Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  The three musicians had reached the slow movement of the Schubert, which opens with one of the most extraordinary inventions in chamber music: softly marching chords on the piano, a plaintive cello melody featuring a repeated trill. Soyer, grunting softly as he played, brought to bear a nobly restrained tone and rhythmically incisive phrasing. He lavished attention on a pair of trills that lead into the hushed coda, wistfully prolonging the second as it precipitated a shift from C major to C minor. Kim executed everything with unfailing precision-so much so that the older players actually encouraged him to be less precise at times. “A little more Wiener schmaltz,” Soyer suggested at one point, demonstrating a slide from note to note, like a carelessly dragging foot. “You can’t play sloppy!” Uchida said, teasingly.

  Kim protested that he could indeed play sloppy, and tried again, laying on a modicum of schmaltz. Uchida received only a single citation for being too loud. In accompanimental passages, she achieved the feat of almost disappearing, so that the piano became a nimbus floating around the string voices.

  When Soyer and Kim left, the young soprano Charlotte Dobbs entered, ready to work with Uchida on Schoenberg’s The Book of the Hanging Garden, a song cycle on poems by the German Symbolist Stefan George. Uchida had never played the songs and was making a close study not only of the music but also of George’s poetry. Dobbs, a sunny-tempered woman with a rapid-fire manner of speech, held her own; a recent graduate of Yale, she majored in English and wrote her thesis on Shakespeare and Joyce. With Dobbs, Uchida was noticeably more free-spirited than with the two male players, indulging in giggles, literary digressions, and moments of self-criticism.

  “Schoenberg’s music is echt Viennese,” Uchida said. “When you get to ‘Schnabel krauseln,’ I hear a sort of Viennese nasal sound. No? And not ‘klagend’ but ‘kl-a-aa-gend.’” She prompted Dobbs to bring out the rhythms more strongly, to accent certain consonants, to clarify the diction in places. Uchida also emphasized the differences between German and other languages. “You are singing it almost as if it were French,” the pianist said. “French is very quick and even. ‘Le president de la Republique a annoncé aujourd’hui dah-dah-dah-dah-dah.’ Japanese is kind of similar.” She sang a fragment of a Japanese folk song, with a slight grimace. “German is more flowing, up and down.”

  Dobbs ventured a few suggestions. “I think I can bring more excitement to the tone when I sing ‘reichsten Lade,’” she said. “Try to do something silky. Put more dazzle in the voice. Can we try a slightly more flowing tempo?”

  “Yes, I am maybe too slow,” Uchida replied.

  The duo arrived at the climax of the cycle, a violently expressive song that, as Dobbs observed, communicates “every possible emotion you could feel in love with someone, except for satisfaction.” Beneath the word “wahr,” or “true,” there is a strangely shuddering whole-note chord consisting of a B-major triad with C-sharps attached; Schoenberg has marked it with a crescendo, which is technically an impossibility for a sustained chord, but with a coaxing of the pedal Uchida made it resonate through the bar.

  By the end of the afternoon, sunshine had given way to a downpour. An SUV was summoned to transport Uchida back to her apartment. Dobbs and I rode with her. “The pure major becomes so nasty,” she said, of that B-majorish chord. “I love it. So dark, so beautiful. This is fun, yeah? But bloody hard.”

  Marlboro’s hoariest tradition is the paper-napkin-ball war that erupts most nights during dinner. History does not record whether Mr. Serkin originated the practice, but he was a lusty participant from the beginning. One night, when Queen Elisabeth of Belgium was passing through, the pianist Leon Fleisher had to raise an umbrella to shield her from bombardment. Uchida does not take part. “I am very good at making,” she told me. “There is a technique. Pack in the corner, lightly, that is the idea. But I don’t throw. If I start throwing, I will be such a target.”

