The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The three foreigners trooped back inside. Soon came the sound of muffled laughter and once again ambiguous shadows lunged and melded on the garden wall. Some random notes were played on the piano and then came singing: the man, the two girls, loud giggles. This sort of music didn’t strike the watchers as quite so alien. You could hear noises like these when you tuned in the wrong station on the radio. That earlier stuff without the human voice was like nothing on earth. Reluctantly they turned back to the remains of the Mirinda, now flat and warm. A curious depression had swept up over them, as if the easterly zephyrs which had earlier brought the scent of citrus groves had backed and was now the carrier of a mephitic listlessness. Ibrahim turned off Cairo Radio to save the batteries. Nobody objected.

  ‘If they’re singing they can’t be having sex.’

  ‘Probably not.’ This was slightly consoling.

  Low on the eastern horizon a bright light appeared, flaring and trembling like a diamond on a jeweller’s cushion. An American Air Force transport banking into its final approach.

  ‘I’ll ask him tomorrow,’ said Muntasser at length. ‘“Please close your windows, Mr Tim, when you play your piano at night. There are young children in the house trying to sleep.” He speaks quite good Arabic. He’s always very reasonable.’

  ‘Pah,’ said Ibrahim. He gathered up his radio. ‘We shan’t meet here again. It’s too unsafe. It’s not your fault, Muntasser. A man must live somewhere. Who was to know a foreigner would choose to live here instead of in Garden City?’

  Muntasser let him out again, carrying the crate of empties with the radio on top. The bare hallway echoed to the singing behind the door of the ground floor flat. Outside the building Ibrahim found a vast American car whose rump sprouted fishing-rod aerials. The Egyptian climbed mournfully into the borrowed Fiat, belching orange-flavoured carbon dioxide which made his eyes water. He started the car and drove off. Not unsafe, he corrected himself mentally. The building was less unsafe than contaminated. He wished the man Tim hadn’t spoken so fondly of Egypt. He would pass on a word or two about him. If he’d really sat around in Cairo hotels with Heikal he was working for somebody. He would need watching.

  And that went equally for this Baḥḥ … Whatever it might be – sexual practice, social convention, cultural tradition – it represented an area of unease. He must discover as soon as possible what it was without revealing a degree of ignorance that might provoke scorn. As he drove slowly down towards the seafront Ibrahim found all his own uncertainty and cross-purposes, his hardness towards nations and his softness towards people, had coalesced around this mysterious Baḥḥ until it took on the threat of ruination. He suddenly realised he wanted a woman, right now, something swift and clear and absorbing to drive away the evening’s unease. There ought to be some Syrian whores in the maidan. It was no fun being in exile, seconded by one’s government to teach for a pittance in what was frankly a benighted backwater, far away from wife and family. Another two whole years … He wished the Englishman hadn’t mentioned Groppi’s. The famous Cairo café painfully reminded Ibrahim of his favourite Alexandria watering-holes: Pastroudis and the Hotel Cecil; the Crazy Horse nightclub on Ramleh Square with Dr Alky and his band, The Frogs, accompanying oriental dances …

  Well, he thought as he turned westward along the seafront to the older part of town, it would soon be time for action. Some of his own students were raring to go. It was a matter of selecting targets. Oil company offices, lone American servicemen, those fatherless Italian slavers on their estates. What was that place Tim had said the British went to at night? The Elizabethan Club. When that went up in flames, Ibrahim reflected, it ought to take a tidy bit of Baḥḥ with it … But just then his attention was diverted by the strollers along the sea-wall. Failing a Syrian whore there was always one of those rich foreign men in tight white trousers simply begging for it.

  Sidonie Kleist

  SINCE I’M a prisoner of Chinese nuns, let us examine the double entendres of the words ‘cell’, ‘asylum’, and ‘sanctuary’ … No, on second thoughts let’s just describe the calendar on the wall. It would gladden the heart of any musician, being inscribed with the name ‘C-sharp Spectacle Co.’. The days and months are in both Chinese and Roman: good-luck red in the case of the Chinese and mournful blue for the Roman lettering, which maybe has something to say about Eastern optimism and Western pessimism, hope and nostalgia, looking forwards and looking back. In any case the bilingual, bi-cultural efficiency is further enhanced by the industriousness suggested in a running legend ‘Sun Wah Tsui Optical Laboratories’ and a Hong Kong address. Why, then, did these nifty entrepreneurs – whom I visualise seeing sharply ahead through a pair of their own spectacles – provide their calendar with a picture so fatally tainted with backwardness?

