by Gerald Elias
“I panicked. I started raving. Incoherent. I wasn’t saying words. Just yelling. I got up and started walking into things. After a while I said to myself, ‘This isn’t doing any good. I’ve got an audition to take. I have to focus on that.’
“But how the hell am I going to get there? I can’t take a damn step without plowing into a wall, let alone drive. So I called my stand partner, Solomon Goldbloom.”
“I remember Sol from when I first studied with you.”
“I told him what had happened. He said, ‘I’ll be right over and take you to the emergency room,’ but I told him if he did that I’d kill him. He could tell I was serious, so he came over, grabbed me and my fiddle, and drove me to the hall. We didn’t tell anyone I was blind as a bat until it was my turn to play. When the personnel manager finally found out, he was in such shock it didn’t even occur to him to disqualify me.
“Luckily, the orchestra had just instituted the curtain rule, so the committee couldn’t see that I couldn’t see. I played the Beethoven Concerto, the Adagio of the Bach G-Minor Sonata, Scheherazade, the Tango from ‘L’Histoire’ by Stravinsky, St. Matthew Passion, the Scherzo from Midsummer Night, the first page and solo from Don Juan, and the Adagio from Beethoven Ninth.”
“But how did you do that without music?”
“I told you. I knew I was ready. Yumi, you could’ve played your audition without music. Anyone playing at that level could. At that point in the game, having the music is just a convenience. It was no big deal.”
“It was a big deal. And you won.”
“Yeah, I won. Talk about Pyrrhic victory. Management gave me a week for my eyesight to come back. The doctors called it foveomacular dystrophy, a swanky term for sudden blindness. They always have fancy names for diseases they can’t cure. They said, Yeah, it’s possible it’ll come back. But it didn’t. And I had to give back not only the concertmaster position but my job in the orchestra as well.”
“What choice did they have? What choice did you have? You couldn’t be concertmaster and blind. Could you?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t want to ‘editorialize,’ but, for example, how would you know when the conductor was starting a piece?”
“Honey, you played in a string quartet for years. With great musicians, what do you all do when you start a piece?”
“We look at each other to make sure we start together. That’s what I’m saying.”
“And? What else?”
“We breathe together.”
“Aha! When you’re blind, you start listening to things. If you really listened, you’d hear each other breathing together. I bet you do, anyway, subliminally, and that was just four of you. Think about a hundred musicians breathing together.
“Sometimes you listen to an old record, before they had all the fancy microphones and digital editing. When a record still sounded something like a live performance and not Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. You can hear Toscanini singing. You can hear Pablo Casals grunting like a humpback whale. There is so much you can hear if you listen.”
“You could have done it, then,” said Yumi. “You could have been a blind concertmaster.”
“If Beethoven could compose the Fifth Symphony and be deaf, it shouldn’t be so hard to be a blind fiddler, right? But who the hell knows now?”
“How did you feel when they took the job from you?”
“I take the Fifth. Interview is over.”
They sat in contemplative silence for a while, separated by different thoughts.
“I’m going to stay here in the Berkshires for a while and decompress,” Yumi said finally. “Just to sort things out, but I’m still not going to take the job.”
“It’s your call. I respect you for it.”
Jacobus heard Yumi drive off. Not that he was any good at it, but he had done his best to comfort her. He had withheld his knowledge of the conflict between O’Brien and Herza, of the threatened grievance, and of his prediction that something like this was going to happen. What he could not foretell, though, was how it would all fall out, now that the shit was going to hit the fan.
SEVENTEEN
WEDNESDAY
The strident hammering from the lobby pierced the walls of the new auditorium and would not have been tolerated under normal circumstances, but with the premiere days away, there was little choice. Herza had threatened to cancel the concert unless the arrhythmic pounding came to an immediate halt, but the contractor, with eight different construction unions working on the project, called his bluff, said go ahead and cancel, what do we care, you’ll have to pay us anyway. So the work continued.
But it wasn’t the noise that was disturbing the musicians this morning. It was the improbable absence of their acting concertmaster, Scheherazade O’Brien. After the audition, Tyson Parsley had the distasteful duty of calling her and telling her officially that not only had she lost the audition, she had lost her job. Not unexpectedly, she hadn’t answered her phone, so Parsley left as sympathetic a message as he could muster. Her absence suggested she had received it. One rumor already swirling was that the winner, Yumi Shinagawa of the defunct New Magini String Quartet, had long been a favorite of Herza’s—he having been so idolized in Japan—and the audition result was a foregone conclusion, that Herza had merely been waiting for her to leave her string quartet position. But if that were the case, others reasoned, why wasn’t Shinagawa here either?
Whatever the truth of the matter, Tiny Parsley instructed the associate concertmaster, Lawrence Nowitsky, to move over to O’Brien’s vacated position. The next four first violinists advanced one chair, and according to contractual protocol, the last-chair first violinist moved up into the now empty sixth chair. Before Nowitsky stood to tune the orchestra, Tiny Parsley quieted the anxious musicians, if not the construction crew, which, oblivious, continued its hammering.
