To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  Beyond his room was a smaller room with a screen that was meant to shield the language teacher who lived there. Visually, it served its purpose, but this woman was a concentration camp survivor. Whenever we knocked at her door, the knock would set off her startle-reflex, and she would give a little cry along with several terrified gasps, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, uhhh, uhhhhhhh . . .” before she could utter the words “Who’s there?” as if she feared the worst, and we might be the Gestapo.

  Once she knew who it was, she would calm down and beg us to proceed to our rooms. I started calling to her first, “Frau Professor, it’s Carol here,” and following my announcement with a gentle knock. She came to know our voices, which cut down on the daily trauma. Sometimes she would open the door herself, with a warm greeting, and, I’m sure, relief that it was friend, not foe.

  I soon became acquainted with Sieghart, the chemistry student. He was a thin, intense young man with a courtly manner and a deep voice. He studied in his room a great deal but was as eager to practice his English as I was my German. He usually won, as he had studied English for many years. In one of our conversations in English, Sieghart referred to our landlady, Frau Leber, as “Mrs. Liver”—a literal translation of her German name. The first time he did this, I couldn’t stop laughing; so any time he wanted to make me laugh, he would refer to “Mrs. Liver.”

  Sieghart was in love with history and tradition and was a flesh-and-blood guidebook to Vienna. He wanted to show me everything about this city he knew so well—both in actuality and from the multitude of books he had read on every aspect of its history. By now, Martha had enrolled in the Academy and was out much of the time, so Sieghart invited me on his many expeditions. He never tired of planning, and I always had to cut his plan down to a fraction of what he had in mind if he wanted me to go along. He knew that I had been ill and was very solicitous, but couldn’t quite grasp the limitations of my endurance. I saw only the first room of many museums in Vienna.

  I was beginning to have episodes of feeling faint and breaking out in a cold sweat, while at the same time feeling ravenous. Sieghart thought it must have something to do with blood sugar. Perhaps I wasn’t careful enough about my nutrition? I countered that I ate much better than he did. But after that discussion, Sieghart and I began poring over books on food content, making lists and tables of the cheapest ways to obtain the most nutrients. We began to eat many of our meals together. I had found my first new friend since my illness—someone who had not known me BP (Before Polio). It was curious to find someone who accepted me as I was now, a damaged person so unlike my former self.

  Sieghart was in many ways more at home with his books and in his re-creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than he was in the present and in a personal relationship. There was always a certain distance, a certain reserve. But it was just this reserve that enabled us to be friends, although I didn’t realize it at the time. He didn’t find me strange, because he hadn’t known many girls outside of his sisters. Anything American fascinated him. He didn’t think of me as an out-of-commission concert pianist or as someone weak and ill. He thought of me as an American girl visiting Vienna who had been ill in some way and couldn’t do much, but who wanted to learn all about Austrian culture. Sieghart wasn’t someone with whom I could share my anguish at what had happened. But he accepted me as I was. Though I didn’t like that polio-girl at all, I was grateful to him for accepting her with such kindness.

  Meanwhile, Martha was reveling in her work at the Academy, convinced that she had found the greatest voice teacher in the world. Elisabeth Radó had trained, and continued to coach, some of the singers we heard all the time at the Staatsoper. In Martha’s first few lessons, Radó already had pinpointed some of her vocal problems. I was fascinated, and followed every step of her progress.

  I had rented an old upright with a mute on it so that, as I wrote to my family: “I can practice my ugly-sounding exercises in the morning without bothering anyone, including myself.”

  As part of these exercises, I used patterns from pieces I had once played, trying to recapture even the smallest vestige of coordination. As I labored away, I found that with a series of jabs with my whole body and jerks of the elbow and throwing of the whole wrist, I could push down a series of keys. The true neuromuscular channels were closed off. Gone was the old familiar open-handed feeling of being at home on the keyboard. It was as if I had to shut off any natural flow at all—almost shutting out the music itself—in order to deal with the situation.