  Other Marlboro rituals include an annual square dance; the International Dinner, at which the musicians cook up dishes from various cultures and afterward present comedy skits (Uchida impersonations are frequent); and pranks in the Serkin manner. The prizewinning prank of 2008 took the form of an extended fantasia on the sign attached to David Soyer’s music stand in Happy Valley. One morning, people awoke to find that hundreds of objects across the campus had been festooned with signs declaring them to be Soyer’s property. “It was something unbelievable,” Uchida told me. “Everything had a sign. ‘David Soyer’s personal Baby Chair.”David Soyer’s personal Water Jugs.’ ‘David Soyer’s personal Exit Sign.’ All the cars in the parking lot. Every chair in the dining hall. Ugly painting in the coffee shop: ‘David Soyer’s personal Ugly Painting.’ It can’t have been one person. I cannot imagine the man-hours it took. We still don’t know who did it, although I have some ideas. Such secrets stay with me!”

  Some newcomers roll their eyes at Marlboro’s customs. Joshua Smith, the urbane Cleveland Orchestra flutist, initially squirmed at the prospect of the square dance. “Do we have to?” he asked at dinner one night. But he grew to love the magic-mountain mood. “I wish I could somehow package this feeling and bring it back home with me to Cleveland,” he said. Others complained of hearing too many Serkin stories, or of being dragged on too many picnics, or of being inundated with Germanic repertory. One young musician jokingly scripted a mock infomercial: “Remember a time when only German music was considered important? When Poulenc was not allowed? At Marlboro, you can live that time again.” But sooner or later the skeptics fell into reveries about playing Mozart while gazing at trees in the late-afternoon light. And Poulenc is indeed played, on occasion.

  There is a conscious plan behind the quirky lore. Marlboro is a long-running experiment in altering the metabolism of city-based performers. When Serkin began inviting his colleagues to Vermont, he wanted them to lose their worldliness, to fall into a slower rhythm. Uchida agrees, and proposes that Marlboro’s quaint habits have a specific musical application. “The kids have to become more naïve,” she told me. “Because there is something very naïve about this music that they play, even the very greatest. What is it about? Mountains, trees, birds, young love, that kind of thing. Of course, there is quite a bit more to it than that, but you must grasp the simplicity of the surface.”

  After dinner, the musicians gravitate to the coffee shop, where they often remain until late in the night. The conversation has the typical tempo and jargon of Generations X and Y, although the references are idiosyncratic (“Your fiddle was made in 1717, too? Oh, my God, that’s so weird”). There’s discussion of disconcerting things that audience members say to performers after concerts (“I sometimes get suggestions for different things I could do with my hair,” Rebecca Ringle said); of the familiar perils of traveling with instruments on planes (“They said I’d have to check my viola case, so I took the viola with me on the plane and cradled it in my lap the whole way, like a baby,” the violist Kyle Armbrust recalled); and of the relative lack of scandal at Marlboro this summer (“Last summer was a summer of Sappho”). Instrumentalists talk about hearing “Der Doppelganger” for the first time; singers learn how to name Mozart concertos by Köchel number; Uchida is urged to listen to Björk.

  Uchida usually appears in the coffee shop on the early side, then heads off to bed, or, as she puts it, “sneaks away without anyone noticing.” One night, I dropped by her apartment for a visit. “Here is one of the finest residences of Marlboro,” she said with mock pride, after negotiating a sticky lock. “It even has a bathroom.” It was a one-bedroom basement apartment with white cement walls, sparsely furnished and wanly lit. Uchida lived here alone, although her partner, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, joined her on the final weekend. The piano was piled high with music that Uchida was studying. On a bookshelf was some not particularly light summer reading: the Inferno, Hamlet, volumes of Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stefan Zweig’s autobiography (in German), W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and 501 Italian Verbs. As we spoke, Uchida se
t out two more little luxuries she permits herself: first-flush Darjeeling tea and Marcolini chocolates.

