Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “But the business with Wagner,” Michael said stubbornly.

  “That is complicated. Felix van Gelden was for boycotting Wagner. I do not feel like this, but as long as there are people alive that it disturbs, it is impossible as yet to play Wagner live here. But he was a great composer.” A shrewd glint flashed in her eyes as she continued: “And yet the radio boycott has ended. Lately we hear Wagner all the time on the radio. But it is all on the quiet. Theo understands the erotic in Wagner’s music, and for him this is very important from the musical point of view. Thomas Mann says that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is nonsense of course, but his music is another story. And that is what Theo also believes.” Her lips trembled. “After fifty years people forget. This is good and also bad.”

  “What did Wagner mean to Gabriel?”

  “Ah!” She waved her arm and smiled. “For Gabriel, Wagner was not interesting at all. Of course he knows the music, but it means nothing to him. Not only because of his father, but because his path was completely different, toward much earlier music.”

  “Could you explain this matter of historical performance to me? And Gabriel’s obsession with it?”

  She nodded energetically. “Certainly, why not?” And then, remembering: “But Yuval is waiting. Do we have time?”

  “A little,” he said, silencing the anxiety that had been gnawing at him all morning. If only he could phone to make sure that no one had harmed Nita. But to phone now would be to lose the moment with Dora Zackheim, who at any minute could simply stop talking.

  She planted her feet on the floor in front of the bed, leaning heavily on her hands to support her thin body. “It is not a simple matter. I will explain it a little, yes?” And not waiting for him to respond, she began to talk.

  In the great emptiness that had overwhelmed him and never left him since Shorer had told him what had happened with the baby, Dora Zackheim’s stream of words and the need to concentrate on them offered a distraction. From not knowing how Nita was, from the simple longing for her voice, her movements, her presence; from wanting to touch her skin, to embrace her. And the whole time he was uncomfortably aware of how brief and precious Dora Zackheim’s time was.

  Her old woman’s voice was lower now, almost choked, and she went on chain smoking the slender cigars she pulled out one after the other from the yellow metal container with a picture of a panther on it. “You must remember,” she said, pulling the hem of her long, narrow brown dress down over the bandages on her legs, “that historical performance began just recently. The rediscovery of Renaissance and Baroque music has already been going on for generations. But when they began to play Baroque music again, in the nineteenth century, they played it in the Romantic fashion of the time.” She then spoke of the revival, in various countries early in this century, of the harpsichord, which had been superseded a hundred years before by the newly invented piano. Now performers like Wanda Landowska and later Ralph Kirkpatrick began to play Bach and Handel and Scarlatti on the instrument these composers originally wrote for, and to play it with greater and greater fidelity to what scholarship revealed not only about instrument making but also about tempo and the minutiae of old musical notation and performance of the time. She ground out the stub of her cigar and stared reflectively at her bandaged legs before resuming. “Then, after the Second World War, the world was no longer what it used to be. Nothing from before, nothing that people had been used to could be any good now,” she said in a cloud of gray smoke and with a deep, dry cough. “So, when things are very bad, people look to the distant past. And finally in the last twenty years, we have orchestras with period instruments—violins with gut strings, trumpets and horns without valves and pistons, wind instruments that are exact copies of old ones, timpani not with plastic but with animal-skin heads—playing not only Monteverdi and Rameau, Corelli and Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, and Handel, but even Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. All in proper authentic tempos and with authentic dynamics, and with the authentic number of musicians. And so on,” she concluded.

  “Would you say that to play Baroque music as it was played originally you have to play it in a smaller, more limited way?” Michael asked, embarrassed.

  “That is too simple,” she said didactically. “But it seems so. Everything was different then. The halls were small, the instruments were very different. Only after Beethoven were trumpet valves invented.”

  He felt in his shirt pocket, seized with horror at the thought that the tape recorder might stop working. It was clear to him that he would have to listen several times in order to understand fully what she was saying.

  “There are big problems,” she went on, “in actually realizing the music.”

  “In what sense?” he asked, feeling his shirt pocket.

