The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘We’re a historical leftover.’

  ‘What classical music lacks in breadth of appeal’ - Brian was roused - ‘it gains in depth of impact.’

  ‘Yeah, but when I lose the plot, it doesn’t give me strength to think my life’s work means nothing to most people.’

  ‘In the history of the world high culture was only ever a minority affair,’ said Oswald.

  ‘The minority isn’t helping me. Especially this minority.’

  There was a pause.

  Philip gazed in strained amazement at the floor. It came to him glancingly - the sum of their reactions - so obvious: that he was mediocre. That was what they thought of him and had done for years. He was long past his best.

  ‘I support Philip,’ said Julius, bunching forward on the sofa. ‘For a modern pianist it’s so hard to connect what you do to the wider world. One’s expertise or artistry, if you will, is of such an esoteric nature, geared to the past always, meaningful within a tradition that takes a lot of knowledge and appreciation to penetrate. Truly, we are playing against the age, not for it; and when you’re performing in some outback hall rented by a music society, some place with a killer piano and Arctic draughts, and no hot water in the changing room, paint peeling on the walls, a spam sandwich and leaded tea for your rehearsal break, plus when you get on stage, it’s spot-the-audience time, just a few old people sprinkled around, who’ll snore off in your concert and die the next day before they can tell friends and build your reputation, plus some attention-deficit kid front row flapping his programme through your most difficult passage, you do think: Should I get a desk job? Afterwards it gets worse. Backstage they start to roll in, these old folk, and you shake and smile and hope they don’t croak right there, and in comes some controlling housewife with a cross-eyed son, just taken Grade One and amazed by your fingers - ‘They were like lost in a blur of speed, weren’t they, Johnny?’ or ‘I don’t know how you keep all those notes in your head!’ - and you do kind of wonder was this manicured interpretation that cost a thousand hours of practice really worth it? Even with professionals in the audience you can play like an angel and get the worst reviews. Or play like a bum and get buried in fucking Interflora. Bottom line here, Philip, is we can never know the effect we have on individual listeners, even when they tell us they liked it, because you don’t know what that means, and you just have to believe it’s good for people to hear a Beethoven sonata played live, or an étude by Stuttgart-Martier-Berenson.’

  ‘Who?’ said Brian.

  ‘You haven’t heard of Stuttgart-Martier-Berenson?’

  ‘Julius, you’re prodigious!’

  ‘He wrote a suite called the Political Etudes.’

  ‘That should resonate with a wider public,’ said Oswald drily.

  ‘It resonates all right. It’s kind of Takemitsu meets Kapustin meets Pink Floyd. Smorgasbord modernism. Real fun.’

  Philip looked askance. Even among friends and colleagues he was alone. He felt an ache around the eye, tension in his neck. He was so deeply berthed in his chair that he had lost all power to oppose. He was just a swivelling head, disagreeably regarding other people as they tried to talk around him. How mediocre he felt. How undignified! He was allowed to communicate musically, but as soon as he tried to express ideas no one was interested.

  ‘What you can’t face,’ said Oswald, looking over Philip’s head in haughty summary, and in a tone of voice that was mock-provocative, ‘is that you might be an ordinary mortal, not some pianistic god. You can’t stomach bad reviews, and don’t like to be in thrall to a musical public who may exercise their own judgements. You resent the fact that applause validates your efforts and that others, not you, are the arbiters of your reputation. That’s why you cancelled, in my opinion. To get one up on the audience. To show them who’s boss: the mighty artist. To put them in their place before they did the same to you. But lo, if the audience aren’t cheering and the critics aren’t on their bellies in prostration, who is there to applaud your noble dedication? The larger world is not bothered by this anguished little tragedy. Only you, by an act of will, can validate yourself. Alas, somewhere along the way, you’ve lost the ability to do that. But that, my dear fellow, is the only reason why any musician has an audience. Because he is prepared to take infinite pains, to soldier on, to commit more than ordinary people, to suffer whatever Christ-like ravages and tribulations are necessary to understand the great works, and to keep on keeping on. That slavish devotion, plus the humble knowledge that he serves only the music, that alone justifies the elevated status of the artist; and if the artist cannot survive his own doubts he must get off the stage and join us in the stalls. The whys and wherefores of his quest are no concern of ours, as we are not competent to judge beyond the results. It’s all down to you. And if you’ve lost the plot there isn’t much we can do except wish you well and ask for our money back.’