  It is a colour photograph, about a foot square, of a model Nativity scene (plaster? plastic?) of which only the foreground is in focus. Clumps of ferns, unquestionably plastic and of that virulent green of children’s drinks, surround a sort of coral outcrop. Against this is posed a shiny pink putto with a heavily made-up face, rouged nipples too high up its chest and wearing a pair of golden knickers which mercifully hide what would otherwise be chubby and winsome genitalia. From this horrid infant’s curls grows a fringe of gilded antlers, presumably beams of glory, and on one upraised palm sits a white pigeon. Boy and bird are gazing at each other with sickly intimacy. Try as we might, we can’t convince ourselves that the kid is going to wring the animal’s neck and give it to his soft-focus mother in the background to cook for lunch. Nor do we imagine the bird is going to have the wit to shit on this frightful effigy as its living counterparts do on statues the world over to show nature’s contempt for human hubris.

  How vile the Holy Family was, is, and always will be. Imagine: this rancid scene claims to depict the home life of the Lord of the Universe, guaranteeing that anyone with the slightest taste takes her devotional custom elsewhere. I know little enough about Islam but I do know it has the decorum to outlaw representations of God. I also know, from the days when it was still possible for an American woman to wander in Iran, how breathtakingly beautiful were the abstract designs in many mosques: intellectual and aesthetic riches which constantly drew the mind outwards. By contrast this iconography of the basic domestic unit is the debased fag-end of Renaissance shlock, a sort of idealised quattrocento Italian famiglia: kiddie-widdie, daddy-waddy, wifey-poo. All that’s lacking is a doggy-woggy, though there are baa-lambs and, of course, the representation of the Holy Spirit as potential Sunday roast. I’m fed up from ass to tonsils with Renaissance art. All of it.

  So what happens when you’re a professional concert pianist and you wake up one day to discover you’re irrevocably out of love with your own culture? Oh, never mind the cuisine and the sexual customs; I mean the arts, the whole grand European edifice which supposedly speaks for the world’s zillions. What happened in my case was that I froze in the middle of Beethoven’s Fourth piano concerto and had to be carried offstage like Euridice to Hades while Orpheus – temporarily disguised as Chou Mei Ling, the conductor – gazed after me with helpless consternation. That I do remember. Less clear is the series of darkened rooms through which I passed en route to this airy retreat and/or prison high above Kwun Tong. ‘Gastric collapse’, the South China Morning Post called it, having been told to, since nervous breakdowns are as impermissible onstage as technical ones. ‘A spiritual crisis’, cheerfully says Sister Lotus Blossom who brings me pots of green tea. She’s not really called that, I’m just mocking my upbringing. She’s sweet and has those spectacles (quite possibly in C sharp) which nuns always seem to wear: nearly rimless except for bits of gold wire. My fingers itch to lift them off her nose like a Cary Grant businessman in a Hollywood movie (‘Why, Sister, has anybody ever told you how beautiful you are?’) and replace them with silver-coated microcorneal lenses, sexy and sinister. In my next incarnation I’m definitely not going to be lesbian. It was a category thrust upon me by the t
imes in which I lived, as were ‘American’ and ‘concert pianist’. Next time I shall be a free agent in a frontierless world. My disgust with the familial will make a good start.

  Why should a brief account of my personal crise be of the least interest? Yet Mother Ignatia insists on it since I can’t at the moment talk. Or won’t; I myself don’t know which. Evidently my sudden refusal to make public sounds goes further than merely abandoning my career in a minor key, unable even to begin the Finale. Ignatia’s a very sensible person and wants at all costs to keep me out of the hands of psychiatrists. ‘What do they understand about art?’ she asks. ‘They think despair is just a matter of chemical imbalance. Are we to dissolve our grief and remorse with little pills? Perhaps Beethoven would never have written his music if he’d been fed little pills.’ This is quite likely but so what? If little pills can stop people being unhappy then I’m all for them even if it means fewer concertos. In any case Mother Iggy knows the details of my ‘collapse’ and attaches great importance to them. ‘Why that piece?’ she keeps asking. ‘Why there, just before the last movement? Go on, write it down. You’ve all the time in the world.’

