The Prodigy: 2014 Edition - The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd - Number 4

by Noel Hynd

  The gun back in New York. The pistol. One good bullet through the brain…

  At least no one would know why.

  The knock on the door to his dressing room startled him.

  Geiger recognized the touch: Diana.

  “Rolf?” He heard her voiced. Then a third rapping, insistent as the applause.

  He sprang to his feet and went to the door. He unlocked it and threw it open. She stood before him, with Bernard Vickers, the Academy stage manager, several feet behind her.

  “What’s going on? Are you okay?” Diana asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay. I love you, and I can tell. What happened out there? “Did you see something?” she demanded. “Was something there?”

  He knew exactly what she meant. He wouldn’t answer.

  “What about you?” Rolf asked. “Did you see something?” She shook her head.

  Her hand found his.

  “Your audience is begging,” she said. “The orchestra is waiting.”

  “As is Maestro DaSilva,” said Vickers. “So, Rolf, if you please…..

  “Of course,” said Geiger, still badly shaken. “Yes, yes! Of course.” He struggled for his composure.

  A million thoughts were upon Rolf. None of them good.

  “Please,” he said to Diana. “I’m in your hands tonight. Lead me back.”

  She guided him back toward the stage. The orchestra was in the wings. The musicians gave way when they saw him. He walked through them. They applauded also.

  Snippets of conversation from his peers:

  Absolutely fantastic!

  As good as anyone now…

  Didn’t think ‘the brat’ could be that good…

  The applause from two and a half thousand people was subsiding only slightly. It exploded again when Rolf walked back onto the stage.

  He appeared stunned to those who knew him. Even some customers in the front rows could see it. Geiger wobbled to the piano. His mood had changed.

  He slid back onto the bench. “What should I play?” he asked aloud.

  Offstage, DaSilva was surprised. A slight murmur rippled through the audience.

  “Moonlight?” the conductor called softly. That was what the plan had been. Enough people heard the word to garner a smattering of applause.

  “Moonlight, huh?” Geiger asked.

  But again, he felt the icy hands of his master upon his shoulders.

  The touch was cold and firm as usual. The presence was overwhelming.

  Geiger glanced down and saw that his hands were his own—this time. But the hands remained on his neck and behind him.

  “I think not,” he said. “Moonlight Sonata’s such a clichéd piece by now. Sort of for slutty teenage girls to sniff at.”

  Geiger looked off stage at the orchestra. Some of the musicians were conferring. Geiger spoke in a low hiss.

  “Just everyone shut up,” he snapped. “I know what I’m about. If you guys had the guts to be soloists, you’d be out here!”

  Shocked, the musicians fell silent. The first rows of spectators reacted similarly.

  Then Geiger turned to the audience. “The Dying Poet,” he said. “Chopin.”

  He looked back to his keyboard and began to play.

  His Chopin unfolded gravely, with poetry and aristocracy—a small jewel of a performance. Worthy of a Rubinstein, a Horowitz, a Liszt, or a Rabinowitz.

  And all the time, he played with Rabinowitz’s hands on his shoulders, close to his neck. He could feel the eyes of the ghost peering over his shoulder.

  As Geiger came to the obbligato, his music filled the grand old music hall. Though Diana, watching from the wings, saw his lips move, no one heard the words he spoke.

  “I’m ready to see you again, Rabinowitz,” Rolf Geiger said to his departed mentor. “I’m ready to see you and talk to you.”

  No one other than Geiger heard the response.

  “Soon. When I’m ready,” Rabinowitz answered.

  Geiger completed the encore with a flourish.

  Then he stood and was gone again. He stalked to the dressing room with Diana. They gathered his things. The distant applause lasted for ten minutes, but they left the building before it subsided. Rolf scribbled sloppy autographs as he pushed his way to his limousine.

  “Out to dinner, sir?” the driver asked.

  “No. Get me back to New York! I hate this place!”

  “Rolf?” Diana demanded.

  “Just shut up,” he said to her. She was stunned. And hurt. When she tried to get close to him, he wouldn’t touch her.