  The action on the old upright was feather-light, and that helped. My left hand was the more uncoordinated of the two hands, and since it was the weaker, it tired more quickly than the right. None of the snatches of music that I tried to “play” in this fashion sounded like music, but I felt I must persist. Surely I would be getting stronger any day now.

  I wanted to attend the Baroque seminar at the Academy. I needed to learn more about Baroque style anyway, and decided that I might as well do it while I couldn’t be playing the piano for real. One day I went over to the Academy with Martha, and found my way to the studio of the harpsichord and Baroque music professor, Eta Harich-Schneider. She was a lovely, kind-eyed woman with soft white hair and a gentle voice, and happened to have a little time in between lessons to speak with me. She spoke excellent English, and her manner was so sympathetic that I decided to tell her my story. By the time I finished I didn’t have to explain to her what my difficulties would be in studying with her. She understood.

  “You will have to audition in order to study with me through the Academy,” she explained.

  “But I can’t play at all!” I said, immediately gathering my things for a hasty retreat as I felt the all-too-familiar, and still uncontrollable, tears coming perilously close to the surface. The “jangled” condition, as Dr. Lipsitch had described it, had not faded. Post-traumatic stress disorder was a term that hadn’t yet been invented.

  “That’s all right,” Harich-Schneider assured me quickly. “Just do anything at all and I’ll accept you. It’s just a formality.”

  One of the musical patterns I had been using to develop my push, jab, and jerk technique was the opening of the Bach E-Major Concerto. I decided that I would “audition” with that, and refuse to play more than the first few phrases, pretending I had forgotten the rest.

  The audition was one of many nightmarish sequences that were becoming commonplace. Harich-Schneider and the president of the Academy were seated in a room that housed a piano and a harpsichord. I had played a harpsichord a few times in past years and knew that any harpsichord action would be considerably lighter than the piano. I also had a strategy.

  I explained that I had been ill and had not played the piano for many months, and that I was still not able to work at the piano. I wanted to become acquainted with the harpsichord while I was regaining my strength.

  “I cannot play the piano for you,” I said in a shaking voice and with considerable understatement, “since it isn’t up to my standard. But I will play a little Bach on the harpsichord.”

  The president of the Academy looked puzzled and said something to Harich-Schneider I couldn’t understand. She responded with something that I couldn’t understand and nodded at me encouragingly. I sat down at the harpsichord and began pushing, jerking, and jabbing at the opening of the concerto. It sounded, of course, appalling. I stumbled and had to start again, but soon Harich-Schneider stopped me.

  I still wonder at the audacity—and willingness to be humiliated—on the part of that partially paralyzed creature sitting at a keyboard in front of the two expert musicians. I must have retreated from reality in allowing myself to get up in front of Harich-Schneider and stumble and thump around as if I were a total stranger to the keyboard. I must have been pushed into it by my own desperation. It seemed unreal, nightmarish; but then, everything seemed so at that time.

  My excuse about being “thrown off ” because I was unfamiliar with the harpsichord must have been at least fa
intly plausible, because the president of the Academy left it up to Harich-Schneider whether or not to accept this person who was clearly unfit for admission. She, as promised, accepted me. The whole episode had been so traumatic that I didn’t even attempt to describe it in my letter home, knowing it would upset my family. I wrote only: “Yesterday was my audition for entrance into the Academy. I was, as you can imagine, feeling a little handicapped. However, I am accepted, so all is well. The harpsichord teacher is very nice and speaks excellent English.”

  My lessons with Harich-Schneider, unlike the audition, were relaxed. Her joy in the music itself, along with her sense of humor, prevailed. I loved her decision to assign descriptive titles to the Bach Inventions and Sinfonias. “Well,” she said, “the French Baroque composers gave descriptive names to their short pieces, so why can’t we do the same with Bach?”