  Philip looked at his hands and scowled. He felt an inner sliding or collapse, as if Oswald had delivered the coup de grâce. Unhappiness was now in a fixed position, attached to its cause, something one could look at and away from, and still find there in half an hour. He had flaunted his angst at intelligent men who all did their best, but whose moderate reactions and prevarications could make things neither better nor worse for him. He realised only that time was running out. Whichever path he might choose, he still had to survive the time it took to adjust, correct, recover, and time might be short. He had lost all sense of an imperative course. Without the sense of a future, the threads of a life seemed tattered and incomplete. This, perhaps, was the hidden curse of childlessness. Everything else fell away when one stopped doing it, whereas having a child carried one into the future, regardless of success or failure. The best part of his life, he realised, belonged to the past. He understood now. He saw it more clearly.

  ‘Klaus Friedrich.’ It came to him suddenly. Almost out of nowhere. This was the moment, surely. There had been a moment, yes, a specific event that robbed him of the will to compete. ‘He played terribly for three years. Record company dropped him. Agent dropped him. Total career doldrums. Everything in his playing had become coarse and exaggerated.’ He frowned to remember this, as though recollection itself was a kind of proof. ‘I was offered a ticket by a friend of Klaus’s a few months ago and had to go along to his concert. My worst expectations in the first half. The playing was brash and coarse-grained. After the interval he played the Hammerklavier. D’you know, I have never heard anything like it. He had the piece by the tail. I mean it was rough-hewn but totally apocalyptic. Very hard to convey what he did except to say that I was riveted by the awesome power of Beethoven’s mind. One had to succumb. A physical experience. My whole body was in thrall to a kind of cosmic storm, and it made me understand that the truly great performance takes you to the hot core of the composer’s brain, and that Beethoven’s brain is like the energy centre of the universe . . .’

  He swallowed, looked down at his lap, hands joined together.

  The others were subdued.

  Philip smiled painfully. ‘A miracle.’

  ‘Sounds amazing,’ said Julius.

  ‘After that, I knew . . .’ He had never dared admit this. The truth was a kind of relief. ‘I had nothing left to say.’

  ‘That’s a common reaction.’

  He felt stronger. ‘I haven’t the talent to seek that kind of epiphany. Maybe I never had it.’

  ‘You do need a sabbatical,’ said Oswald more kindly.

  ‘I need to quit.’

  ‘Every one of us has something to say.’

  Brian sighed and shook his head sadly.

  He put his hands on the arms of his chair to get up. He needed to be on his own now. ‘Sorry to have bored you all to death. Actually, it’s been helpful. I know where I stand.’

  ‘Philip, don’t beat up on yourself,’ said Julius. ‘Self-doubt is a cyclical given. Hold on to this. I remember listening to your recordi
ng of the Brahms Intermezzi when I was twenty-two thinking it was the greatest version I’d ever heard.’

  ‘That was in another life.’

  ‘Do it again!’

  ‘It’ll be a relief to shut the lid of that instrument, actually.’ He rose. ‘Night, gentlemen. Apologies.’

  ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Brian, straight-faced. Then he smiled kindly.

  Philip nodded, eyes downcast.

  He made his way carefully around the backs of armchairs and slipped through the doorway to the corridor outside. He had to think twice before proceeding down the hall. He would avoid the crowd sitting on the terrace and work his way through the back of the house and out through the music room. He was more tired than drunk, he realised, as he went along the dimly illuminated corridor. He switched on the light in the music room and passed through it to the garden door.

  The night air was fresh, the sky starry. He picked his way along garden paths and through gates to the front of the house and then walked down the drive, leaving the glow of the porch lantern behind. Out on the lane he could see the dark shapes of farmyard machinery, an abandoned tractor, the snout of a saw mill. Even at this hour the guineafowl were making their strange noises, like a set of unoiled hinges squeaking and creaking from their perch on the fence. Moonlight cast a bar of shadow from the hedge across the lane. His footfalls were muffled by the flattened scree of mud and horse-dung.