  They stayed in Philadelphia just long enough for her to go up to the hotel suite and pack. Then his driver took them back to New York. All along the way, on this night of artistic triumph, he was sullen and angry, as if a personality other than his own had taken complete control. Halfway back to Manhattan, Diana began to press the issue, but he wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “Who do you think you are?” she finally snapped at him in response. He looked at her quizzically, but when he tried to respond, she was furious.

  “Forget it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Fine with me,” he snorted.

  That night, Rolf Geiger had no further explanation about what had happened on stage at the Kimmel Center. Nor was he happy, the next day, when Brian Greenstone phoned.

  “I heard it was sensational, my boy,” Greenstone thundered, “but some of my intimates tell me there was some confusion at the end. Care to regale me with an explanation?”

  “No, I don’t,” Geiger said. He hung up the phone on his old friend.

  But the music critics came close to an explanation. Both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, in the next morning’s editions, made the same observations.

  The performance had been mature and brilliant, they agreed. The technique sounded so much like Isador Rabinowitz that a listener could picture the deceased master at the keyboard.

  “Rabinowitz was Geiger’s great, if unloved, teacher,” William Baumann concluded in the New York Times. “If young Geiger has decided to get serious about this art as he now indicates that he wishes to, it perhaps says something about the young man’s intelligence that he should adopt and master his mentor’s great and distinctive technique.

  Geiger, reading this, picked up his cell phone, called Baumann’s voice mail at the newspaper, and left a profane message in person.

  Diana rose from breakfast when she heard his words and went back upstairs. She locked herself in her own bathroom and cried for an hour. For all this time, Rolf stayed downstairs in the library, pouring over Chopin at the piano, alternately cursing, reading the score, and playing.

  Never once did he think to go upstairs to see if Diana was all right. And never once did she dare to go down. “So greatness,” grumbled Geiger to himself as he made beautiful music at his Steinway, “has its price. And I’m now willing to pay it.”

  Twenty-eight

  A week after the perceived triumph in Philadelphia, Rolf sat in his library on a bright summer morning. Diana had gone to her health club. Aside from the music, which flowed generously from Geiger’s Steinway, and the occasional utterance from the pianist, the town- house was silent. Anyone viewing the handsome young virtuoso at the piano would have guessed that he was alone. Rolf, however, knew otherwise.

  There was no score in the music rack of the Piano. Geiger was busying himself with warm-ups—musical calisthenics. Trill exercises, simple and chromatic scales, and exercises for the throwing of the hand, for which he used a two-part fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Geiger watched his powerful hands run up and down the keyboard. He listened with a demanding ear as the notes came together in the proper context. This went on thirty minutes. From there he moved to the piano passages of the Choral Fantasy by Beethoven, a probable part of his London program. He played passionately and impeccably. When he was finished, he raised his eyes from the keyboard
.

  To Rolf’s eyes, Rabinowitz was standing there in the suit in which he had been buried.

  “Well?” Geiger asked. “What did you think?

  “Competent,” said the ghost of the Maestro.

  Geiger eyed him now without fear. It seemed normal that he should be there. “It was better than ‘competent,’” Geiger said

  “You struck every note with rigid exactness,” Rabinowitz said. The ghost drifted around the room. “Perfection makes your interpretation frigid.” Rabinowitz continued. “Play this again. Bring out your conception of the work. Make it vivid. Happen it. Again, you young fool.”

  Rolf’s hands returned to the keyboard. He attacked the piece with more swagger and increased elegance and imagination, but less precision.

  “Better,” he heard the ghost say. The old man’s voice was all around him. He at one point felt his mentor’s hands settle on his shoulder, just by the neck.

  “Play the pretissimo at the ending with broken octaves,” the ghost instructed.

  “What?”

  “Do it! For the love of God, don’t think! Just do it!” Rabinowitz ordered.

  Geiger reached and followed instructions. His own hands were a flurry before him. The sound that swelled from his Steinway amazed even him. It gave him goose bumps.

