by Rick Blechta
Now, in an odd bit of serendipity, here I was scheduled to play it the night after I’d received that mysterious music supposedly by Beethoven himself. But I’d also stupidly antagonized the one person who could do more to ruin my performance than anyone: Ebler. On top of that, I hadn’t had enough sleep. I was well aware that the media would be out in force after my roasting at the airport. Roddy was right. I’d be playing for my life that evening.
Ebler smiled evilly. “Why don’t we get the Bruch out of the way?”
The manner in which the old bastard said the words made it clear that he wasn’t going to put any effort into the music. That was a sure recipe for a memorable performance! I kept my mouth firmly shut, even though a snappy retort quickly formed in my brain.
As he raised his baton and the stark, forbidding, indescribably beautiful landscape of Scotland was conjured forth by the sonorous tones of the brass section, my fears were confirmed. Ebler had no real feeling for the music, and no interest in discovering it.
The long first note of my violin part came out more like a sigh of resignation.
***
Two-and-a-half exhausting hours later, I stumbled across the lobby of the hotel I’d been booked into and drooped against the front desk.
Ebler had subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) picked apart everything I’d played and had done several things I thought musically wrong: notes held too long, too much rubato, not enough rubato, and always too loud. My bow arm ached from trying to keep from being buried by the orchestra. Anything at odds with the direction I wanted to go, he was in favour of. If someone had told me the concert had been cancelled because the Musikverein had just burned down, I would have stood on the nearest table and cheered.
“My name’s Morgan, and I need to get into my room. Are there any messages for me?”
The bored-looking desk clerk glanced up. “Morgan?”
“Yes,” I answered wearily. “Victoria Morgan. Someone may have left an envelope for—”
“Yes, yes. I know who you are. Mr. Whitchurch has already checked you in.”
The grudging way he said it made me feel as if someone had hung a sign on my back saying “Kick Me.” Hotels usually roll out the red carpet for people like me, but I was too exhausted to do anything except meekly accept my key card.
“Well, are there any messages for me?” Without a word, the clerk turned around and checked my box, pulling out a long envelope.
Same handwriting as the previous one. “Do you know who dropped this off?”
“It was here when I came on duty at noon.”
I stuffed the letter into my handbag and headed for the elevators. Upstairs, I could have been walking into the same hotel room I’d left that morning in Birmingham; only the colours had been changed to protect the innocent. Roddy, bless his heart, had opened up my suitcases and taken all the dirty clothes to be attended to. My makeup was laid out in the bathroom, and the bed had been turned down. The green sequined gown I wanted to wear that evening was hanging up in the closet, freshly cleaned. Beside the requisite box of chocolates on the pillow (two missing—Roddy’s “fee”) was a note:
Get a few hours sleep. We’ll have a spot of supper and I’ll accompany you to the concert. If that’s not what you want to do, give me a ring (Room 712). Otherwise, I’ll wake you at 5:30.
Thank heavens for Roddy’s kindness, a prince among accompanists. My mind was on other things, however, as I sat down on the bed, and with a thumping heart, opened the letter.
My Dear Fräulein Morgan,
I am hoping that you have had a chance to look over the package I had delivered to you in Birmingham. Perhaps you have played it? Even this small section is quite wonderful, is it not? Let me assure you once again that your eyes (and certainly your ears) do not deceive you. This work is most definitely Beethoven. How it has come into my possession, I cannot reveal at this time, but I can vouch for its provenance.
You have probably been wondering about all of this and why I have sent you these things. I have a proposition to make, one that I trust will meet with your enthusiastic approval. First, I want you to know that of all violinists alive in the world today, you alone play Beethoven with the passion and intelligence his great music demands.
I want to offer you the opportunity to be the first in the world to perform and record this important masterwork. You will have the sole right to premiere this musical treasure. Does this not sound good to you? To be the first to perform one of the master’s finest works?
I am eager to meet you and show you the rest of my “little find”. I will be telephoning to arrange a meeting where you will be able to inspect the manuscript and even play the entire work if you wish. What do you say to this?
Again, I must caution you strongly not to mention this to anyone. I wish to avoid the attention which would quickly develop if word got out. Let this be our “little secret” for now!
Yours in music,
Baron Rudolph von Heislinger
I put the letter on the night table and lay back on the bed. An hour later, my eyes were still focussed on the ceiling.
***
Roddy, aware of the pressure I was under, tried to distract me at dinner, filling the meal with useless chit-chat about his schooling in Vienna. Because of the debacle at the airport and worry over what that ass Ebler might pull at the concert, I had the complete North American migration of monarch butterflies circling my aching stomach. It was an effort to choke down some soup and milky tea.
“What’s the news on the review front?” I asked him distractedly.
Roddy put down his knife and fork and looked at me. “You don’t want to know.”
“Jesus, Roddy! You can’t say something like that and just leave it! Tell me what they said.”
“Well, it’s not exactly the reviews. They’ve actually been reasonably good.” He grinned. Roddy memorizes every word that’s written about him. “Even when we haven’t played that well.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s Easterbrook. He’s written about you three times in his column in the last fortnight, and believe me, he’s stuck the knife in and twisted hard. Some of the things he says are just this side of libelous.”
