To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  “Fast and clear.”

  “Firm and strong.”

  “Slowly and solidly, 10 times each, then faster, forte and piano, 10 times each, changing accents, 5 times each.”

  He wrote metronome markings; at first, slower than I had ever imagined playing, then moderate and hard to control, then exhilaratingly fast, almost faster than I could play. It was rigorous training, but its effects were meant to last a lifetime of piano playing. Neither Edward Bredshall nor I could have dreamed that years later I would be faced with something that made this effort literally look like child’s play.

  Toward the end of my first year with him, Mr. Bredshall let me begin a concerto, the Haydn D Major, and I found out what he considered to be the proper kind of work on a piece of music. Every phrase, every articulation slur, every detached tone, every legato line was shaped and worked out with the greatest of care. Almost every measure of my sheet music had something written over it, or underlined, or circled.

  Our work was hard and rigorous; the bad habits were disappearing, and reliable ones were taking their places. I played my first Bach Prelude and Fugue, controlling every finger and clarifying each voice. I played my first virtuoso concerto, the Mendelssohn D Minor, with octaves and sweeping arpeggios and thrilling romantic melodies. I began to find that I could handle more difficult études and exercises with greater ease.

  As time went on, Mr. Bredshall not only assigned more and more difficult repertoire, but spent more time talking to me. By the time I was thirteen, our lessons were two hours long: one hour for work and one for talk. It was a brilliant education: I drank in the exotic world of his monologues. He told me about his radical political and social beliefs, which were usually in opposition to anything I heard at home or at school. He told me about books I should read, especially those that told one something grim about life. He would quote long passages from memory; he was cursed with total recall, he said. Sometimes when he opened a book or a piece of music, a ten-dollar or twenty-dollar bill would drop out. Money seemed to mean so little to him that he would use it as a bookmark and then forget about it. He once said that if he ever got hard-pressed for cash, he had only to look through his books.

  Cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, he would play passages from the opera that was to be broadcast from the Met in New York the following Saturday, translating as he went along and calling out unusual instrumentation. Sometimes he would put the cigarette down on an ashtray perched precariously on a stack of music and begin singing all the roles in rasping voice or hilarious falsetto.

  He would pause dramatically on a chord: “Here . . . Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist.”

  I took very seriously his analysis of the absurdities in the concert field and laughed at his imitations of other pianists and their mannerisms. He told me what recordings I should listen to. He described his days in Europe with bitter humor and sharp detail: the bookstalls along the Seine in Paris, the opera houses in Germany, his teacher who had played the Strauss Burleske magnificently and who had committed suicide. It became evident that he spoke fluent German, French, and Italian.

  It was then that my dream of going to Europe had formed. Mr. Bredshall had found something there that his musical soul needed. I wanted to find it, too. As soon as I had arrived in Paris for the first time, I dragged Martha to the bookstalls along the Seine, which I was happy to see were just as Bredshall had described them. We had spent hours picking out some yellowed, browned, and ragged scores. It didn’t matter if I was actually saving money by buying music that was timeworn and clothbound rather than paperbound and new. It was part of a ritual that made me feel closer to that mysterious source Bredshall had drawn upon.

  I was fourteen when he discovered a trick he used on me many times. I had wanted desperately to play the Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto and had secretly bought the sheet music and learned the piece. When I finally played it for him, I confessed that I had been afraid he would say I wasn’t ready for it. He looked at me with an amused expression.

  Many times after that incident, when I would mention a piece that I would like to learn, Bredshall would frown, hesitate, and look out of the window.

  “Well, I don’t know if you’re quite ready for that,” or just, “Well, I don’t know . . .”

  I would of course rush out to buy the sheet music, and work on it with a secret intensity until I felt I could prove him wrong. When I would bring it to my lesson for the first time, he would raise his eyebrows high over his horn-rims and say, as if surprised, “Well, I guess you are ready for that, after all!” It was only much later that I caught on to what he was doing.

  Increasingly, by then, Bredshall was letting me do things my own way. He was writing in my music less and less. The first time I had played through the Saint-Saëns for him, he laughed and said to me admiringly, “You are an excellent faker!”

  I knew what he meant: that when I wasn’t yet quite up to achieving a musical effect I wanted, I was able to get my idea across anyway, without quite knowing how I did it. He was letting me pursue my own way and develop it to the point where I didn’t have to fake anymore. Every so often he would say, “How did you do that?” about a particularly difficult passage that I had managed to play before he thought I was ready for it.

  Another moment I’ll never forget was the first time I played the Chopin G-Minor Ballade in public with Bredshall present. Afterward he embraced me, beaming and pink-cheeked, and said: “I’ve always listened to you as my student, but tonight I found myself listening to you as a pianist for the first time. It was very convincing.”

  I kept repeating those words to myself on the way home, trying to extract every bit of meaning from them. I also wrote them in my diary.

  Mr. Bredshall thought of me as his star pupil when I was in my mid-teens, but a couple of years later he decided it was time for me to move on. I gave a marathon recital before I left, a strenuous two-hour virtuoso program. Our final performance together was the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, with Bredshall playing the orchestral part on a second piano.

