Nana had been strong, spiritually and emotionally. She knew how to get a lot of joy out of life and how to savor the simplest things. When I was still so weakened and seemingly without ballast, just the thought that she was there, even halfway around the world, had been sustaining. I had felt that I was discovering part of Nana’s root system in Central Europe, and therefore part of my own. But now the flower of those roots had died. I wondered what I was doing in Vienna that was so important that I couldn’t have gone home, that I couldn’t have seen her once again. The “defeat” part of “going home in defeat” suddenly seemed less important. Nana and my mother had been very close, and I knew that Mom would be in a state of deep grief. Was my “keep trying” program more important than that? Maybe I should give up, after all, and go back to be with her.
But the letters that came from my mother, with added notes from my father, described wholehearted support from friends and neighbors. Thoughtfully anticipating how I would be feeling, they expressed ongoing interest in whatever was happening in Vienna. They were making it clear that they wanted me to stay if something there was contributing to my recovery.
One day in early 1957, as I was leaving Harich-Schneider’s studio after the Baroque seminar, I saw an announcement for an analytical lecture on the Beethoven Piano Sonata Opus 57, “Appassionata,” and decided to check it out. I sat in the back of the room, near the door, where I could leave unobtrusively if the sadness took over, or if my muscles started telling me that they’d had more than enough for the day.
The professor, Franz Eibner, was drawing an elaborate graph of the entire first movement of the sonata. This wasn’t just a variant of the usual vertical analysis of harmonic progressions taught in typical music theory classes. Here, the professor was picturing horizontal motion representing the grand design, the overall tonal structure of the entire ten-minute first movement. In blueprint fashion, spare single tones represented the tonal direction. The lines representing horizontal motion intersected at the principal harmonic goal posts, so that the vertical harmonic events were also represented, but in the context of the horizontal movement. It was a dazzling view of the underpinnings of Beethoven’s tonal architecture.
The professor’s blueprint-after-the-fact of Beethoven’s genius creation was thrilling and struck me as something of import, as Boulanger’s sessions had done in Paris. The graph expressed the underlying tension, forward motion, and breadth I had always responded to in great classical music, and had tried to express when I performed such piano works.
Clearly, this architectural analysis was in tune with a performer’s intuition. The graph of the first movement represented the tonal structure of the music as being in motion from the first note to the last. Traditional music theory analyzed classical structure on a mostly vertical basis and had always felt static to me.
Professor Eibner explained that this analytic technique had been devised by a great scholar-musician named Heinrich Schenker, and that he, Eibner, was one of Schenker’s “disciples.” The disciples called themselves “Die Schenkern” (“The Schenkerites”), and Eibner was spreading the word under the auspices of the Academy.
Schenker Theory courses were divided into three levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. Over the next few weeks I started to drop in, and stay as long as I felt up to it, during all three courses. It didn’t matter which level I was auditing: Each discussion not only included something meaningful to me, but also resonated with my former life as a pianist. The discussions drew me back into that resonance. The graphs represented the glorious tonal events I had wanted to communicate. And if I couldn’t be playing, at least I could be living some magnificent creations in my imagination. I could be feeling them acutely, from the inside, by a different means.
Eibner was tall and wiry, and radiated high intensity. His eyes filled with tears when he got emotional about his subject matter, which happened frequently. One day, when I had felt up to staying until the end of the class, Eibner beckoned to me as the others were leaving. He had noticed that I came intermittently to all three levels and wanted to know a little more about my own field. What was I studying?
“Harpsichord,” I answered. Ah, so I was a harpsichordist. “No,” I replied, “I am actually a pianist, but I’m not studying piano at the Academy.” If that seemed a little strange, he evidently wasn’t bothered by it.
“Well,” he remarked, “you seem to be very interested in Schenker theory! Are you working on something that you’d like to analyze? If so, we can have a private session.” As I hesitated, knowing that what I’d like to bring in would be a piano work, he added: “There is no cost for a private session.”
“Yes, Herr Professor,” I answered. “I’d like to work on the Opus 111.” Beethoven’s final piano sonata was almost sacred to me, and I could think of nothing I’d rather work on from this unique perspective.
So our private sessions started, as I saw it, at the top of the mountain. I ventured a graph of the first few pages and brought it to Eibner at our first session. This did not seem to be what he had expected, but it did seem to excite him. We sat with my manuscript propped up on the piano rack. He scratched his head, tousling his dark hair a bit, and erased some of my suggestions, writing in others. We went back and forth, considering the various levels of tonal importance, sometimes with Eibner erasing and rewriting what he himself had just put in.
From that point on, Eibner gave a generous amount of time to our joint graph creations. I had a private session once a week, on average. In between, I fiddled with the analysis, trying to get at and express the powerful architecture of whatever piece I was analyzing. We went through all three of the late Beethoven sonatas (all sacred to me in various ways), and a number of other works.
The Schenker graphing of important piano works was molding on paper the powerful musical motion I heard in my ear and wanted to recreate in performance, but could no longer attempt at the piano. I was drawing pictures of what I couldn’t do! The graphs addressed the underlying beams and girders and powerful currents of the tonal world of evolved classical music. And “writing” graphs of Beethoven’s music seemed especially satisfying because his structural underpinning has a unique power and dynamism; to me, it is the supreme architecture in tonal music.