“A few announcements, very briefly,” Parsley said. “There will be limited reserved parking available in Lot B for any musicians crazy enough to drive to the concert on opening night. There’s a sign-up sheet; if your name’s on it, I’ll give you a pass. Otherwise, you’re on your own.
“Second, the musicians are invited to a reception after the opening concert in the second-tier function room—”
“If it’s done by then!” Cappy, always the designated tension breaker, hollered from the back of the viola section, to the laughter of some and to the scowl of Beanie, who shook his head in dismay at his stand partner’s breach of protocol.
“It’s free food and free booze,” continued Parsley, “and if you’re bringing a significant other, there’s a sign-up sheet for that, too.
“Finally, I’m sure you’ve noticed that Sherry is not with us this morning. I’ve been trying to contact her. If anyone knows how I can reach her, please see me at intermission.”
Parsley then pointed toward Nowitsky, now the acting acting concertmaster, who dutifully signaled to the principal oboist to play the A for the orchestra to tune, first the winds and brass, then the strings.
Responding to this daily cue, Vaclav Herza lumbered onto the stage, to the accompaniment of a taciturn orchestra that had heard all about the audition, and slowly mounted his stool on the podium.
“Dvořák,” he said, lifting his baton.
The “New World Symphony” was one of Herza’s and, by extension, Harmonium’s signature pieces. There was little that needed to be said, and Herza was content to let the orchestra play; they knew exactly what he wanted of them and he refrained from comment, that is, until the first entrance of the trombones, upon which he rapped his baton against his music stand.
“You, first trombone. You are sharp. Are you trying to ruin my rehearsal? Again from the beginning.”
Junior Parsley knew that he had played in tune but said nothing.
When they reached the same moment the second time, Herza stopped.
“Perhaps you should try playing,” he said to Parsley, raising his voice, “as if you wante
d it to sound good.”
At any other time, Parsley would have absorbed the barb in silence. Indeed, he had heard a lot worse. But the tension of the moment, the down-to-the-wire contract negotiations, the last-minute construction chaos—that damn hammering—the obvious anxiety swirling around O’Brien’s sudden termination and, ultimately, the sarcastic unfairness of the criticism led him to retort, “That’s no way to speak to a professional musician.”
Herza placed his elbows on the stand, pressed his hands together in prayerful fashion, and stared at Parsley. “On the contrary,” he said. “Someone should have spoken to you that way twenty years ago when there was still some hope for redemption.
“Now, we continue. Rehearsal letter F.”
The orchestra finished the first movement and began the Largo that was so popular in America after its premiere that it gradually became “common knowledge” that it had been borrowed from a spiritual, “Goin’ Home,” when in fact the reverse was true. Midway through the famous English horn solo, though, the noise from the welders on the construction crew became so overbearing that Herza threw down his hands in disgust.
“Lubomir!” he shouted with the little power that his weakened lungs and slurred tongue afforded. Yet Butkus was immediately at the edge of the stage.
“Tell them to stop. Now.”
“But they’re working overtime to finish before the opening.”
Herza put his baton on the stand, pushed himself up from the stool, and limped to Lubomir. Herza slapped the taller man in the face.
“Tell them to take it out of their masturbation schedule, then. And don’t you dare cross me again.”
“Yes, Maestro,” said Butkus. He walked quickly out of the auditorium, not looking at the musicians.
Butkus followed his ears down the hallway to the lobby, the source of the hissing of welding and the ratcheted thumping of drill guns. Ignored by hard-hatted, goggled workers, he groped his way around drums of adhesives and drywall compound, and barrels of tape, screws, and other metallic hardware he couldn’t identify. The area generating the most noise, inside of which welders were wearing masks and full-body protective uniforms, was cordoned off by yellow tape. Butkus ducked under the tape and passed a small chemical canister on his way to reprimand the workers for doing their job.
“Hey, get away from that stuff, asshole,” said the foreman. “A drop of that’ll kill you.”
“What stuff?”
“Right there,” said the foreman, pointing. “Read the label: ‘Danger—thorium welding rods.’ You breathe that powder, you could be dead as that cute little picture of the skull you’re lookin’ at. Now get the hell out.”
Butkus hastily ducked back under the yellow tape.
“Just keep the racket down,” he said over his shoulder, fully aware that no one could hear him.
* * *
At intermission, Tiny Parsley met with the orchestra committee, including its chairman, twin brother Junior.
“How is it,” Junior asked, “that when we have concerts overseas you know how to get in touch with everyone, but a hundred miles away in the Berkshires you’re clueless as an ear of corn in a pig trough where O’Brien is staying?”
“Calm down, bro! When we’re on tour, most of the orchestra stays at the official hotel we book for them, and those who choose not to give us their alternative address so I can make sure everyone gets on the bus. For Tanglewood, there aren’t any hotels big enough to accommodate the whole group, especially at the last minute, so we just gave everyone a per diem that included lodging and let them find their own. And since we didn’t provide any transportation, there wasn’t any need to know where anyone was staying.”
“So you’ve tried her apartment, her cell phone?”
