blurted, “the pianist! I only—”
“Do lower your voice.” Jann held up a hand and took a long, slow breath to cool his emotions. “In a case like this, I am afraid that ignorance is no excuse.”
Maile stared back, radiating an indignation that he felt suggested at least partial innocence. He sighed. “Each year the Festival consumes one fifth of our national budget. Designs for new productions are guarded like military secrets. And you wanted unauthorized entry to a premiere that attracts international attention.” In a flat tone he described the thousands of Festival employees; painters, electricians, carpenters, boot makers, and dry cleaners; boom handlers, scrim spanners, mechanics, armorers, throat doctors, and sound engineers; contract experts on Eastern Bloc regulations; photographers, music scholars, reporters from more than twenty magazines and newspapers. “And above all this, Maestro von Wehlen stands at the peak of a personal empire. His theater security force works with Interpol, because a black-market tape—of say, the Othello premiere—is worth a million schillings in Japan, South Africa, South America.”
“A tape?” Maile yelped. “I just wanted to hear a live performance.”
“Stop defending yourself. Perhaps unwittingly, or foolishly, you nearly ruined your status here. Under no circumstances can you become the subject of low gossip.”
She lowered her eyes, thinking that Jean-Paul was trying to get her expelled from the competition before it started. If she confronted the rat, he would simply lie, but now that made no difference. The absurdity of what Jann described had a logic she recognized as Austrian.
He continued mercilessly. Trying to gain illegal entry to a Festival premiere was hardly a minor offense. It challenged von Wehlen’s code of perfection. And no matter what anyone thought of his past, he deserved his present status after decades of brutal self-discipline and tireless devotion to music.
“Sit down,” Jann said finally.
The room had one fine chair upholstered in leather. Maile crept over to the piano bench, appalled at everything being blown out of proportion because it concerned von Wehlen. She longed to be excused but Jann’s rigid posture indicated that he was not finished with her.
He remained standing and turned aside to deal with a mass of competing thoughts. Reprimanding his prize student had called forth a fatherly impulse to protect her. His anger had also aro
used a decidedly non-fatherly attraction. Sensual desire—there from the beginning— surfaced to tempt him, vying with a powerful awareness of the mistakes he’d made at her age and the faults that still dogged him. She deserved to know some of that, he decided, bound as they were in pursuit of music.
“I know nothing about von Wehlen’s private life,” he said. “He presents himself as content with his family and his expensive hobbies. This is clever and necessary. The greater the career, the higher the personal cost.” Jann walked over to a cabinet of inlaid rosewood and took out a cut-crystal glass and a bottle with a crumbling label. He held them up like pieces of evidence, his hard expression tinged by the ghost of an ironic smile.
Maile doubted that he was offering her a drink.
“One of my vices,” he said. “I manage to keep it under control, although the struggle is constant. Two years ago I married my fourth wife. Every evening she replaces this glass, and every other evening she brings a new bottle. Cognac, by the way, not brandy. Dreadfully expensive.” He put back the glass and the bottle, and closed the cabinet. She stared into her lap, ill with embarrassment, thinking that a Kammersänger didn’t have such problems. Or if he did, he didn’t talk about them to a student.
Jann’s confession had steadied him and he walked over to sit beside Maile on the piano bench. “What I mean to make clear,” he said, “is that being accused is sometimes the same as being guilty. No one at the top of the profession remains unscathed. Once you no longer have to fight for each contract, your worst battles are with yourself. The only way to survive is by having an inner conviction that never lets go. Talent and ego alone will fail you.” Thoughtfully he poked a piano key and then shut the lid. The sound inside faded away.
Maile wanted to wail that she’d been betrayed by an envious racist. She turned to Jann, about to speak.
He motioned for her to be still. “In my youth,” he went on quietly, “I had convictions. Mine were untested and thus worthless. When the war began, I was in my late twenties, not much older than you. I lied and hid to avoid being drafted. What terrified me more than the Fascists was the high chance of losing my legs or having half my jaw blown off. Coming home like that, you see. After Stalingrad the military hunted down any able-bodied man. I considered only myself, not my family, relatives, friends, not Jews, Gypsies, partisans. The French caught me shortly before the Armistice.”
Aloha, Mozart Page 19