Unlike most people I had met in Vienna thus far, Eibner did not speak any English, so my German was making considerable progress. One day a colleague of Eibner’s stopped by his studio-classroom. After a brief exchange, Eibner introduced me and pointed to our joint graph. “Wie das Mädchen schreibt!” (“How the girl writes!”) he said to his colleague. That was the first compliment in German I’d ever received.
At one point, Eibner asked if our work together was having any effect on my piano playing. This was a moment I’d been dreading, as I was afraid that he might dismiss me as someone unworthy of all this attention. I took a deep breath and began to give him an understated and abbreviated version of my story: the paralysis, the present incapacity. I presented these problems as temporary.
Tears came to his eyes as I started to tell him what had happened to me. He turned away from the music rack to face me directly, asking questions about how I was coping with such a devastating blow. After a while he began to talk about his experiences during the war, especially the year just afterward, when public services in Vienna had come to a halt and food was so scarce that many starved to death. He spoke of his beloved young daughter, Agnes, who had become desperately ill one evening. No streetcars were running, so he had no option but to carry her to the hospital in his arms. It was a considerable distance, and Agnes had died before he got there.
We both wept as he told me the tragic story, his devastating “Erlkönig” experience. “Her name was Agnes,” he said, choking on the words. Tears ran down his face. “So close to Agnus . . . She was the Lamb, the innocent sacrifice to war.”
It was a long session that day, a turning point in our relationship. Eibner and I both knew that we had spoken of things not often
communicated with others. I was no longer just the American girl who did interesting graphs, but also someone with devastating life experiences to absorb and process. And he in turn felt comfortable speaking with me about major tragedies that he and his friends and loved ones had endured during the war, which they, too, were still struggling to absorb and process.
My relationship with Eibner represented in some ways my relationship with Vienna itself. The damaged person I had become felt a kinship with the damaged city that had been home to so much great music. Many of the Viennese were reeling from their wartime and postwar experiences, just as I was reeling from the effects of polio. Vienna was important to me symbolically—its damage and great beauty, combined with its passion for music, created a spiritual bond.
In a sense, nothing seemed truly whole except the glory of what happened at the Staatsoper. Martha and I continued to marvel at the consistency of its high artistic standards. Such celebrated music directors as Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan drew great and legendary singers throughout the company’s season. We delighted in the citywide fascination with opera stars—what and when they were singing, if they were in top form, if they had recently been re-studying roles or techniques, and much more.
One of my favorite examples is the day a visiting soprano who was to sing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier that evening suddenly fell ill. The Staatsoper office immediately placed a call to Hilde Konetzni, one of Vienna’s resident star sopranos, who had sung the role hundreds of times and had been accorded the title of Kammersängerin. (Kammersänger and Kammersängerin are the equivalent of a British knighthood; in England, she would have been Dame Hilde Konetzni). When Konetzni did not answer her phone, the Staatsoper put out a news bulletin on the radio: “If anyone sees Frau Kammersängerin Hilde Konetzni, please tell her to call the Staatsoper.” Within minutes, she was spotted at the hairdresser’s and returned the call. Martha and I heard her sing gloriously that night.
On one of the first days of spring, I went for a walk in the Stadtpark, and sat down to rest for a few minutes on one of the park benches. As I looked around, I noticed that the woman who was sitting at the other end of the bench, just a few feet from me, was the great soprano Birgit Nilsson. She looked over, smiled, nodded, and said good day, as I did in return. Then we both just sat there quietly, enjoying the sunshine.
It was sheer magic to share that warm day on the park bench with someone who had inspired such joy and wonder as I had listened to her sing. Birgit Nilsson was supreme in her category; what she had accomplished was rare among generations of great singers. With her gleaming voice, she could make Wagner’s Brünnhilde sound like an energetic, rambunctious youngster. It felt enormously comforting to share such a personal moment, as this magnificent artist relaxed with no incursions into her space. The great stars in Vienna knew that nearly everyone recognized them but would be respectful of their privacy.
As summer drew near, and things would be winding down at the Academy for a couple of months, I decided to go home to Michigan for a visit. Since I was not giving up the struggle, but merely taking a vacation to rest and spend some precious time with my family, I reasoned that no one could consider this “going home in defeat.”
My parents and I were happy and warmed to be together again, and we had a great deal to catch up on. A year and a half had gone by since we had seen each other in France. Transatlantic phone calls had been few and far between because of the expense.
One of the first things my mother and I did was to go together into Nana’s room, our presence there a poignant mixture of tears and smiles. We looked silently out the window from the spot where Nana used to sit with her rosary in hand, gazing at the trees behind the house. While sitting in that spot, Nana had often talked about the flow of life, and in that sense the room was sacred. But my mother also knew that Nana would have liked it to be used for some practical purpose. As a compromise, Mom had brought some of her books and sewing projects into the room, where she could either read or work quietly and feel Nana’s presence.