  He glanced up. Rabinowitz was gone. His eyes went back to the keyboard. He played through the same passage again in broken octaves. He was amazed. When his eyes rose again, Rabinowitz was a handsome young man, much the way he had looked when he fled Austria in the thirties. He was sitting on the piano. Weightlessly.

  “Don’t look so much at me, explore your music!” the ghost snapped.

  Geiger’s eyes returned to the score. He went back to the beginning of the piano sections of the Choral Fantasy and played the work straight through. Then at the end, he looked up.

  The ghost stood there, its arms folded.

  “Fair,” Rabinowitz finally said. “That was almost good.”

  “What about the broken octaves?”

  “Don’t use them. They don’t belong there. It’s show-offing. It will only impress American audiences who know nothing.”

  “If I don’t use them there in the Choral Fantasy, where do I use them?”

  “In the Totentanz,” Rabinowitz said. “Liszt’s Dance of Death.”

  Geiger cringed slightly and shifted restlessly on his bench.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your London program.”

  “Who’s playing it? You or me?” Geiger asked.

  The ghost was suddenly gone from the piano. Geiger glanced around and found him in the chair across the room, looking to be of middle-age. He looked way he had looked as a famous performer in the 1950’s when he had frequently been Jack Paar’s guest on The Tonight Show.

  “Unfortunately, you,” the ghost said. “It would be better I played, but…”

  “You’re dead. You’re not here.” Rabinowitz answered.

  “Then, why are you talking to me, Rolf, if not here?” The ghost’s tone was taunting. Then Rabinowitz disappeared so abruptly that Geiger felt a change in the pressure of the room. He looked around the library, all directions, and couldn’t find the ghost.

  “All right,” Geiger finally said. “Come back. Show yourself.”

  The face materialized inches in front of Geiger’s.

  It was so intense and disagreeable an image that Geiger recoiled in horror.

  “You will London under my tutelage,” said Rabinowitz. “You will achieve greatness under my instruction. Deviate, and I will take over the keyboard again, as I did in Philadelphia.”

  “I can achieve greatness on my own,” Geiger said softly. “I can and I shall.”

  “If you’re so sure, then why don’t you?” Rabinowitz taunted further. “You left my instruction eight years ago. Why no greatness on your own? Tell me, young man, why?”

  Geiger didn’t answer. He didn’t answer because he knew. He hadn’t dared. He hadn’t aspired. Rolf had wanted to conquer the world but hadn’t dared take the first serious step until the old man was dead. And now ironically he, Rolf, was keeping the old man alive.

  “Well then, there! The ghost insisted. “There we have the truth between us, yes?” He made a clucking sound like a chicken to rub it in further. Suddenly Rabinowitz was an old man again. He was sitting on the piano bench next to Geiger. “As the piano is your instrument,” he told Geiger, “you are my instrument. That much is clear, even to a fool like you.”

  Geiger turned away from the ghost. When he raised his eyes again, Rabinowitz was in full view, right in front of him.

  “Now, what about the London program?” Rabinowitz asked. “The Choral Fantasy is acceptable. What else?”

  “It’s an all-Beethoven program.”

  “Mistake. You need to show range in London. English audiences will include a few people who have some sophistication.”

  “The second piece is Concerto No. 4 in G.”

  “Expendable.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece.”

  “Maybe. Don’t play it.”

  “The Emperor is the main work.”

  “The Emperor is bombastic, pretentious, and pedestrian.” He paused. “Plus, it’s cheap. Cheap, cheap. It challenges no audience and thus no recitalist. You cannot play it.”

  “You used to play it, Maestro.”

  “When I desired to. Everyone recognizes my greatness. So I could play it and get away with it. You cannot.”

  “So that’s when I’ll play it, too. When I desire to. And I desire to in London on September first.”

  Geiger’s left hand went to the keyboard. He played a strain of the Emperor. Then his right hand found the keyboard and he embroidered the melody of Don’t Be Cruel and Suspicious Minds.