  “What, for example,” she said with satisfaction, “does Bach mean when he writes a trill? That is, a symbol for a certain sound. The same thing Schubert means?” And she asked sharply: “Do you know what a trill is?”

  He shook his head despairingly. She stood up with astonishing agility, opened the door with an effort, and called: “Come here a minute, Yuval, bring the violin.”

  Yuval stood in the doorway, holding his violin case and looking at her with bewildered expectation. “Play a few bars of something with a trill in it, yes?”

  Michael could not identify what he played. She stopped the boy as soon as he had finished playing two rapidly alternating neighboring notes.

  “That is a trill.” She looked at Yuval as if remembering his existence. “What are you doing in there? Take something to eat if you want.”

  “I’m reading, it’s okay,” said Yuval, putting his violin away. “Are you . . .” he hesitated, “are you going to be much longer?” His eyes were downcast.

  “No, not very long,” Michael reassured him. “Another few minutes, and then we’ll be off.”

  Dora Zackheim sat down on the edge of the bed again. “That was a trill, an ornament, decoration. But you can play it many different ways—slower or faster, beginning on one of the two notes or on the other, and so on. The written notes do not tell you how. And then there are decisions to make, such as whether or not to add ornaments, and if so, all the time or only at repetitions. It is a very complicated matter, Baroque music. There are many arguments these days about how to play it now and what it really sounded like in the past. And even whether you should play it the way it was played then.”

  “And Gabriel thought it should be,” concluded Michael.

  She nodded vigorously. “And not only with Baroque music. The authentic music people are now working on Schumann and Berlioz and Brahms, even.”

  “Did Gabriel do this, too?”

  “Yes, sometimes,” she said disapprovingly. “Like everything else, it is a matter of degree. How much makes you a fanatic?”

  “Was Gabriel a fanatic?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted unwillingly. “And sometimes he did things I did not like much at all, like the Bach B Minor Mass with the tiny chorus. On the other hand, Gabi’s recording of Vivaldi’s Opus 8 Concerti is very fine, you can hear this is Vivaldi and not some kind of Elgar. There is a real Baroque style to it, and it is full of life.”

  “Was Vivaldi his favorite composer?”

  She frowned. “It is impossible to speak in such terms of these things. Did he like Vivaldi better than Bach? No. But this,” she said, pulling a compact disc from a shelf and putting her finger on the picture of Gabriel van Gelden adorning the box, “is excellent. It is Vivaldi’s wonderful concerto La tempesta di mare—Storm at Sea—and you can hear in Gabi’s performance, both as conductor and violinist, what lyrical melodies Vivaldi wrote. And how much invention there was in his music, what a magician he was of form as well as of atmosphere.” She put the disc down on the bed. For a moment her lips trembled, and she passed a finger under her eyes to wipe away a tear. “I think,” she said after some seconds of silence, “that Gabriel was on the right road. If he had not been . . . if he were stil
l alive, he would have become truly authentic, and not at all fanatic. He was sometimes a wonderful combination, deep down, of an artist of the end of this century and an artist of the eighteenth. In him there was a real, beautiful dialogue between periods. You must listen,” she said, touching the CD box again, “to La tempesta di mare, because the Venetian Antonio Vivaldi knew and wrote about the sea not only with Baroque grandeur but also with a feeling of intimacy with it. Gabi would have created a musical renaissance here in Israel. Gabi still had a lot to say,” she said in a dry, forcibly restrained voice.

  “What surprise could he have been talking about? Do you think it really had anything to do with Vivaldi?”

  “I really do not know. It could be so many things.”

  “Is Vivaldi so important and significant for you, too?”

  “Well, of course,” she said, surprised. “All Baroque music is important. But the Classical period—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—is equally important. As it was for Gabi, too. It is very hard to know what he meant exactly. For me,” she said, smiling with a conspiratorial air, “to tell you the truth, I feel closest to the Romantic period. To the nineteenth century—the concertos of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, as played by a Heifetz or Erica Morini. Do you understand?”