Dad missed Nana, too. Because they shared a strong, close relationship, I had never understood mother-in-law jokes as I was growing up. Dad had always insisted on Nana’s being part of things and never wanted to start our family dinner until she had joined us. When Nana decided to clean up something in the kitchen before coming to the table, Dad would call to her: “Pani!” (meaning “Ma’am!”—the Polish term of respect he’d learned from his in-law family). That meant “Pani! We’re not complete without you!”
My own room was pretty much as I had left it two years before, which was comforting, since so much else in my life had changed. If I had expected to be jarred by further reminders of the stark difference between who I had been and the damaged person I had become, I hadn’t anticipated how soothing it could be to feel the bonds with my past. When I was in my teens, I would pack into every day an ambitious school curriculum, several hours of piano practice, and a schedule of teaching piano to neighborhood kids. Sometimes I would come up to my room before switching from schoolgirl to pianist or piano teacher and just stare out of the window, letting my mind go blank. If Mom checked to make sure I was OK, I would answer something like “OK! Just resting my mind!” Maybe staring out of that same window could help to “rest” for a few moments the constant stream of anxiety that had begun with the polio attack two years before.
Mom and I had long talks while we relaxed in the sun and took walks, sometimes with another friend from the neighborhood, Reta Simons. Reta’s son, Jay, who had been my younger brother Gary’s classmate in grade school, had paralytic polio as a child. He was one of the youngsters I had thought of the first time the doctor in Paris had mentioned the word “polio” to me. When Jay had returned to school after the attack, he had seemed shaky and easily upset. He would burst into uncontrollable tears at the slightest thing. It hadn’t been general knowledge in the neighborhood that such nervous instability and personality change was a typical result of paralytic polio. It was painful for me to remember the little boy being thought of as a “crybaby,” when I now knew only too well that those crying bouts were impossible to control. Jay’s parents had been staunchly behind him, and I was thrilled to learn from Reta that he was by then doing very well in college.
On evenings and weekends I had good opportunities to catch up with Dad, too, and there were get-togethers with longtime family friends. Bob Schilling, a close friend and business associate of Dad’s, had grown up in Germany, and his wife, Winnie, in England. Mom couldn’t wait to hear Bob and me converse in German, and kept egging us on. It took me a while to figure out why. Yes, it was partly that she had grown up among maternal relatives who spoke Central European languages when they gathered together, but I think it was also partly that she wanted to highlight what the time in Europe was contributing to her daughter’s life.
I had been afraid that getting back to my Steinway A grand, the instrument that had been part of my life for so many years, would be particularly painful. But after a few days I found that I had formed as tolerable a relationship as possible with any instrument at that point. Mom tactfully focused on the simple fact that I was once again able to work at the keyboard. This was a vast improvement from what she had seen and heard on the rue Donizetti in Paris.
She understood that the work I was doing was partly mental and partly a “keep trying” gesture. She also understood that the mental component drew me especially to the music of Bach. Bredshall had characterized the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues as his clear “desert island” pick; and Aitken had once made a statement I’d often quoted to her: “Bach knew everything.” I also showed her a couple of graphs of late Beethoven sonata movements, from my work with Eibner, which she found fascinating. She heard me working on little bits from those late sonatas and knew that they were a special goal for me, as I dreamed into the future.
Mom had found a highly recommended physical medicine center where we could consult with a Dr. Fleming, who had a fine reputation
for his work with polio patients. When I met the doctor, all seemed to be going predictably as he and his assistant took my medical history and put me through the usual muscle tests. He asked questions that were by then familiar to me, and I showed him the exercises I was doing, recommended by Dr. Schmid in Vienna. Though he found the exercises appropriate, he seemed surprised that I was even trying to play the piano. He gave me the same advice that I’d heard from the doctors in Paris and Vienna—to be glad I could walk and do many “normal” things, and to focus on living a “normal” life. But he seemed to be saying more strongly than the other doctors that I should try to find an area of activity that did not require highly skilled piano playing. His assistant accidentally left the exam room door slightly ajar as they left, and I heard Dr. Fleming say, “The world is full of ’em. Somebody should tell her!”
Full of aspiring pianists? I wondered. But a moment later, I realized that his medical world overflowed with damaged people who were simply learning how to live the kind of lives they could manage. I had a sick feeling in my stomach. It was like overhearing someone say that your life is over.
My parents commented on the range of things that appeared visibly improved since they had seen me in France. I didn’t have to pretend or write fantasy letters to them because they could see some tangible improvement, even though I clearly had a considerable distance to go. We had frank discussions of the pros and cons of my returning to Vienna for another year; and they left it up to me to decide what to do. Dr. Fleming hadn’t come up with a treatment plan that looked as if it might make a difference, and I felt that I had more to learn from Eibner and Harich-Schneider. The three of us agreed that I might as well return to the Academy for one more year, in the “keep trying” mode.
Back in Vienna, I felt that the summer vacation with my parents had given me a good start, and I approached the Schenker study and Baroque study and seminar with renewed determination. Soon I was back to pushing my narrow limits—and beginning to feel the physical consequences once again. But I accepted the now-familiar pattern as a current fact of my life.
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