By the time I finished practicing, the pain over my father’s reaction had eased. For the rest of the evening I walked on air. Mario noticed and asked about it. After I told him, he regarded me with enormous eyes. It was not the same light that had shone from my grandmother’s face, but I could see he was pleased.
He slapped my shoulder. “Mio piccolo maestro,” he said. “Make sure you reserve me a front-row seat for your first concert, right?”
I nodded, smiled, and started to float away when he called me back.
“Hey, Maestro, when’re you gonna play something for me?”
I waved a hand vaguely toward him. “Soon,” I said. It was too much trouble to plan. Soon. Right then I could see only one star on the horizon.
* * *
My promise to Herr Scherer did not help when the day finally arrived. I walked with my grandmother down the hall of the Musikakademie’s second floor, reading the names beside the doors, my heart thundering in my ears. The air rang faintly from various instruments being played in practice rooms on the floor below. Beside the last door on the hall I read the name on the small brass plaque: Herr Professor Doktor Schmitz. My grandmother squeezed my shoulder, wished me luck, and said she would be waiting for me in the entrance hall downstairs and praying for my success. I stood before the door, listening to the echo of her footsteps fade away, sweating and trembling very badly.
Professor Schmitz was seated behind an oversized desk. One stick-like hand held a smoldering cigarette, the other a pen. He looked up from his papers and peered at me through wire-rimmed spectacles.
“Yes?” His voice sounded very stern.
“I-I’m Giovanni di Alta, Herr Professor, I have an—”
“Audition,” Professor Schmitz finished, and dropped his head back down to his papers. He pointed two fingers and the smoldering cigarette to a door at his right.
“Wait in there,” he droned, “and make yourself ready.”
I walked into the adjoining room. The parquet floor was covered by a large Persian carpet. The two corner windows, heavily draped, looked out onto the park across the street. Several plaques and pictures adorned the walls. I recognized one of Segovia, signed at the bottom in an illegible scrawl. There were several armless chairs with footstools, a number of music stands, and an old filing cabinet in the corner by the door with one open drawer spilling music scores.
The floor squeaked and the walls echoed back my footsteps as I walked over and I sat down. I opened my case and began tuning my guitar. The sweat from my hand left streaks on the guitar neck. I took a cloth hanging from the back of another chair and wiped the guitar, the strings, my hands, my face.
Herr Schmitz entered the room. He was tall and seemed even taller because of his thinness. He wore dark trousers and a starched white shirt and a narrow dark tie. His skin was almost as white as his shirt. His cheeks were cavernous and his lips a thin line. The wire-rimmed spectacles glinted as he stood and regarded me before sitting down in the chair by the wall.
His voice was surprisingly deep. “Who taught you, boy?”
My mouth felt filled with cotton. I swallowed and told him the name.
“I believe I have heard of him.” Herr Schmitz drew an unfiltered cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit it. I noticed the yellow stain between the first and second fingers of his left hand. I stammered that my former teacher had taught at the Bergamo conservatory before retiring.
Herr Schmitz nodded, letting the smoke out with his words. “Yes, I remember now. He must be approaching seventy.” He turned and tapped the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray on a burn-marked table. “All right, boy, let me hear you play.”
I had decided to start with the same Schubert sonata I had played for Fraulein Rohr. It was a simple, melodious piece, but one which translated well to the guitar. I wanted to start with something relatively easy, but something which he was fairly sure to like.
I botched it terribly.
By the last half-dozen bars, the frets were so slippery from my sweat that my trembling fingers could no longer hold down the strings. I had lost all sense of timing. I struggled grimly on to the finish, my shaking worse with each passing moment. When I stopped I hung my head, knowing I had absolutely destroyed the piece.
“Look at me, boy.” Reluctantly I raised my head. “You are ashamed, yes? Of course you are. You have taken a beautiful piece of music and ripped it to shreds.”
His voice had a curious lack of emotion. It was a flat deep voice, full of authority, used to giving commands. He tossed me a cloth. “Dry your hands and listen to me. It is perfectly normal to be nervous. But you have indulged yourself, and now I want you to put your nerves aside and play me some real music.” He used the word echte. Real music. Genuine, authoritative music. Professional.
“We are going to sit here until I am satisfied I have heard you play what is real music to your ears. I am not interested in hearing you destroy good music, but if you insist on indulging yourself, I will endure it as long as necessary. Do you understand what I am saying? Good. Now I want you to try to put your nerves aside and play me something real.”
My trembling was not so bad now. It helped a lot to hear that he was going to give me time to calm down.
“Close your eyes for a moment, boy. I want you to take a deep breath. That’s it. Deep. Now let it out slowly. Take another one. Again. Now open your eyes and play the first thing that comes to your mind. Not what you had planned to play; something different. No, don’t think about it. Play!”