  Harich-Schneider had begun her career in Germany but left abruptly in 1940. She had been a professor at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik (Music Academy) in Berlin, but had been dismissed and threatened when she had refused to join the Nazi party. As she described it, a group of young storm troopers came into her studio and threw her music scores onto the floor, muttering contemptuously to each other “Opusmusik!” (“Opus music,” i.e., classical music with opus numbers.) She had fled to Tokyo, where she had already been invited to teach. In 1949, she had moved to New York, where she taught privately, perfected her English, and pursued studies in other fields that interested her, such as sociology. When the Occupation forces finally left Vienna in 1955, she had accepted a teaching post at the Academy.

  As it had been with Boulanger, our sessions were mostly paper-and-pencil study: suggestions from her and questions from me about registrations, embellishments, and ways of articulating this or that passage. She suggested that I participate in the Baroque seminar and assured me that I could come when I felt up to it. After the first class, I found that I couldn’t sit up for the whole period in the stiff wooden chairs, so I would either come late and stay to the end, or I would leave when I was tired. Many times, I didn’t come at all, if my back was too tired or if I couldn’t face the morale-lowering that I felt whenever I was around the other students. There was a hierarchy in the seminar, and those who were the best performers or who did the most interesting musicological research controlled the group. I had never seen a class from that diminished point of view before—I had always been on the other end of the totem pole.

  I was not relegated to the usual European stereotype of “stupid American,” at least to my face, but tried to intercede when it happened to others. One American girl in our harpsichord class had not been in Vienna long and was not used to German language protocol. She came from the South, so of course her instinct was to call Professor Harich-Schneider the literal equivalent of “Ma’am”—which would have been correct in French, but was hilarious in German. “Frau . . .” she addressed Harich-Schneider one day (that was the equivalent of saying “Woman . . .”). Snickers, giggles and laughs rippled through the class as she went on to her question, and I felt sure she had no idea what was wrong. After class, I explained that she should say “Frau Professor” or “Gnädige Frau” (honored lady) if the person was not a professor.

  In general, I felt isolated among the other students in the harpsichord seminar, but stubbornly persisted in attending as much as my back would tolerate until one unforgettable day.

  Each harpsichord student was allowed an hour per day of practice time on the instrument. I signed up for my time and went whenever I felt up to it, but the other students had found out that I often didn’t use my time. When I did come to practice, I would usually find someone there who would then leave either reluctantly or graciously, depending on the person.

  One day I arrived at the beginning of my hour and started working on a passage of a Bach suite for which I was trying to figure out registrations. Another student opened the door, frowned when she saw me there, and then came on in. I said that I was using my time today. She said that she had been planning to practice this hour and sat down at the clavichord, which was on the opposite wall from the harpsichord. Was she waiting for me to finish, I wondered?

  I felt I couldn’t work with her sitting there, but was afraid of bursting into tears if I tried to insist on my rights. Maybe she felt that I was not a real student, someone scarcely worth noticing. I decided to brazen it out and started working at the passage I was trying to play when she had come in. Then, I heard another Bach piece being played on the clavichord. I couldn’t believe it. She was ignoring me, and had simply started practicing.

  I couldn’t trust myself to ask her to stop. I couldn’t do anything but gather my sheet music and get out of the room as quickly as possible. I managed to keep back the tears until I was out of sight. If she had told me that I was some substandard creature, I couldn’t have felt lower. From having been an exciting new talent on the horizon a year before, I was now less than nothing. Even Harich-Schneider’s special treatment was powerless to keep me from feeling almost subhuman. This was the “happy student life” I wrote home about.

  I was starting to recognize that strength in my hands, arms, and shoulders was not going to come back easily. The “keep trying” motto, which I followed despite constant aches and pains, wasn’t getting me very far as I worked at the muted upright in my room. I began making inquiries about a doctor who could help, knowing my parents would approve. I described the resulting treatments rather fully to them in successive letters:

  Have finally found a doctor here—a Dr. Schmid. He examined me, and then next week I go to the hospital for muscle-tone tests. He thinks I need massage first. He told me that we can’t begin with the treatments right away because the muscles can react badly if everything hasn’t settled down. But he took a blood test, and thinks it is time now.

