The Virtuoso

by Sonia Orchard

  My father first told me this story when I was eleven. Perhaps I was too young to understand, but he had no one else who would listen. My aunt had little interest in music, and my father’s colleagues at the Home Office would have been horrified to hear of his love for Wagner, whose music was performed at Nazi party rallies and functions, and who had been officially condemned by the British government and recently banned from radio broadcast.

  My father knew that I loved hearing his stories of Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, Schubert and the other great German composers, and it is his storytelling I remember most vividly about him. Sitting in front of the fire after dinner while my aunt washed up and the last broadcast came to a crackling close, he’d lift from his reverie, lean in towards me and start up—‘Did I ever tell you about the year Chopin travelled to Paris?’—as if he were recalling his own adolescence. He had told me every story a dozen or more times, but I always replied no, as it was the only time, other than when absorbed in his music, that I ever recall seeing my father truly happy or interested in anything or anyone at all. His bushy eyebrows would dance about his forehead, and he’d become so animated and carried away with his tale that his pipe, grafted into his palm the rest of the day, would be left to smoulder on the side table, releasing a fine stream of smoke like a fluttering veil up to the ceiling, which over the years formed a sepia cloud above where he sat, a mark that my aunt, with steel wool and curses, wasn’t ever able to remove.

  These stories became the fabric of my relationship with my father. Each composer became a dear uncle, their legends both as fantastic and plausible as The Jungle Book or Robinson Crusoe. By the time I was old enough to ponder the meaning of any of these tales—to ask why a repeating melody drove Schumann to attempt suicide; what enabled Beethoven to rise above deafness and physical decline to compose the euphoric ‘Ode to Joy’; how Wagner substituted music for life and love—my father was already dead.

  Unable to comprehend what really happened that day, the first of November 1944, in my mind the event soon morphed into a strip of black-and-white celluloid, inseparable from the newsreels shown at cinemas at the time, complete with reassuring voice-over and triumphant orchestral score.

  I could see him so clearly, sitting on a bus on Etherow Street in East Dulwich, humming Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, the manuscript of which he was on his way to purchase for my sixteenth birthday, oblivious to the silent V2 rocket—Vergeltungswaffe opus 2, as I called them—careering towards him. In the cyclonic explosion and vaporous silence that followed, I sat shuddering and alone with my one ghost-given birthday present, a giant jigsaw puzzle of Westminster Abbey, five thousand small pieces of coloured confetti, so dull and uninspiring on their own, but each integral to the creation of a magnificent musical tomb.

  I was too young to know my father well, to understand what made him tick. Nowadays I barely remember the warmth of his hands, the sound of his laugh; I only remember missing him. In my mind I re-created, hundreds of times, that frosty morning when he walked to the bus headed for Boosey & Hawkes, pipe in hand, never to return to his olive-green armchair by the fire. Although now, ten years on, I’m not sure how much of that, and all else I recall, resembles anything that may have actually happened.

  My aunt didn’t say much when she broke the news; she wasn’t crying. I came home from school and she told me to sit down; she then sat opposite me at the table. I remember that moment when I looked at her and around the living room—that very last moment when for me he was still alive, but knowing from the thick, sour taste in the air that my understanding of the world was about to be betrayed. I looked at her impatiently and she seemed lost behind her eyes. ‘Your father went to heaven today,’ she said, followed by, ‘Things will have to change around here.’ Then her words began to dull and bleed into a liturgy of muted tones, a few words rising above to become audible as she looked down into her lap.

  She stood up and made me a coffee, a beverage my father had recently started to drink. It had a bitter, burnt taste but I made myself swallow it sip by sip. She sat down again at the table, yet there seemed an interminable distance stretched out between us. I noticed myself watching her fiddling with her bracelet as if she were posing for a photograph, occasionally sniffing the air like a cat.

  Then a strange thing happened: the room started to darken and I felt light all of a sudden, as though I might rise off my chair and float away. I felt very close to my father at that moment, as if the cells of my body were disintegrating and becoming the air around me and dissolving into his. It seemed almost possible that he might walk in the door and put his arm around my shoulder, something that he’d never done before but I could imagine him doing then. That seemed real and possible and I waited for it, each second that passed, thinking I could hear him approaching the front door and the rattling of the knob. But I didn’t wait for my aunt, who sat like a stone sphinx, to come and put her arm around me, because I knew that would never happen.

  I stare at the soggy red heels of my palms I’ve had planted in my eyes—I must have been crying for some time. It is only fitting, I suppose, that I should be thinking of my father right now. Though it does always surprise me how memories will creep up and ambush, without a moment’s warning. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that the mind really does function according to some elaborate plan to which the owner is rarely privy.

  I can hear Martha, the housekeeper, downstairs, cleaning with the wireless on. I wonder if there’s been much talk about tonight’s concert. Not that I want to turn it on and find out. Couldn’t bear to hear them carrying on with their pompous twaddle: Noël this, Noël that, my dear friend Noël.

  No, I don’t think I’ll even leave my room today—until I must.