“Of course we did. I’m not as dumb as we look. And we called people she knows who might know her whereabouts, like Myron and Daniel Jacobus, who she played for last week. And we’ve notified the police in Lenox and Stockbridge and the other towns up there. Just as a precaution. But she could just as well be here in the city. Shit, she could be anywhere. Doesn’t anyone in the orchestra know where she was staying?”
“No, we asked around,” said Junior. “She doesn’t have a lot of friends in the orchestra. She hasn’t even slept with anyone here, at least that we know of. She’s always been kind of a loner—you know that—just holed herself up practicing for the audition. We’re going to call an emergency meeting to decide what to do next.”
“What do you mean, ‘what to do next’?” asked Tiny.
“Bro, what Herza did to her at the finals was blatantly unfair, if not illegal. But that’s not the only thing. It makes the musicians’ role on the audition committee as superfluous as tits on a bull. Think of all the hours they have to sit there, and for what? To have Maestro come waltzing in and make a call like that? We need to address the issue of the audition, because it wasn’t only unfair to her, it was unfair to the orchestra. It undermines the whole contract if we let this one go.”
“Herza won’t be happy. He’s not going to like the musicians meddling with his authority.”
“Well, he better learn to live with it.”
* * *
Before the second half of the rehearsal began, Junior Parsley announced from the podium that there would be an emergency meeting of the musicians to discuss audition procedures as a result of what had transpired the day before. The orchestra then rehearsed Death and Transfiguration by Richard Strauss.
As at the Tanglewood rehearsal, Herza conjured up the sound of the hazy gloom of despair, permeated by the stench of impending death. The tympani imitated the feeble heartbeat, about to surrender.
Herza stopped the orchestra. “You sound like you’re hitting a golf ball into a dead sheep,” he said to the timpanist.
Later, when the principal flutist’s solo did not depict the ray of light shining through the darkness with pristine perfection, Herza growled, “Do it again. And this time take your gloves off.”
Finally, after the trombones played a passage where the protagonist undergoes paroxysms of affliction, Herza lambasted them, singling out Junior Parsley.
“What is wrong with you?” he shouted. “Must you get drunk so early in the morning?”
Parsley stared into his music.
“I ask, what’s wrong with you? Are you ignorant or merely apathetic?” Herza ranted.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Parsley shouted back. Most of the orchestra froze in stunned silence, though there were a few stifled snickers. Herza, immobile, stared at Parsley. Parsley stared back.
“Do not forget,” Herza intoned, “in Death and Transfiguration, before transfiguration, first comes death.”
EIGHTEEN
From the outset there was dissent. The Mega-Herzas contended that the emergency meeting itself was illegal. There was nothing in the musicians’ bylaws, they claimed, that authorized the chair of the orchestra committee to unilaterally call a meeting. Junior Parsley responded that with the looming contract deadline, it was imperative to address those audition procedure issues that were currently being negotiated with management, and that with their juggled schedule there was no other time to hold a meeting. Feeling he had the majority opinion on this, he suggested that a motion be made then and there whether the meeting should continue. One of the Killa-Herzas made the motion. It was seconded, then opened for debate. A Mega objected, saying the motion was out of order—the chair may not propose a vote on anything—and moved that the meeting be adjourned. Parsley ruled that motion out of order, as there was already a motion on the floor that had been seconded.
For fifteen minutes there was heated discussion whether the meeting should take place. Those in favor pointed to the seriousness of the issue—audition procedure violations struck at the foundation of the orchestra’s ability to hire the best musicians. The very fact that they were debating a motion, they added, meant that the meeting was official already, so why not just proceed? Those opposed pointed to inadeq
uate notice for the meeting; with some colleagues not able to attend due to other commitments, there was barely a quorum. Finally, when arguments began to repeat themselves, a Mega-Herza, out of frustration, called for the question. Hands were raised, aye or nay, and a slim majority enabled the motion to pass. The meeting could now take place.
Though the Killas drew first blood, the Megas were not about to give up. They jumped on the fact that Scheherazade O’Brien, contractually only a glorified substitute, would not even have been permitted to attend this meeting. Her rights were not the rights of a tenured staff musician. Some questioned whether her initial hiring two years earlier had even been legal—there had been no audition at all when she was given the temporary position of acting concertmaster. Like “illegal alien,” the word “temporary” became a term of indictment among those against her.
The Killas argued that it didn’t matter what the conditions of her contract were. The issue was whether a candidate—any candidate, for any audition—should be dismissed at the whim of the music director, especially if that whim were the result of personal vindictiveness. This issue then was not Scheherazade O’Brien but Vaclav Herza.
The Megas retorted that vague terms like “whim” or “vindictiveness” or even “fairness” were not within the musicians’ purview to define. Part of the role of music director, in fact the most important role that distinguished a music director from a guest conductor, was the authority to hire and fire. If you start infringing on that authority, they contended, you’re diminishing the role and, in the long run, diminishing the orchestra. What’s next, telling him how to rehearse? Telling him what music he can program? It’s a can of worms, and a slippery slope, and a black hole, and a Pandora’s box, and that’s why the audition committee’s role has always been, and should always be, advisory. No more, no less.