  My tests at the hospital were not very pleasant. They give you a series of stronger and stronger electric shock type things; and then when you jump a bit from the shock they tell you to relax and lie still. I could be sound asleep, and if someone gave me an electric shock I’d jump, wouldn’t you? Dr. Schmid and I are going to discuss the report on Thursday.

  I’m having three treatments a week. Massage of my upper back, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers by a wonderful masseur, Herr Wilhelm. He and I speak German together, which is fun for me and amusing for him. He recommended that I get a little ball and see how many times a day I could squeeze it; so I am, and I think it’s going to help. It seems to be about time for such things.

  Herr Wilhelm made a little contraption for me out of rubber cord and a pulley. I attached it to a hook here in my room, and just pull it back and forth. It’s fairly high up, so it exercises both the muscles that pull down and the muscles that pull out. He has me doing other exercises, too. The rubber ball routine is wonderful. Every time he sees me he asks how many times I can squeeze the thing in succession.

  I’m having treatments galore. In the latest, my hand is immersed in a basin of water, and then electric current is turned on. This is known as galvanization. I also have a pack-type thing strapped onto my back. That’s galvanization too. Then I take the thing I described to you as in the muscle-tone tests and proceed to shock myself in four places in my hand. This lasts for ten minutes. Fortunately, I only go for this treatment twice a week. My massage and radar treatments are three times a week. Dr. Schmid thinks these things will speed up progress, and that it is time to do so. Even after all this time, some muscles in my arms are sore to massage, though they will strengthen now, I’m sure.

  The galvanization is from ten to twenty mA (milli-amperes). The “shocks,” as I call it, are direct current. It goes to fifty V and lasts for half a second. I think that’s right but I’m not certain, since my German is a little shaky yet, and I could have misunderstood. If that’s enough to electrocute me then obviously I’ve quoted the wrong figures.

  For the first time, I began to think and talk more about the immensity of the rebuilding process I
felt compelled to undertake. Even though I was seeing only the tip of the iceberg, the mission was more frightening than I could admit. Every physical move I made at the piano was bewildering, since none of the usual impulses produced corresponding sounds or combinations of sounds. Ever. . . . Before polio, when I had a musical thought, that concept could remain in my imagination, guiding me to carry it out on the piano. But after polio, the moment I heard myself attempt to reproduce what I had just imagined, it would disappear. Soon the tears would come, and I would have to stop for a while.

  It was hopeless doing much work on passages from my solo repertoire, but I found that I could be helpful to Martha. BP, I had often played song accompaniments with singer friends, in addition to playing chamber music with other instrumentalists. Now, I found that I could still work out some way to indicate the general idea of a song accompaniment. For Martha’s purposes in learning a song or an aria, it didn’t matter how much of the accompaniment I could play, as long as there was a general outline or approximately the right harmony. So I used her song accompaniments as my étude material—things to work out with my push and jab and shove-with-the-back technique. I welcomed opera arias, since the accompaniment was one step further removed from piano playing. Piano reductions of orchestral scores were often awkward, anyway. I could attribute some of my awkwardness to the reductions, rather than to my own almost-useless hands.

  I was playing with everything but my nose in order to get some keys down at approximately the right time. In this bumbling fashion, Martha and I went through some opera roles she wanted to learn, as well as songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf. We went over the texts and discussed their meanings as our German improved. I knew that no matter how inadequate the playing was, the study itself was helpful to Martha and fascinating to me.

  With my interest both in the opera and Martha’s vocal repertoire, I began to pump her for details about her voice lessons, which were often in master-class form, so that students could listen to each other and to Radó’s comments. One day a telephone call came for Martha, canceling an appointment she had immediately after her voice lesson. But I couldn’t get through to anyone at the Academy who would guarantee to give her the message. I was going over to practice harpsichord anyway, so I decided to go early and stop by with the message.