  He could smell honeysuckle, which was drifting all over the hedgerows this time of year, and he found himself breathing harder and deeper as the lane began to rise, taking leave of the hamlet behind him and leading to a point where in daytime the view opened out. He was struck by the depth of quiet, the shadowy stillness around him. He heard only the rhythm of his pulse. He was in command of his solitude again.

  It came to him softly, an enveloping certainty that he seemed to walk into; it glided over him, he could not say how or why, that he was going to die. He kept on moving, brow furrowing at the strange sourcelessness of this realisation, which passed through him like a kind of understanding or slow elation, leaving nothing in its wake except the frictionless feel of the darkness all around.

  He kept on going, propelled by a need to hold on to the sense of his physical being but without breaking the spell, the colourless certitude. It was like the revelation of something long known, released from the depths of his being.

  There was movement ahead, a realignment of shadow. He saw a gate, a figure. He heard a grunt of acknowledgement, and as he went closer, to where the dark margin of the hedge was broken by a gap, he saw a man draped on the bar of the gate, gazing across the night landscape.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, involuntarily.

  ‘Philip.’

  He recognised the light, dry voice. He was staring at Konstantine Serebriakov.

  He remembered later how he had walked over to the gate like a somnambulist caught in the same dream, crossing to see the view spread out under moonlight. Konstantine clung like an old rag on the gate, his attention fastened on the strangeness of nocturnal light, the phosphorescent fields, the mysteriousness of visibility without colour. He held fast and still as the layers of countryside revealed contours to the eye - shadows denoting landmark trees, hills insinuating their presence, the character of everything subtly modified by monochrome.

  Philip let the coldness of the gate run into his fingertips. He inhaled deeply, trying to capture the scents and tangs of the field, needing more of something specific to bring back a suddenly accessible memory, the first memory, sliding always to the edge of recall, that went with this scene, linking a depthless well-being to the sight of landscape, the stoic peace of the sinking hills, a childhood acquisition based on a kindling imagination.

  For a long time they stood at either end of the gate, averse to any sound or movement that would break the spell, and as Philip dwelled on the branches of an oak tree that had long since died, floodlit by the moon, wondering how many decades it would take for the brittle tusks of that tree to fall apart and decay in the ground, he realised that both of them were looking into the night with the tranquil fixation of people who would never see this - this apparitional luminescence - again, and that Konstantine’s rapture was a form of leave-taking, a slow tribute to all that the scene recollected, a culminatory Mondnacbt to be relished for the last time. If he were to die soon, then this moment was as crucial as any left to him. One’s imminent departure deepened the present, because the future had no horizon, and the only category of time to be invested in was the present, which when studied closely, revealed itself in layers of suggestion.

  He marvelled at the limitless particularity of what would survive him.

  Later, in bed, he felt no pain. Physically he was aware of nothing. His body seemed at peace with itself. But something was going on, a deterioration or corruption, some silent process that he might never have known about. He shut his eyes, trying for sleep in the memory of Konstantine’s voice, which had broken the silence softly, as though his thoughts had become gently audible. He carried on where they had left off in Arthur’s drawing room. His ideas were like a stream that had gone underground in the interim and now resurfaced in Philip’s presence, more delicately prepared for his ears alone.