I started at the sharpness of his voice, but I did as I was told. Almost before I knew what I was doing I had started the piece, a favorite of my grandfather’s. It was a short composition by Rossini, and my grandfather had always said it reminded him of clean mountain air. He did not know why, he would say, but he could close his eyes and be up above the clouds, walking through a lonely mountain valley and breathing the fragrant air.
Suddenly everything was all right. My trembling and self-consciousness disappeared. Part of me was back in our cottage in Como, playing in front of the stone fireplace as my grandfather rocked and puffed on his pipe. I finished the piece and looked up, knowing I had played it well.
Professor Schmitz nodded abruptly and said in his colorless voice, “There is quite a difference when your nerves do not play the music for you.”
I smiled tentatively, not sure if it was a compliment. His deep voice spoke the words like a machine.
He plucked out another cigarette, lit it, and asked, “What was to be the central piece of your audition?”
I thought about that. I had not planned one as central; I had simply chosen four pieces. I named what I considered to be the most difficult of those pieces.
He smoked and regarded me in silence from behind his glinting spectacles. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen.” My birthday was in two days.
He inspected me a moment longer. “Do you think you are ready to play it for me? Yes? Good. I am ready to hear it, then. Where is the score?”
“At home. I mean, I don’t need the score, Herr Professor.”
There was no change in his voice or his expression. He nodded once more, a slight movement, and said, “Very well, I am ready.”
I checked the guitar’s tuning, adjusted one string, took a deep breath, and began.
The piece was by Frescobaldi, the first I had learned of what my old teacher called the mature pieces. It was in three movements, and was for me extremely difficult. I had spent a number of weeks on it, longer than I had taken on any other single work, spending days and days over some of the more demanding passages. I played it for Professor Schmitz better than I had ever played it in my life.
When I finished I looked up in triumph. I knew I had played well.
Professor Schmitz lit another cigarette and regarded me through the haze of smoke. “Do you know the point in the second movement where the coda is set?”
I looked at the wall, visualized the score, and fo
und the point he was speaking of. I felt let down by the coldness in his voice. No, it was not coldness. It was a lack of any reaction whatsoever.
“Yes,” I said.
“Start at that point and play for me,” he ordered.
I hesitated, then bent over my guitar and began to play very carefully, trying not to think of why he was doing this. I stopped at the end of the second movement.
“So.” Professor Schmitz carefully ground out the tiny stub of his cigarette, reached for his own guitar, and tuned it swiftly. “First you play like this,” he said, and began.
He exaggerated the flow, making a mockery of my playing. Pauses became ridiculously long; notes were drawn into a timing totally out of sequence with the piece. It sounded alien.
When he stopped after two dozen bars I started to protest. He silenced me with an upraised hand.
“Wait,” he said. “Then you tried to play it so. Mind you, I said tried. There is still too much flamboyance to your playing.”
He began again at the coda, and played it with the precision of a Swiss watch. I listened and realized I was sitting with a master. His white fingers were so thin that the knuckles made knobs under the skin, and his head and shoulders remained in a rigid posture that would have been torture for me. But he played with the smooth exactness of one who knew the music perfectly. It sounded stilted and somewhat dead to my ears. More than that, it sounded cold, frozen into place by a total lack of feeling. The man played with the exactness of a true master, yet without any emotion whatsoever.
He played the piece to the end of the second movement, then stopped and turned to me. “Now,” he said. “Do you understand?”
I nodded. I was putting an emphasis into the music that was not written. It was my way of expressing my own feelings about the piece.
“You were interpreting,” he said. “You have not learned enough to begin interpretations. When you play for me, you will play exactly what is written. Nothing more, nothing less. If I ever hear another piece played as you did this one, I will throw you out on your ear. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” I said, not feeling any thrill from learning that I was to be his student. His criticism of my playing with feeling was too distressing.
“Do you have the admittance papers with you? Yes, I see them here in your case. Let me have them.”
I gave him the forms. I felt curiously numb, vaguely uneasy. He was clearly a great musician, and I was to begin as his private student. Why did I feel nothing?
He put down the papers after inspecting them carefully, stood, and walked to his filing cabinet.
“I want to start you with a Spanish composer of the last century, Barrios. Have you ever played any of his work? No? Good. It will make it easier for you to break with this habit of interpreting.” He handed me the score. “Take the first movement only. Study it carefully. I will see you next Thursday afternoon at four o’clock.”
As he stood over me the sunlight reflecting from his glasses made it impossible to see his eyes. “You will be here precisely on time,” he said in his deep voice. “Not one minute late.”
My grandmother was waiting for me downstairs on a bench in the entrance hall, the rosary beads clicking through her fingers. When she saw my face she stood and asked in alarm, “What is the matter?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.” The guitar case seemed curiously heavy. I set it down at my feet.
“Did he like you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. Did he? I truly did not know.
My grandmother demanded sharply, “Tell me what he said, Giovanni.”
“I can study with him.” I looked up at her in confusion. Why did I feel so threatened?