  In some ways, Uchida is even more high-minded than Serkin, who surprised people by praising Vladimir Horowitz, the arch-virtuoso and the un-Serkin. Uchida has few kind words for several leading virtuosos of today. Her remarks were off the record. “I talk only about people whom I love,” she said. Her warmest words were for the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, whom she calls “the most talented guy I have ever met.” She tells of how she once tried to get Lupu to visit Marlboro. “I got very excited, describing how people do nothing but play music all day long. But he said no. His explanation was very funny. ‘Mitsuko,’ he said, ‘I don’t like music as much as you.’”

  Her voice took on a confiding tone as she spoke of the composers with whom she spends her days. “Beethoven was the greatest altogether. Mozart was the greatest genius. And Schubert …” She drew in her breath, her eyes opening wide, her head tilting back. “He is the most beautiful. He is the one you will be listening to when you die.” And then she spoke of a friend of hers who, on his deathbed, in a state of severe pain, was offered morphine and refused it. “He knew that he would die only once. He wanted to see what it felt like. That is some sort of a person, yes? It is a great pity that you can’t come back to tell the tale.”

  The Marlboro summer customarily ends on a Sunday afternoon in August, with a festive performance of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, for piano, chorus, and orchestra. Serkin used to bang it out at unbelievable volume, causing the piano, the floor, the walls, and, possibly, the Green Mountains to shake. Beethoven wrote the work in 1808, for a legendarily overlong benefit concert that also included the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Composing in a hurry, he produced an uncharacteristically baggy piece that nonetheless surges with life. The main tune looks forward unmistakably to the “Ode to Joy,” in the Ninth Symphony. The text celebrates the power of art to dispel the storm and stress of daily life. To quote from Philipp Naegele’s translation:

  When the magic sounds enchant

  And the word’s solemnity speaks forth,

  Glorious things must come to be,

  Night and storms then turn to light.

  In a way, the Choral Fantasy is Beethoven’s Ninth without the world-historical baggage—the perpetually unfulfilled promise of liberation. Instead, it is an anthem of music’s celebration of itself. Hence, perhaps, Serkin’s abiding love for the piece.

  Goode told me, “Many people felt that Serkin playing the Choral Fantasy was a unique experience that could never be duplicated. After he died, the work was retired, and I thought that was the right decision. To my surprise, a few years later people said, ‘You know, I think we have to have a Choral Fantasy’ We needed the catharsis.”

  It is never an especially polished affair. Serkin instituted the practice of inviting staff members, supporters, and musically inclined neighbors to sing in the chorus. Members of Marlboro’s vocal program take the solos, guaranteeing that at least some of the singing will be at a high level, but there are always odd noises. In what had to be considered the final prank of the summer, one of the singers, the generally discerning tenor William Ferguson, decided that I should join the chorus. Trained as a pianist and an oboist, I have practically no singing experience, but I was herded into the baritone section for the final rehearsal. I stood in front of two excellent young singers, the baritone John Moore and the bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon, who encircled me with such stentorian tones that I could almost believe I was making them myself. “I heard you,” Ferguson said afterward, a little ambiguously.

  At the podium was the pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who grew up in Cavendish, forty miles to the north of Marlboro. His father, the novelist, had died the week before, and he had just returned from the funeral, in Moscow. The orchestra was a mixture of Marlboro-ites junior and senior, with Arnold Steinhardt sitting uncomplainingly in the back row and Soovin Kim serving as concertmaster. (Steinhardt wore a sign on his back: PROPERTY OF DAVID SOYER) In trading Beethoven’s ideas back and forth, the musicians were recapitulating in musical terms ties that had formed over the summer. Uchida smiled or wiggled her eyebrows when different players took up the principal melody, as if resuming conversations that she had begun over Eggs McMarlboro at the coffee shop.

  “It’s great,” Rebecca Ringle said to me during a break in the rehearsal. “You know everyone. Romie gets the theme, then James gets the theme.”