  And so I look back, and reflect on the consequences of looking back, even as I move about my pleasant white dungeon gazing now at the fearful calendar and now out of the window at the restless construction site which is the latest New World. Even for Mother Iggy I can’t summon the energy to put down yet again a version of the autobiography which satisfies those journalists who do their profiles of concert hall artists. They accord much significance to the prodigy in plaits, the school prizes, the Juilliard moppet, the Big Break. I don’t say this person never existed or the facts are incorrect; she did but she wasn’t me, they aren’t incorrect but neither are they truthful. Sidonie Kleist the pianist is not Sidonie Kleist the speechless captive of the Order of Intercessionists in Hong Kong.

  My Doubts (and even I can’t avoid the religious overtones of a faltering faith) began in earnest with the aforesaid Big Break. This was a recording of Beethoven’s Fourth piano concerto – what else? – for whose ludicrous success I can’t offer a unitary explanation. Okay, it was an interesting if mannered reading of the work but it was packaged: that’s the only phrase for it. For a start, the posters showed a larger version of the picture on the CD which pretty much broke with tradition. In it I’m not gazing meditatively into a grand piano, or conferring between takes with a shirtsleeved conductor. It was actually a holiday photo taken on a visit to Arran. I’m sitting on a creel in a pretty granite harbour, gutting fish. I’m caught in the act, bloody fingers inside a mackerel, wicked knife in one hand, a drool of intestines hanging towards my lap. I happened that day (which was unseasonably hot) to be wearing a Juilliard T-shirt, the only overt link with music in the picture. I don’t know why the photo was so effective, though I’ve been told it tapped into a certain feminist current, the notion of specifically female readings of the classical repertoire, since it purported to show a capable individual neither squeamish nor frightened of cutting her delicate, highly insured digits. A change from the usual fragile warriors of the keyboard? Who knows?

  What I do know about my performance, retrospectively, is that it was even more artful than the choice of the picture. I should like the bandwagon-load of critics who praised it so extravagantly to know that it was as molecularly engineered as any new pharmaceutical. What is incredible to me now is that in some peculiar fashion I managed to conceal this from myself. I really believed I was turning in an original performance, a vision of Beethoven uniquely mine. Bullshit. I already had an established career, of course; the fact that I was under contract to a record company meant I’d jumped that first hurdle and no longer needed to worry about doing sessions work for a living. The big league was the next stage and I was being groomed for it. Whether pre- or post-grooming, anyway, it’s a romantic fiction to pretend one’s account of any piece of music with almost two centuries of performance behind it can ever be uniquely one’s own.

  I don’t know how much of a music buff Mother Ignatia is, so can’t guess whether she’ll be shocked to discover how cynically that recording of mine was prepared. For a start we have to dodge uneasily around the question which becomes more insistent year by year: Who needs another recording of Beethoven 4? Or his symphonies, violin concerto or whatever? Or hundreds of other works, come to that, from Pachelbel’s canon (I think its popularity was just a fad) to Brahms 1 and 4? So what new could anybody say about the Beethoven G major? Because this is the point, obviously. With God knows how many recordings of B4 being released each year to compete for attention you’ve got to have an angle, what the ad industry calls a Unique Selling Point. I happened to have been reading Owen Jander and was talking about the concerto in terms of programme music. The producer latched on to this pretty fast, scenting a USP. It’s programme music? You mean like the Pastoral symphony? So I gave them this spiel about the contemporary fascination in Vienna with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Orphic legend in particular, and how Beethoven himself became interested enough to write his concerto so that its three movements corresponded to the legend’s three parts: the Song of Orpheus, Orpheus losing Euridice in Hades and Orpheus and the Bacchantes.

  ‘Go for it!’ he said. ‘It’s always called his most lyrical piano concerto. You can major in that.’