  So my father never met Noël, never saw me as his lover, never knew his son was queer. He would have adored Noël; what he would have thought of the two of us I’m not so certain. I like to believe he’d not have minded. After all, he didn’t seem so interested in women himself; as far as I know he never looked at a single female after my mother. He was far too busy with his records, his scores, his pianos; even though he could barely play, I’d come home to find he’d replaced the Weinbach with a Bluthner, then the Bluthner with a Schimmel, the Schimmel with a Bechstein. Or else he’d be raving about propaganda and the bloody war effort, or threatening to throw himself under a train.

  And then there was the v2.

  I recently saw an article in the paper about von Braun. That blasted German rocket scientist who surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war. Apparently he now runs the US army’s ballistic-missile project in Alabama and is still harping on about space travel. Seeing his name there in print, reading about his recent book, Conquest of the Moon, a heady feeling came over me, and I only just managed to make it to the end of the article before I had to leave the table and take a lie-down.

  I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about von Braun, creator of the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the v2 rocket. It started shortly after my father died; I was overcome by a strange desire to write to this notorious man and tell him about my father, who obsessed over Wagner, Beethoven and Strauss, and who promised to take me one day—‘once this damned war is over’—to von Braun’s homeland to visit the birthplaces of Bach, Handel, Schubert and Schumann. My father hated the war, but he never said a bad word about the Germans. My father would have said that von Braun was simply doing his job, just like him. My father, in fact, would have greatly admired von Braun, seen him as a young man with worthy goals. But even he would have found it perverse that von Braun’s enamoured stargazing, his love of the fiction of Jules Verne, his longing to take humankind into the heavens, could have propelled him on a path of such prodigious destruction.

  Noël, I recall, was also fascinated by rocket science. After reading Niels Bohr’s Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature he tried to explain to me how similar atomic principles govern the functions of rocket engineering and human
physiology. He told me that all matter was made up of energy, and there was a virile potentiality stored inside everything—all of us were the prudent progeny of that great ball of flames that blazed in the centre of our orbit. All movement, all life, all evolution could be boiled down to the fusion and fission of particles moving from one state to another, and every change effected a potent release of that simmering energy. ‘Energy is not created,’ he said, his face excited like a child’s, ‘it is expressed. It is the music of matter!’

  On the eighth of September 1944 the first of over five hundred v2 rockets hit London. It landed early on a Tuesday morning on Haveley Road in the London suburb of Chiswick, five minutes after its lift-off near the Hague.

  I’ve often tried to visualise von Braun’s gleaming 18,000-pound creation preparing for lift-off, a symphonic machination of fuels and pressurised gases surging around pistons, turbines and pumps: a high-pressure inferno of 2500 degrees Celsius. When the rocket launches it blasts fifty miles up into the sky, and across a 200-mile range. After only thirty seconds it reaches the speed of sound; after another thirty the engine cuts out and the rocket hurtles towards its target like a meteorite, at three times the speed of sound, approaching in complete silence.

  In light of the terror that had reigned over London in previous months from the v1 ‘flying bomb’ attacks (I remember staring up at those pilotless planes with their cargo of bombs, listening to that deathly rattle as they motored along in the sky, and waiting for that mortifying silence when the fuel cut out, watching them tumble down through the air like birds shot from the sky), British authorities decided against using air-raid sirens to warn people of an approaching v2. The phenomenal speed and malefic soundlessness with which the rockets travelled rendered any warning futile. And so these massive weapons rained down silently on London, killing almost three thousand people. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of one, like a giant telegraph pole streaking across the sky. But those being hit would never see a thing, they had no idea—as they took the roast from the oven, shopped at Woolworths, or, as I’d so often pictured my father, simply boarded a bus—that von Braun’s most brilliant work of art was careering towards them. The only warning they would get, a split-second before their obliteration, would be the mysterious sound of a whip cracking—the blast wave created by the rocket, bouncing off the point of impact—accompanied by white flashes of light leaping across the sky. This would be immediately followed by the impact, a thunderous explosion that could often be heard across the entire city.

  Shortly after the blast, as the dust and debris is already beginning to settle over the still, annihilated landscape, the sound catches up with the rocket. But, of course, there is rarely anyone alive in the vicinity of the ten-foot crater to hear this ghostly approach. At first there is the whine and rush of whistling air. This grows into a deafening roar, which soon tapers off into silence.

  I didn’t ring Noël; that was not unusual. It was implicit in our relationship from the beginning that he would ring or call upon me. He was forever busy with musical and social engagements, and I was always willing to see him. Up until then the arrangement had worked well.

  I tried, unsuccessfully, not to wait for his call; not to lie on my bed fully dressed, staring at the reflection off my shoes, fingers entwined over my belly, thumbs rotating about each other, listening for the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs in Ma O’Grady’s room and her slow tread up the stairs to my door. But as I lay there I’d grow even more despondent, reminding myself that Schumann, when separated from his love, had thrown himself into his music, composing some of the greatest piano works ever written, and yet faced with the same predicament all I could do was mope around on the bed.