I shook my head. “What can you do. Some people are just like that. This is not what I need right now!”
“But Easterbrook gets personal.” Roddy looked closely at me. “He intimates that you only got to the top by sleeping your way there.”
I put down my soup spoon in disgust. “Should I sic some lawyers on him?”
“I don’t know much about law, but I’ll bet he’s had his words vetted by a lawyer or two.”
“Well, I’ve got to put it out of my mind for now. The guy’s a creep, and this concert’s going to need everything I’ve got.”
“How do you feel?”
“Exhausted. Ebler’s being his usual jerky self, and I stupidly egged him on. The poor orchestra doesn’t know what to make of the situation. He’s certainly delivering the goods for his part of the program, from what I’ve been told, but he conducts the Bruch like a bull in a china shop. No grace whatsoever. So I spoke to the concertmaster, and he’s going to pass the word to the orchestra to follow me as much as possible. It’ll be dicey at times, I’m sure, but it should work out.”
“What encore did you prepare?”
“Marty made me promise to do ‘Zigeunerweisen’, since it’s on the new CD . It should be less troublesome, since I’ve performed it before with Ebler.”
“And how’s the Beethoven?”
“That he does really well, and the orchestra was majorly hot this afternoon. The Beethoven will be no problem at all.”
Shows how wrong one can be on occasion.
***
Standing in the glare of the stage lights, I felt wired, totally on for the first time during the tour. This was more like it! It went through my mind that maybe Easterbrook’s venomous articles had been just what I needed: a musical kick in the ass, as it were.
The orchestra may indeed have been hot that afternoon, but tonight they were on fire. Much as many of us disliked Ebler, he was competent at his craft and had picked two pieces the orchestra couldn’t help but enjoy playing: the Symphonie Fantastique and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what he’d do to my musical contributions to the evening, but I knew the orchestra was looking forward to it. Several members had come up after our rehearsal that afternoon to commiserate with me about the nasty things Easterbrook had been saying back in the UK . Nothing spreads faster in the music biz than bad reviews.
For the “Scottish Fantasy”, which closed the first half of the concert, the orchestra had been magnificent. They were right on top of everything I wanted to do. And believe me, I’d had to be right on top of things myself with Ebler at the helm. This is emotional music, and it must be played more from the heart than the head. Everything is so evocative of Scotland’s wild landscape. Maybe the old goat had never been to Scotland, or maybe on some long-ago Robbie Burns Day, he’d had a bad bit of haggis. Whatever the cause, Ebler’s concept of the piece was totally at odds with mine, so after tipping the concertmaster a wink, we went our separate ways. At times the results were hysterically funny, as Ebler conducted for a few beats at one tempo while the orchestra and I were doing something completely different. I conducted more of the piece with the end of my violin than he did with his stick. He eventually gave it up as a bad thing and decided to go along with the rest of us. The hassle of trying to stage manage Ebler’s job as well as mine was something I wouldn’t want to make a habit of, but it was worth the effort that night.
After the weight of the opening brass chords, I eased up on the bow making my tone delicately fragile and yearning for the melancholy opening theme following that infinitely long first note. In my mind’s eye, a slate-gray lake surrounded by dark hills, barren of trees, harsh, but still majestic, opened out before me. Gradually, I increased the depth and complexity of the tone my bow was pulling from the strings, musically adding washes of color to the vista opening outward in my mind’s eye.
As the orchestra slid into the adagio cantabile section with a few notes of “Auld Lang Syne”, followed by the two stark chords that have always epitomized this work for me, the hassles of the day fell away like shed clothes, and I walked forward into the wild countryside as I imagined it. I wasn’t on a stage in Vienna any more. This was the heart of the Scottish Highlands.
A profound feeling of serenity washed over me, as if an inner voice seemed to say, “Relax. This is the way it’s meant to be.” After that, the music just sort of was. That’s the only way I can put it—and it felt magnificent. When the final chord of the piece washed out over the audience, I almost turned to the orchestra and said, “Let’s do it again!” From the expressions on their faces, they probably would have, too, especially the brilliant harpist, whom I asked to stand and get his share of the applause. The hall went berserk.
Then I saw Ebler. His face had the look of Scottish weather: cold and stormy. To make amends, I went over, pulled his head down and gave him a kiss on the forehead. The audience roared their approval. He wouldn’t take a second curtain call with me, though, and stomped off to his dressing room, slamming the door. Tough. He knew he’d lost the “Scottish Fantasy” 84–1 to me and the Vienna Phil.
I locked myself in my dressing room and tried to summon up enough strength to make it through the Beethoven.
The orchestra relinquished the reins for the Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Good thing, too, because Ebler came out of his dressing room breathing fire. I’ve never heard the “March to the Scaffold” taken at a faster clip. As the last note reverberated around the auditorium, the audience went bonkers again.
When I walked out on the stage for the Beethoven to thunderous applause, the atmosphere absolutely crackled with electricity. After bowing low to the audience, I checked my tuning with the oboe, settled Tristan under my chin, and turned to flash Ebler a wink. Flushed from the success of the just-completed Berlioz symphony, he deigned to respond with a slight inclination of his head, then turned to the orchestra.