A group of students clamored through the front door, all long hair and blue jeans and laughter. They paused to shed coats and scarves and to give my grandmother and me quizzical looks. I wondered what they thought of this stern old woman in her dark gray coat and lace-up shoes standing next to a thin young boy with his ill-fitting suit and big dark eyes.
“Come, Giovanni, you can tell me about it outside.” Her speaking in Italian brought more glances from the students. My grandmother ignored them. She steered me through the group and out into the cold, crisp air. For once we had sunshine.
We climbed onto our streetcar and traveled through a world transformed by sunlight. I stared out the window at a city sharpened into a clarity of lines and angles and shadows. How had I ever taken sunlight for granted? As we traveled, I did my best to explain what had happened with Professor Schmitz.
My grandmother was not sympathetic. “You play for the professor of the academy, and he likes you enough to take you as his private student. But instead of being happy, you are upset because he criticizes you. You are being a child, Giovanni.”
“It’s not that,” I protested. It’s just that he’s—” I made circles in the air with my hands as I sought the words. “Like ice. His playing, the way he talks, everything. There’s no fire.” And I’m afraid of being trapped inside his world of ice, I wanted to say. What if he freezes my music? I yearned to say what I was afraid she would laugh at. What if he turns my heart to ice?
“He is German,” my grandmother said flatly. “Do not seek to squeeze blood from a stone, figlio mio. He knows his music, yes?”
“He is a very great guitarist,” I agreed. There was no question about that.
“Then you will study with him and learn as much as you can,” my grandmother commanded. “And if I hear that you are failing to please your professor, I’ll give you all the fire you need.”
When we arrived at the apartment house, my grandmother said, “You are going to go practice? Good. I must buy a few things from Angelettis’.”
She regarded me gravely and brushed the hair from my forehead. “I am very proud of you, figlio mio. You will study hard and play well for the professor, and then—” She hesitated, and gave me a brief smile. “And then we will see. You have your key, yes? Good. Go and practice, my Giovanni. I will be up soon.”
****
Very early on I had created a routine for beginning my practice sessions. I do not remember how it had started; probably it had grown naturally from the sheer boredom of doing scales. On most days it remained as it had begun, a dance starting at the middle C tone, flowing down, flowing back, going up and up to the highest point, racing back down, changing from major to minor to seventh to ninth, an exercise that after all these countless practices brought me swiftly to a quiet state of thoughtlessness. The exercise both numbed and calmed me, stilling all the turmoil in my mind, pushing aside all awareness of a world beyond my music. When I finished the exercise I was focused, ready to begin the part of my practice that required intense effort and concentration.
But on a few days, on some very special occasions, when I reached that point of calm thoughtless flow, I was able to hear another music. A different scale. A lilting, flowing, endless pattern of notes that surged up from somewhere deep within me. It did not often happen. But on the days when it did I felt as though my heart was singing to me, telling me with crystal clarity what seemed so cloudy and confusing when I thought of it in the outside world. It sang to me of how I truly felt.
When I was happy, the scales became chimes that made my whole being vibrate. I would fly through the majors and the sevenths, following the path laid by the inner music as my guitar laughed and sang with joy. When I was sad the tune bubbled up softly like water from an underground stream, quiet and steady and all in minors and discords, and my guitar wept.
Today I heard the song, and my fingers swiftly followed it. There was no rhythm, no logic to the sequence, no line of classical development—or maybe there was, but I was so caught up in the simple pleasure of playing that I did not want to stop and think and analyze. The song had started long before I heard it, and as I followed its path I knew with utter certainty it would continue on long after it had faded from my hearing.
Today it was the song of a river, steady and sure and never-ending
, a calm flow of strength, an acceptance of moving with the current of things beyond my control. For the first time since my arrival in Dusseldorf I felt a sense of rightness, of being where I was meant to be, flowing like a river through the course set out for me.
It moved like a stream of human voices, this song inside of me, sounding low and deep from waters never touched by the wind making ripples on the surface, piping staccato beats for the raindrops that made everything below the surface invisible. I followed the inner flow of harmony for as long as I could hear it, until it became a single clear note that rose higher, ever higher, climbing beyond the edge of my hearing like a bird soaring up on an unseen breeze toward the sun.
When the last whisper of inner song vanished, I started into a piece I knew very well, moving from one to the other without a pause. I did not consciously choose this piece. It simply rose up into the stillness. It was a good day, and the feeling of weightless union with my music continued on through this song as well.
When I finished the piece I looked up to find Mario standing open-mouthed beside my grandmother at the entrance to my alcove. How long had they been standing there? I had not even heard them come into the apartment.
“Madonna,” Mario breathed.
My grandmother glanced at him, a faint smile touching her face. She turned back to me and said, “I want you to find a good day for the gentleman from your school, what was his name?”
“Herr Scherer,” I said.
“Yes. For him and his wife to come and have dinner with us. Mario and his parents will come, too. You don’t mind having your birthday a few days late, do you?”
“I can’t wait ’til my mother hears you play, Gianni,” Mario said.
The Maestro Page 9