  ‘. . . this second sonata . . .’ Philip smiled to remember the creaky Russian accent . . you cannot see as the last word so much as a preliminary view of death. Very close. Very angry. How different with Beethoven March Funèbre! Nothing in music comes like this. The fate of the soul! Kaboom, fini! But, but the composer gets a little better, comes to Nohant, very good in the country, and even if you believe’ - he raised a finger in the darkness as he spoke - ‘Chopin knew he would not live before many years, it is for me as though he had understood his immortalité and had made a victory over creative challenge of death. So. Then. Up one step. To B moll. Third Sonata. On the edge of C, where everything begins again. And listen, for Chopin B major is so comfortable, so . . . at home. This key is for him satisfaction. You have in the first movement the most beautiful nostalgia. For life. Fulfilled, rich, and strong. In the scherzo he revisits his youth. He is still virtuoso. In the trio, reminiscence. Not without the pain of lost time, but with the idea that all time is eternal in music. And from here you can contemplate eternity. So, Philip’ - his voice was a whisper - ‘by slow movement, listen, this is the trick . . . consolation has already happened. The soul now looks on life with serenity. The soul is safe and when the tune - da, dee da, dee da, dee da dudeededadadee da dum - comes in the last page we have a berceuse for final sleep. The last chords, this is fate cadence. The acceptance of death. Yes?’ He swallowed. ‘You understand! And then! But what? What can come after this? On with life, of course, on with future. It’s a rondo because in life everything returns, same struggle, the whole story of the future going on after the individual dies. We have so much reminiscence in his music, so much sadness for the past. But this sonata sees the future, and the future is the spirit of man overcoming and winning. You don’t know till right at the end - dee, da, da Taaaah! This is triumph. La gloire.’

  Konstantine chuckled. He placed an old hand on Philip’s forearm and squeezed hard.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Moving around under the shade of the apple tree, Peter carving, Clarissa pouring Orangina into children’s cups, Philip spooning out potatoes, beans on plates, everyone impatient to sit down and tuck in. Behind them the cottage, doggedly ancient, with its furrowed timbers and panels of flint, and pretty surround of rose-beds and brick footpath. Beyond the apple tree a brook, and then a fence and field, which ran up the hill to a grassy crest set off by an oak tree that leaned against the sky, shoving great spits of dead wood into the air. Hedgerows intersected the fields, puffs of crack willow followed the line of a ditch. Here and there was a cow.

  They sat and ate and drank before the view, and when the children had run off to play, deckchairs awaited them. Clarissa would subside into a shapely cat-like curl on the rug, paperback under
the compress of her flowing arched hands; Peter and Philip would almost expire on their seats, wine glasses slackly dandled, heads averted from the confronting sunlight, which now, p.m., cast deeper hues across the fields and caused new distinctions in the landscape, like patches of orchestral colour drawn to prominence.

  It was much the same for all their visitors. Newcomers to the cottage received the identical surprise. You drove off the main road two miles back. The lane ebbed away into the valley, hills rising all the while, and suddenly the hedgerows seemed lusher, the meadows glossier, the cow parsley more abundant. One was travelling out of time into a rural past and who could say where on the windy lane the spell was cast. At the bottom of the lane one turned right along a drive overhung by willow and ash, and came to a gravelly opening in front of the house. One parked, and clambered out, all eyes on the cottage with its mossy roof tiles and brick buttresses, and was suddenly aware of a view to the right, which opened out between slanting alders, much broader than expected and delightfully arresting because of the vista it opened across the most beautiful countryside, and suddenly one was gaping in marvel at the levels and lines of distance, the tumbling woods and swooning dells, the timeless figures of solitary trees. One dropped one’s bags, knocked for six, and Peter and Clarissa came out of the house to hug and greet and pat children on the head. And later, one explored the plot: the orchard, the brook, with incredible elation. The whole fantasy of childhood was brought back in this garden of wicket gates and staddle stones and stumps covered in emerald moss.

  In the summer they would have picnics by the stream under the fissured bows of sally trees pushed cock-eyed by the ‘87 gale - and still dropping spears of dead wood into the soft earth below. Tea was set out on the upper lawn, where one could sit with a newspaper, momentarily gazing at the wood across the field, listening to bees and zizzers and the cawing of crows. Visitors would amble along a footpath or across a meadow and find themselves on the edge of an eerie wood, or on rising pastureland, the hills receding hierarchically about them, the cottage itself sinking to a ruddy smudge in the distance, the poplars one had noticed from the garden as a distant queue of drumsticks suddenly turning up, clamorously rearing, their glittery leaves surging in the lightest wind. He had walked up to that point of vantage many a time - on the edge of a field - and watched the wind pawing at the barley, furrowing its coat, or seen the shadow of a fast-moving cloud scudding towards him, trailing a blaze of sunlight in its wake that crossed the crops and lit up trees and eventually bathed him in its warmth.