  The hall was packed for the performance, with many longtime friends of Marlboro in the crowd. Uchida assumed concert mode, unleashing the full strength of her mighty left hand in the portentous C-minor chords that open the piece. Throughout, she allowed herself a bit more Romantic flamboyance than is her custom. She also issued a smattering of wrong notes, as if in tribute to Serkin’s philosophy of seeking the perfection beyond precision—the truth of the noblest, most honest effort. The great moment for the chorus comes in the insistently joyous setting of the line “When love and strength are wed”: “Und Kraft! Und Kraft! Und Kr-a-a-a-a-ft!” I had the feeling of being carried along by an enormous wave, and, however approximate the sound coming from my throat, it added to the force of the mass. And I reflected on the fact that even the most exalted music-making comes from an accumulation of everyday labor, inextricable from human relationships.

  “It was at least inspired,” Uchida said afterward. “Not the cleanest, but bloody inspired.”

  On my way home, driving toward the interstate, I took a detour and stopped at a little white church in Guilford. Rudolf Serkin is buried in the churchyard there, a few feet away from Adolf Busch. The violinist’s name is almost hidden by thick-growing bushes, which metaphorically suggest what Busch and Serkin achieved when they came to America. At a time when Hitler was dragging German music into the mire, these pure spirits succeeded in transplanting their tradition to Vermont. In a wider sense, Marlboro represents the migration of tradition across centuries and continents: a Japanese-born woman passing along her understanding of Mozart and Schoenberg to new generations of American kids. Marlboro is an enchanting place, but, in the end, there is nothing especially remarkable about it. The remarkable thing is the power of music to put down roots wherever it goes.

  17

  THE END OF SILENCE

  JOHN CAGE

  On August 29, 1952, David Tudor walked onto the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall, near Woodstock, New York, sat down at the piano, and, for four and a half minutes, made no sound. He was performing 4’33”, a conceptual work by John Cage. It has been called the “silent piece,” but its purpose is to make people listen. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said, recalling the premiere. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Indeed, some listeners didn’t care for the experiment, although they saved their loudest protests for the question-and-answer session afterward. Someone reportedly hollered, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town!” Even Cage’s mother had her doubts. At a subsequent performance, she asked the composer Earle Brown, “Now, Earle, don’t you think that John has gone too far this time?”

  In the summer of 2010, the pianist Pedja Muzijevic included 4’33” in a recital at Maverick, which is in a patch of woods a couple of miles outside Woodstock. I went up for the day, wanting to experience the piece in its native habitat. The hall, made primarily of oak and pine, is rough-hewn and barnlike. On pleasant summer evenings, the doors are left open, so that patrons can listen from benches outside. Muzijevic, mindful of the natural setting, chose not to use a mechanical timepiece; instead, he counted off the seconds in his head. Technology intruded all the same, in the form of a car stereo from somewhere nearby. A solitary bird in the trees struggled to compete with the thumping bass. After a couple of minutes, the stereo receded. There was no wind and no r
ain. The audience stayed perfectly still. For about a minute, we sat in deep, full silence. Muzijevic broke the spell savagely, with a blast of Wagner: Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Someone might as well have started up a chain saw. I might not have been the only listener who wished that the music of the forest had gone on a little longer.

  Cage’s mute manifesto has inspired reams of commentary. The composer and scholar Kyle Gann, in his 2010 book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, defines the work as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” That last thought ruled Cage’s life: he wanted to discard inherited structures, open doors to the exterior world, “let sounds be just sounds.” Gann writes, “It begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.” On a simpler level, Cage had an itch to try new things. What would happen if you sat at a piano and did nothing? If you chose among an array of musical possibilities by flipping a coin and consulting the I Ching? If you made music from junkyard percussion, squads of radios, the scratching of pens, an amplified cactus? If you wrote music for dance-Merce Cunningham was Cage’s longtime partner—in which dance and music went their separate ways? If you took at face value Erik Satie’s conceit that his piano piece Vexations could be played 840 times in succession? Cage had an innocent, almost Boy Scout—like spirit of adventure. As he put it, “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.”