  I imagined Noël’s reasons for not ringing: his mother had been unwell, he’d been in Wales recording for the BBC, he was working on a composition that required all of his attention—he hadn’t even been aware of the days, weeks, months that had passed. I wouldn’t ask about his mother, about the recordings, the composition; I would demonstrate how well I had survived without him, with a graceful aloofness. He’d be chattering nervously and I’d be looking at him with a distant curiosity as if he were someone I hardly knew.

  When I did venture out for the day, to the Academy or a daytime concert, I’d often be struck by a sense of urgency, as if I’d suddenly remembered that I’d left the gas on in my room, or that an essay was due to be handed in that day. I couldn’t think of anything I’d neglected or forgotten and could only attribute this feeling to the thought that Noël was trying to contact me. I’d run home and, upon finding my door empty of messages, collect a pile of shirts (mostly clean) and take them down to Ma O’Grady to be laundered, chatting with her as long as possible—asking if she’d heard from her sister who worked as a missionary in Ceylon, or if the improvement in the weather had done anything for her husband’s chronic cough—hoping that during our conversation it would dawn upon her that she had taken a call for me in the morning from a most polite young man, a real gentleman, he was, and that he’d requested I ring back immediately.

  As I lingered at her door her cheeks would grow more plump and shiny, her stories more labyrinthine, and I’d realise I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I’d be standing there, nodding thoughtfully, catching myself peering through her wispy ashen hair to her boiled-egg scalp, all the while growing increasingly irritated with her. At that moment she seemed the only thing standing between Noël and me, and her raw-potato smell, her lard-smeared apron, would begin to appal me. But I’d remain, smiling pleasantly, trying to tease out the recollection with my geniality, convinced that my kindliness—who else cared that she spent the day running about for her invalid husband?—would somehow be remunerated with a message of a telephone call from Noël.

  After a while I began to find comfort in playing the piano; I’d stay home all day practising, telling myself that Noël would arrive at the precise moment when I was suitably ready to charm him with my performance. He’d be summoned by the aching melodies of Chopin with their willowy arpeggios and wrenching chords. Struck upright, in the middle of his own practice, he’d be overcome by the desire to see me. This conviction enabled me to sit at the piano all day, untroubled by hunger, propelled by the belief I had in my own musical powers.

  I tended to my devotion quietly; it was a small but steady flame that flickered soundlessly, ever ready to ignite into a blaze. I listened to stories on the radio of war widows who worked all day in factories without complaint to support children they rarely saw. Their nobility and humility impressed me, and as I sat at the piano to practise through the evening it would occur to me that my consuming musical endeavours were my own silent sacrifice, an integral part of the whole affair. It wasn’t long before Anton mentioned that I was playing with more life—Con gusto! It was not just my practice, though, that improved at this time; I also threw myself into other subjects, especially musical history, staying up late into the night reading my father’s books, trying to increase my understanding of the composers and what lay at the source of the heavenly sounds they created.

  It was during this time that I wrote a biographical essay for the Academy on Tchaikovsky that caused such a stir that I was called to the Dean’s office to explain myself, and asked why I was wasting the time of the Academy staff with such vile innuendo about Tchaikovsky’s music being an expression of his repressed homosexuality. (This same essay, incidentally, was one of the first I later had published overseas, virtually word for word, in the Musical Quarterly.) I wasn’t able to respond with any good reason and hadn’t even been aware that my teachers might read the essay in such a way. I stood there in front of the Dean’s large oak desk, apologising and staring into his ruddy face with its full white beard and receding quiff, thinking I’d never before noticed how much the man looked like Brahms. The Dean leaned back in his chair, shook his head once more and sent me out with a warning.

  I’m not sure when my interest in Tchaikovsky began, but h
e was the composer of whom I most thought whenever I worried that my crippling anxiety and lack of showmanship and charm would prevent me from being a musician of any significance. Tchaikovsky was often accused of being a wimp, a hypochondriac and a madman; he was also as susceptible and excitable as a child. But when he composed music, the millions of minuscule antennae that covered his being, making living so torturously difficult, would coalesce and, like a tuning fork, transform those terrifying vibrations into the most superlative sound.

  As I worked on my essay, sometimes until dawn with the sun peeping gingerly through the window, I’d think about Tchaikovsky, who laboured over his G minor symphony, his first major composition, day and night, inducing insomnia and headaches, drinking heavily and driving himself into a state of near-collapse. His inspired melodies were reluctant creatures to which he was giving birth.

  What intrigued me most about Tchaikovsky, however, was the connection between his creative output and his romantic life. It seems that so many of the major composers endured a year of great personal crisis that affected the development of their music. For Beethoven it was when encroaching deafness nearly drove him to suicide; for Wagner it was when the Dresden Revolution forced him to rethink his political convictions. (Naturally, this discovery had me welling, once again, with thoughts of my own creative possibilities—would this be the year in which my musical brilliance would begin to reveal itself to the world?) For Tchaikovsky it was the consequence of an extraordinary decision he made in 1877, at a time when he was finally starting to enjoy some public success. He’d just finished work on his ballet Swan Lake and returned from a visit to the Bayreuth festival, Nuremberg and Vienna; then, after staying at his sister’s house in the Russian countryside, where he was so touched by the warmth and intimacy of her household—in such stark contrast to his own solitary existence—he returned home and decided he would marry.