Okay. Rubber match. Who was going to win the evening, Ebler or Morgan?
As if in a bad dream, I watched his baton move into the upbeat. Too slow! The five notes of the timpani came out sounding like a car with a weak battery trying to start on a cold day. The first movement absolutely dies if you take it too slowly. At this tempo, I’d be retired by the time they got to my entry. The timpani player had an incredulous expression on his face as he played it. I must have looked like a scared rabbit, because that’s the way I felt.
All through the interminable opening, like spirited horses pulling a monstrous load, the orchestra strained at Ebler’s stolid beat. I caught the attention of the concertmaster with a wide-eyed look of panic to see if he could do anything about it, but he only shrugged, and the piece continued to simply lie there.
Finally, at bar 89, I got my chance. I took the octave leaps up to the high G at a noticeably faster clip. But Ebler held his ground, with the result that the orchestra didn’t know which of us to follow and came in all over the place on their quarter notes in bars 91 and 92. The old goat actually turned and smirked at me. From the audience’s perspective, it would’ve sounded as if I had goofed up. Ebler knew he had me.
I stewed about it during my opening melodic tracery, with the result that I hit the D in bar 101 slightly north of the correct pitch. Knowing that I had little chance unless I again took over the orchestra (much more difficult in this piece—particularly since I hadn’t set it up beforehand), we had to do the movement at Ebler’s snail’s pace. I tried my hardest to make my line sing with as much energy as possible, but this is not bravura music, and it sounds particularly awful if the soloist pushes too much.
Beethoven composed the concerto for a violinist named Clement, who was known for his singing tone—not for his technique. Everything Beethoven wrote for the soloist seems tempered by that. You have to play sensitively at all times, soar like a bird, and like the “Scottish Fantasy”, not work the music too hard. Ebler had set things up to make what I was doing sound laboured and false. Every time I tried to break free, to fly away, he caught me and dumped me back into his musical cage. By the time we reached the cadenza, and I was finally free of the metronomic beating of the German swine, my playing sounded insanely manic by comparison, and I felt the puzzlement of the audience growing. What was happening here?
Between movements, I took the unheard-of step of going over to the podium to whisper to Ebler, “This isn’t fair to any of us!”
He simply turned away and raised his baton to start the orchestra before I had even gotten back into position.
This time (you guessed it), he took it too fast. If the death of the first movement is lack of speed, the opposite is true in the second. It’s my favourite, and it must be played with the utmost delicacy and simple tenderness. Ebler’s choice of tempo gave me little chance of that, and if I tried to correct it, it would now sound as if I were dragging. Every time I had a few beats to myself, I relaxed the tempo as much as I could, but invariably Ebler came right back in, pushing the tempo when the orchestra rejoined me. In the last few dozen bars of the movement, I’d finally had enough and began conducting discreetly with the end of my fiddle. Since the orchestration thins out considerably at this point, the musicians finally began following my lead.
As it had in the Bruch earlier, again that odd sense of peace flowed through me and I relaxed into the music, making passionate love to it with my fingers and bow. As the string section leaned into their final fortissimo notes, something moved in my brain, stretching as if waking up, and a brilliant idea floated into my consciousness. Even though it was horribly risky to attempt on the spur of the moment, it might reclaim the mess this concert was fast becoming.
The short, forty note cadenza I normally used for the transition between the middle and final movements was a playful little nothing
Franz wrote for me as a birthday present. What began coming out of my violin was anything but simple. Starting slowly, I played runs through several chord progressions from themes presented earlier in the concerto. While doing this, I experienced an incredibly strange sensation, watching my fingers move almost as if I were looking at someone else playing. Ebler stared at me with an expression of incredulity. Nobody plays a cadenza of any length between the second and third movements. And although it was the accepted norm in Beethoven’s day, no one extemporizes cadenze these days. They’re worked out to the last nuance, yet here I was doing this musical trapeze act without a safety net. I had no idea where I was going or where all these ideas were coming from. They were just “there”. That’s the only way I can describe it.
My fingers finally arrived at a powerful double stop B and D#, and the music of the Concert Rhapsody in F# Minor I’d played the previous night burst forth as my fingers raced up the neck of the violin. My bow arm became suffused with more strength and agility than I’d ever been able to muster, and the sound leaping from Tristan had the glory of a thousand angels singing.
As the music approached the end of the page I’d been given by my mysterious correspondent, I began to slow again, grow more dreamy, softer, and melodic snippets from the D Major Concerto I was supposed to be playing again began mingling with it. Finally, with gentle ease my fingers slipped into the G#-B-A passage that Beethoven wrote to close the cadenza, and I almost caught the cello section napping when I ripped into the dancing melody of the third movement—finally at the tempo I wanted.
The Rondo was everything anyone could have wanted it to be. Ebler, realizing no one was going to follow him no matter what he did, made the best of it and pretended to be doing something useful while the orchestra and I got on with it. I’ve played with most of the world’s great orchestras, but never have I been followed in the way that wonderful multi-headed musical beast running at my side seemed to anticipate everything I wanted to do.