  “What is that noise? Rabinowitz asked.

  “The Emperor meets the King,” said Geiger, knowing it would annoy him.

  “Which King? Martin Luther? George V?”

  “Presley.”

  The specter was vehemently angry, which pleased Geiger.

  “You are jerking off!” Rabinowitz thundered furiously. “Intellectual masturbation. Same as you’ve always done! Whore! Slut!”

  Geiger added a leitmotif from Blue Hawaii.

  “You have the intellect of a honky-tonk player!” Rabinowitz insisted.

  Geiger persisted. “Me and you and Blue Hawaii, Maestro,” said Geiger. He sang along in the fashion of Elvis. “Come with me, while the moon is on the sea…”

  Rabinowitz roared. Furious, the ghost knocked a pile of scores from where they stood on a nearby table. Nothing offended the old man quite like catchy successful American pop music, which he considered a cultural abomination.

  Geiger crooned more lyrics. The scenario was nothing new. It was the same as many of their “lessons” and “learning sessions” from fifteen years earlier.

  “What else will you play?” Rabinowitz wanted to know.

  Geiger was thoughtful. “Maybe I won’t play the Concerto No. 5,” he mused. “That leaves an opening. So I would still be looking for the third piece.”

  “I told you, imbecile. Liszt’s Dance of Death.”

  “Why the Totentanz?” Geiger asked again.

  “To further embarrass yourself, it is obvious,” the ghost snarled. “Technically demanding. I played it most masterfully. Think you could rise to it?”

  Geiger thought about it.

  As a teenager, Rolf had seen Andre Watts Play the Totentanz at Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center in New York. It had been electrifying. The music had been riveting and Watts had always been a great showman. As was frequently the case, Rabinowitz had a point.

  Geiger looked at the ghost. “Do you think I could?” he asked.

  Rabinowitz laughed.

  Outside the library, in the vestibule of the town house, there was the sound of a door closing. Diana returning home. Rolf recognized her footsteps.

  “Totentanz,” he said a
loud. “The Dance of Death. London 2009. Rolf Geiger’s World Tour.” He thought about it for a moment. His fingers came down on the keyboard ad he played a few bars he could remember.

  Dance of Death and Diana appeared at the doorway. He glanced up.

  A confluence of ideas: Diana’s Dance of Death? He mused. He liked the alliteration, though the thought made him cringe.

  “How’s it going?” she asked softly.

  He grunted.

  She gazed into the library and saw no one other than Rolf. The muscles of his face and neck were tense with concentration. She had a packet of morning mail in her hands.

  She asked again. “How is it…?”

  Rolf slammed his hands down onto the keys in mid-phrase. The Steinway thundered with rage and anger.

  “Don’t interrupt me, all right?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m rehearsing? What the hell am I doing in here, dicking around with Top 40 crap?”

  She stood frozen at the library door. Tirades such as this one had become common in the week since Philadelphia. Once, they had never happened. Now, they happened several times a day. Unhappily, Diana was feeling increasingly as if she should just stay away from him.

  But her own anger rose in her defense.

  “I’m sorry!” she said. “But I heard you talking.”

  He looked around the library as if she were crazy. Even Rabinowitz had turned invisible to Rolf.

  “To myself, if anyone,” he said. He paused. “How was your workout? Tell me about bouncing around with all those other firm butts and six-pack abs.”

  “Some other time,” she said. “Here. Your mail. From your adoring, unquestioning fans, no doubt.” She bundled it and tossed into the room, like a woman feeding a caged beast at the zoo. The mail landed with a thump, then several pieces flew in various directions.

  Rolf made no move to pick anything up. Diana left the doorway. Geiger heard her go upstairs. He set his attention back to the music. He looked down. Where was he? He wondered.

  “Dance of Death,” came a nearby voice.

  “Yes, of course,” Rolf said aloud.

  He tried to pick it up again. He struggled. He had studied the piece years ago but couldn’t remember it well. He struggled. His hands faltered.

  “Need help?” Rabinowitz asked, kindly this time.