  ‘Lyres?’ I said. ‘How would it he if I spread that first chord as an arpeggio instead of playing it cold? Like this …’

  Agent, producer, conductor: they all loved it, especially after some scholarly argy-bargy about authenticity. This performance was going to be different, right from the first chord. As for the second movement, that was a knockout. No longer was it abstract music, a stark dialogue between orchestra and piano. This was human drama, really operatic in its recitative effects. Poor Orpheus tries his best to woo the Furies with his fragmented melancholy song, and actually wins Euridice her reprieve. He can bring her up from Hades provided he never looks back to see if she’s following. But of course he does, just as Lot’s wife did, because telling someone not to look back’s like telling her on no account to think of elephants. Is it clear from the music when this fatal moment occurs? You bet it is, in my version. It’s the anguished chromatic scales against a trill on C with the left hand crossing over to make two despairing cries in measures 56–59. After that the passionate lament grows still as the note-values double and redouble, to be followed not by the orchestral Furies howling in triumph as they undoubtedly would have in Berlioz but soft, as if they were stifled by remorse.

  After this emotional climax there is, as always, the problem of the Finale. Not just a problem for us performers, either. It was a problem for composers from Haydn on: how to follow a really serious slow movement without destroying its effect. For example, people have bent over backwards to convince late-twentieth-century ears that there isn’t a degree of galant triviality in the last movement of Mozart’s G minor string quintet; that its emotionally neutral, tripping lyricism really is the perfect foil to the most despairing music he ever wrote, the most nihilistic in the whole Western canon. So what to do with the Beethoven Finale? My – or our – answer was to play it slightly hushed, to dim the glitter, restrain the romp. We scrupulously observed all Beethoven’s sforzandos and orchestral outbursts, since violence was an integral part of his aesthetic; but they were relative rather than absolute. After all, nobody comes too well out of the original story. Euridice is lost for ever in Hades; the Bacchantes destroy Orpheus and are promptly punished by being turned into oak trees. The story may be muffled in tone but it’s violent in import and that’s the effect of my performance.

  The critics ate it. Recording of the Year. Awards, acclaim. Ominous signs that Beethoven 4 might become known as ‘Orpheus’, much as Mozart 21 became temporarily known by the name of an otherwise forgettable movie. Engagements. More specifically, requests which – had I agreed to them – would have had me playing the concerto 528 times worldwide in two years. At that moment I began to
take seriously the fate, or triumph, of Glenn Gould who from the time his first recording of it was released could have made a handsome living playing nothing but the Goldberg Variations. Gould’s a figure with whom every pianist sooner or later has to come to terms since his career, whizzing wilfully along at a seeming tangent to everyone else’s, still managed to whack head-on into major questions such as whether public performance is necessary or desirable, or if an ideal performance can be recorded by constructing it piecemeal from a mass of short takes. These issues are so radical and so germane that it suddenly seemed Gould might after all be the central figure among the last half-century’s performers while everyone else was marginal in their avoidance of them.

  An hour ago Sister Lotus Blossom took me to see Mother Iggy who smiled and asked if I might as a great favour play the harmonium for Compline. I truly hoped to smile as much as she, but try as I would I couldn’t make either my mouth or my fingers move. Experimentally she laid my hands on the keys and switched the thing on with a little gassy roar for, incredible though it may seem, this Hong Kong order has no Yamaha keyboard, all lights and buttons, but a genuine pre-war Hammond with chunky stops labelled Vox Humana and Dulciana. When nothing happened she switched off.

  ‘That was stupid of me,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know why I did that. If you’d been able to play would I pretend you were “cured” now, that everything was back to normal? I think it’s a cliché taken from the cinema’ (you can tell these Hong Kong nuns have been British-educated), ‘this idea that when someone has an accident or a collapse they have to resume their old life as soon as possible. But maybe Sidonie Kleist should never play again. Maybe God has other plans for her.’

  Oh, they’re crafty, these religious. Until that final sentence I’d been thinking what an uncommonly sensible person she was. But with that little sally about God I tried everything I knew to voice the repartee which ached to come out. Alas, nothing came. I’m not even sure my mouth opened. Inwardly, I had my question perfectly formed: Had I been one of her Sisters who’d suddenly lost her faith would Mother Ignatia say, ‘Oh, never mind, my dear. Maybe it’s God’s way of telling you to become an atheist’?