  “He never prepared any surprises for you before?”

  She smiled and lowered her head. When she lifted her face to him again, it was hard, and her voice was low and cold: “I have lived so many years, seen so many things—everything is a surprise to me. Every visit of Gabi’s was a surprise. A good recording or concert by a pupil is a surprise. To wake up in the morning and breathe is a surprise.” She looked at her watch, stood up with an effort, and almost hobbled to the sliding door, which Michael hurried to open for her.

  13

  Et Homo Factus Est

  Three years ago,” said Yuval as they were reaching Zichron Yaakov, “I won first prize in an important violin competition. I played the Mendelssohn concerto. At my first lesson after the competition, I played the piece for her. When I finished she said: All right, but you know Shlomo Mintz played it much better.’ I laughed, and she said: ‘What are you laughing about? You should play it as well as he does.’ I didn’t understand why she had to tell me that Mintz played better. I thought it was silly. I was only thirteen and Mintz had worked on the Mendelssohn for years.”

  He looked at Michael for a reaction. When none came, he went on: “A lot of people are offended by her. I was never offended. She makes me angry sometimes, but I don’t feel insulted. For instance, we were listening to Bach together, and suddenly she said: ‘Who plays better, Milstein or you?’ If I’d said something critical about Milstein, she’d have cried out and said something like: ‘Who do you think you are, how dare you criticize Milstein?’ And if I’d said Milstein was wonderful, she’d have shouted: ‘What did you say? You shouldn’t say that! You have to think that you’re wonderful, that you’re better than Milstein.’ Stuff like that. Obviously,” Yuval said, turning to him and smiling innocently, “I can’t play like Milstein on the one hand, and at the same time not like everything he does. I have to think really hard about what to say when we listen to something together. Not compromise and not worry about what she wants me to say. Sometimes she seems really out of it,” he said and immediately took fright at his own words. “Not because she’s old, you shouldn’t think that. There’s nothing wrong with her head,” he assured Michael. “She was always like that, even twenty years ago, old students have told me. She can tell a student one day he played better than another one and the next day tell the other one the opposite. Sometimes you feel she’s trying to break you.”

  “She did tell me that it takes a strong ego to be an artist,” murmured Michael as he maneuvered the car into an empty space between two big olive trees and turned off the engine.

  “Then I must have one,” said Yuval simply as he swung his legs out of the car. “She’s never succeeded in breaking me, even though I’m not yet seventeen. She complains about the way I play, I practice from morning till night, and the next time I always play better. And I also know,” he said, standing beside the open car door, “that it prepares you to face all kinds of difficulties. There’s a lot of pressure and uncertainty in a musical career. I’ve already felt it. I’ve already made one recording. I’ve heard a lot from even great violinists about all the problems, and being with her prepares you for them.”

  “Do you think she does it consciously, on purpose, to prepare you?” asked Michael as he bent over the lock and opened the door again to make sure that he had switched off the radio transmitter.

  “I don’t know if she’s always aware of what she’s doing, if it’s all part of some overall plan. Sometimes it can really be destructive. One of her students, a famous violinist, had terrible stage fright because whenever he was on the stage he remembered all her lectures and yelling and lost his confidence.”

  “So it’s hard for you with her,” said Michael as they walked toward Beit-Daniel’s main building, and he looked down at the pine needles covering the heavy, dry earth and up at the tops of the cypress trees. His eyes came to rest on the familiar van with the Electricity Company’s logo on it. He felt a sense of relief knowing that Theo and Nita had already arrived. It seemed to him that here, in this place, no harm could come to her. But he knew that he would be unable to relax until he saw her with his own eyes. There was a stab of pain, too; because if you spread a blanket exactly here, under this pine tree, you could put a baby on it, on her back, so that she could see the sky and the tree. You could lie down next to her and listen to her contented cooing. You could, if only you could.

  “It’s not too bad,” said Yuval. “Without her it will be a lot harder for me. She’s the most important person in my life now. If she weren’t here . . . I think . . . I’m afraid I won’t be able to come to any musical decision without her approval. If she dies I’m sure I’d be completely lost.”