  “This is our swan song, Carol,” he had said to me with a little laugh, but with a sad look in his eyes. Until that moment, it had seemed as if our relationship would go on forever. It was a test for both of us that we could get through the concerto that evening, and to this day I can’t hear it without my throat tightening.

  Just a year before I had left for Europe, Bredshall had died very tragically. He had been in an automobile accident, had recovered, but was found dead beside an empty bottle of sleeping pills. I had dreams about him every night for months after that, and awakened in the morning with the same shock that he was gone. I wished I had told him that he would always be one of my gods. I hoped that he knew anyway.

  I went on to study with my other “household god,” Webster Aitken, in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon, where he was teaching at the time. At my audition, I encountered a tall, slender man with a deep tan and very blue eyes, wearing a Western shirt and well-fitting pants, a turquoise bracelet-watch, and cowboy boots. Added to his stunning appearance was his bearing—self-possessed and so straight that he looked almost stiff. I had wondered suddenly if I could play at all for this magnificent creature.

  His studio was the opposite of Bredshall’s. Instead of comfortable chaos, Aitken’s was clean-swept and impeccable: two pianos, two benches, a few chairs. Instead of Bredshall’s flow of commentary and information, Webster Aitken was a conversational minimalist, at least in the studio. He asked me a few pointed questions, which I stumbled to answer. I had already fallen hopelessly in love, complete with watery knees and elbows, and a sudden inability to find words. He asked about the repertoire for the solo recital I had just played, and upon learning that I had played Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, wanted to hear the “Ondine” movement. Fortunately, I was on familiar ground with the piece, one of whose treacherous passages Bredshall had once pointed to and asked, “How did you do that?” Aitken’s response
was impossible to read.

  Much later, he told me that he had been very impressed with my playing from the beginning, but I would not have known it at the time. What I did find out very quickly was that from Webster Aitken I would learn to find the musical reason behind every note I played. I searched every phrase for meaning and contour. I sharpened my ear so that I could listen to myself objectively enough to tell if I were reflecting that in my playing. In the years under Webster Aitken’s guidance, I refined my art.

  He would sit very straight-backed on a chair across the room from me and listen to something I was playing for him for the first time.

  “Thank you,” he would say, almost tonelessly, after I had finished. Then he would stride over to the piano and go through the score, thumping the page for emphasis.

  “What were you trying to do here?” he would ask in a voice that was like fine sand. On he would go, pointing out the places where my expressive intention had not been clear or where I had failed to dramatize a musical point. The emphasis was always on my ideas. Because I had fallen in love with him, I hoped for his approval, but that was the last thing he was offering. A touch of praise or encouragement was nowhere in the equation.

  On the other hand, I was being treated like an independent musician. Aitken was expecting me to come up with something original. It seemed a little like being actor and director, dancer and choreographer all in one. When I had expressed my own musical ideas in the past, I had been following my natural instincts. But now that the natural facility Bredshall had nurtured was fusing with the refinement of my work with Aitken, I was experiencing a musical coming of age.

  Aitken and I gradually became friends, a friendship carefully controlled by a man who could exchange bon mots and barbs with the best of them. I had become adept at dodging his retorts, and we could laugh together, especially at the inadvertent word variants produced by his closest friend in the Carnegie music department, Maria Malpi, an Italian-Swiss voice teacher with an outgoing personality and casual demeanor. Some of Malpi’s mixed-up words amused Aitken so much that they remain in my vocabulary: “disturbtion,” for example, which meant an interruption of one of her voice lessons.

  The last time I met with Aitken before leaving for Europe, I had just played a solo recital in Pittsburgh to a standing ovation and much excitement. I had worn a white dress, and he had turned up in a white suit. On some level, it felt as if I had finally achieved a form of togetherness with him. And Martha, whom I had met in Pittsburgh where she was studying voice with Malpi, had said the white garb was symbolic, that I was Aitken’s “white hope.”

  In the recital, I played the same Chopin B-flat Minor Sonata that I had been practicing in Fontainebleau when the strange pain shot through my hand. The Chopin had earned me some special praise from Aitken, who rarely gave any. “Carol, you’re like a small figure in a giant room, surveying the splendid techniques at your command,” he said. “You have more than you need to do whatever you want to do at the piano.”

  He seemed to be saying that I had scarcely begun to make use of all these techniques: “Now it’s up to you to go out and do something of consequence with it.”

  I realized that we were discussing the process of a lifetime, as the “small figure” would continue to grow. “From this point on, Carol,” he declared, “you are in charge.”

  Hearing these words, I felt a considerable sense of responsibility, a tinge of anxiety, and much exhilaration. Then he gave me a photo of himself, with the inscription: “To Carol Rosenberger with every good wish for a happy and brilliant future– Webster Aitken.”