  “Tell me, Yuval . . .” Michael enjoyed saying the name this boy shared with his son. During the ascent to Zichron Yaakov—maybe because of the view of the sea from the top of the hill on the way to Beit-Daniel—he had imagined for a moment that it was his own Yuval sitting beside him. It was already a week since he had last spoken to him, and the conversation had been brief and frustrating, filled with “How are you?” and “Is everything all right?” These were the only questions he had ever succeeded in asking him, repeating them over and over again during the months of Yuval’s wanderings in South America. His postcards were brief and matter-of-fact. He hadn’t mentioned the baby. He couldn’t tell him something like that in a telephone call whose main purpose was to notify his father that his son still existed. (“Hi, Dad, I’m alive,” Yuval had announced in his most recent call. “Alive and well?” asked Michael. “Just fine,” Yuval assured him without going into detail. This conversation had taken place with the baby in Michael’s arms. Her head rested between his neck and shoulder, and she was snoring lightly into his free ear. He had wanted to say something about her to his son, and now he no longer needed to or had to.) Yuval, he calculated, should be leaving Mexico for the U.S. any day now. But where exactly in the States he would be Michael had no idea.

  “Tell me, Yuval, don’t you think that’s a weakness of hers as a teacher? Can you become independent when you’re so dependent on her?”

  Quietly, with no hesitation, Yuval said: “I think it’ll be all right. I know that when I leave her to go and study abroad, or when I begin to play all over the world, I’ll be independent. It’ll be hard at the beginning. I talk to her old students, and that’s what I see. In time they free themselves from her. . . . It’s hard to explain. . . . It’s as if you have to take her as she is, with the yelling and everything.”

  “Apparently education doesn’t work without some terror,” said Michael, smiling as he opened the brown wooden door to the narrow entrance, and he looked at Yuval ascending the broad steps before him, swinging his violin case.

 
There was nobody else in the entrance hall of the big building. On a long formica-topped table was a large bowl with a few apples, paper plates with apple cores, and styrofoam cups containing coffee dregs.

  “The break is already over,” said Yuval. “I’ve missed the first lecture, but it doesn’t matter. I have to run to the other building,” he explained, and thanking Michael for the lift, he hurried outside. Michael stood in the entrance hall and looked out the big window at Yuval running down the dirt path until his figure disappeared around a bend. In a narrow corridor leading off the entrance hall, next to the toilets, he found a pay phone. As he rummaged in his pocket for coins, he peeped into a big room. From where he was standing he could only see some wall and a wide brown bookcase, in which a few books and magazines lay scattered. Suddenly he heard the sound of a piano, soon joined by a singing voice and then a cello.

  “Where the hell are you?” demanded Balilty angrily at the other end of the line. “Why didn’t you take a cell phone? Why did you turn off the radio transmitter? We’ve really been looking for you!”

  “I arrived at Beit-Daniel just this minute. I’m calling from a pay phone,” said Michael, examining a photo on the wall beside him of two men standing in front of an orchestra. The caption read that they were Arturo Toscanini and the violinist Bronislaw Hubermann, founder, in 1936, of the Palestine Philharmonic, as it was then known. He stepped back to look again.

  “Have you talked to Eli yet? Talk to Eli! And don’t take your eyes off them. I told Eli exactly what to tell you. The van Geldens are there with him, and instead of . . .” Balilty swallowed something. “Instead of Dalit I sent someone new, a young guy. Have you seen him?”

  “Not yet, I just arrived.”

  “You’ll like him,” said Balilty with a chuckle. “He looks a bit like you looked twenty or so years ago. Tall and thin, with those eyes, and full eyebrows, the kind the girls like, only he’s not . . . he hasn’t . . . he’s less . . . he’s more ordinary,” he finally pronounced. “He’s a rookie from a moshav, with no bullshit about him. You’ve got enough people there to keep a constant close watch on them. I don’t want your maestro to be alone for a second. Or to have any long conversations with his sister, either.”