  But there was certainly no “happy and brilliant future” in sight as I sat at the keyboard in Paris and looked down at hands that no longer felt like mine. The piano had always been part of me, an extension of me, and I an extension of it. Now suddenly it felt like something alien, as if my best and most beloved friend had turned on me and said “I don’t know you.” What would my two “household gods” think if they could see me now, after their years of investment? They had taken my raw, exuberant talent and helped me develop it to the point where I could “do anything,” as Aitken had said. Now, in contrast, I could do nothing. Could this be true? The question was too staggering to consider.

  They say that human beings have surprising abilities to adapt. Perhaps that’s what I was doing those first few days in Paris as I went to the piano for a few minutes at a time and forced myself to look in the fun house’s distorting mirrors, to walk up and down the crazy stairs, and to stand with one finger on a treadmill that went one way and another on a treadmill going the other way. I went on trying to “practice.” I set up exercise patterns for myself. As I sat there, making distorted and awkward movements to get the keys down somehow, I told myself that soon this would pass, that soon I would have my hands back again. Dr. Lipsitch had said “weakness,” hadn’t he? And weakness was dealt with best by exercises, wasn’t it?

  Mom and Marge came back from London with some warm clothes for Marge and happy memories for Mom of her first glimpse of London. She had bought me a few things, knowing that none of my clothes fit me now. I talked incessantly about my “exercise program,” but I don’t know what Mom or my two friends thought about it. They simply expressed pleasure that I was working again. We all talked enthusiastically about my getting stronger now that I could “practice.”

  Mom asked what I would like to do on my birthday. Since that was the same day the heat was to come on in the apartment building (November 1), I said jokingly that we should have an appropriate ceremony at home. But we ended up doing something much better: taking a trip to Chartres Cathedral. I lay down in the back seat so I could have full back-strength to walk around the famed edifice. I had read about Chartres and pored over pictures of it for years. But to be in its presence was so moving that I was trembling with more than muscle weakness. It wasn’t only the grandeur, the reaching out and touching an earlier age, the history and aesthetic achievement. Somehow I wanted the Gothic to help give me perspective on the fun house. As I sat quietly, my eyes drawn up to the vast arch, up to the Rose Windows, I thought of American historian Henry Adams’s tribute in his Mont St. Michel and Chartres, a book I loved so much:

  Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that slender nerveure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards of the flying buttress, the visible effort to throw off a visible strain—never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is visibly delicate beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every stone. . . . The delight of its aspirations is flung up to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish of doubt is buried in the earth as its last secret.

  How inspirational these words would turn out to be for my own struggle to maintain an equilibrium in the structure of my life!

  We had planned to go out to dinner that night but I, as usual, was too tired. So I lay, and everyone else sat, in front of the fire. We enjoyed some excellent wine and delicacies from the charcuterie, topped off with fruit and petit-suisse, for which I had developed a passion. There were all kinds of cheerful toasts to the speedy recovery just around the corner, to the valuable things I would learn and experience here, to Mom’s first trip to Europe, to Nana’s recovery, to Martha’s vocal career and Marge’s year of grace in Paris before she would have to begin teaching.

  As we clinked glasses—mine trembling and spilling a little, as usual—Mom’s eyes misted as she smiled at me. I thought I knew what she was thinking: At least I was alive; I was not in an iron lung; I had walked around the cathedral unaided; I was sitting here clinking a glass with her. Surely the rest would follow. We drank to the next November 1—by which time I would be strong again.

  Though the magnificence of Chartres pervaded our mood and conversation, Mom was leaving the next day. I was already steeling myself for the separation with as many optimistic thoughts as I could
gather together. I was determined not to repeat the crying bout that had followed my father’s departure.

  I waved Mom off as cheerfully as I had Dad, and managed to control the weeping marginally better. But I felt nauseated and anxious almost immediately, feelings that prevailed for several days.

  It was time, I decided, to plunge into what I was here to do—resume my sessions with Mademoiselle. She was delighted to hear from me, and we set a time for the following week. Martha and Marge both rode with me in the taxi to 36 rue Ballu. The celebrated Great Lady of Music welcomed me as warmly as if I had been one of her many beloved godchildren instead of a student who, as I saw it, had made a lot of trouble for her during the summer.

  First, she made sure that I was comfortable, carefully arranging cushions so that I could be in a semi-reclining position. Then, while Martha and Marge went out to explore the neighborhood and find a good café, Mademoiselle and I talked of many things—music and meaning and life and perspective. She talked of her beloved younger sister, Lili, a composer who had died tragically at a tender age. Throughout our conversation, she seemed to be telling me that she considered me worthwhile, even in my present invalid state. Somehow she knew, almost more than I did, that I needed such reassurance.

  Then she sat down at the piano and asked what I would like to “work on.” It was clear that she wanted to know what music would mean the most to me. When I told her that I would find late Beethoven particularly soul-satisfying at present, she suggested that we analyze one of the late piano sonatas. As we started exploring the Opus 109 together, we both forgot everything but the music.

  I wrote to my family later: “During the middle of our session I put my hand behind my back to support it for a minute. When she looked up and saw this she jumped up from her chair and brought over another cushion for me. She said she had forgotten for a moment that I had been sick, and had been conducting the lesson as though I were just a regular student. Isn’t that great?”