Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

Musical groups had started to founder nationwide in 1990, and employment possibilities for orchestral musicians didn’t look good anymore. The Buffalo Philharmonic went on the auction block, advertising itself to be bought by another city as if it were a sports team. Smaller symphonies in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport all posted huge deficits. I couldn’t have afforded to travel to any more auditions anyway, even if the orchestras had been thriving.

  Sydney wasn’t imagining that work was drying up. Freelance groups cut back and disappeared in the early 1990s as well. The 92nd Street Y pulled its Schubert series over a $1.5 million deficit. The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players canceled their schedule for the first time since 1977. The Opera Ensemble of New York called off half its season, and deficits mounted elsewhere: Queens Symphony, $120,000; Long Island Philharmonic, $130,000; Orchestra of St. Luke’s, $80,000.1

  The New York City Opera, a populist company with a history of municipal support that enabled low ticket prices, struggled back after a sixty-six-day strike by the orchestra in 1989, in the wake of which the company’s entire season was canceled. Its pit musicians demanded a 20 percent raise over three years for parity with companies in San Francisco and Chicago, despite those groups’ far higher ticket prices.

  Unlike the City Opera musicians, I felt like an antique, painfully aware of my irrelevance. CD players were rapidly replacing turntables in the early 1990s. Computers were being used for jingles, replacing musicians with synthesized tracks. And MTV had become an entertainment staple, adding a visual element to rock that made classical music look even more archaic.

  Without many options, I started subbing in a Broadway show. Les Miserables was one of the few musicals that included a straight oboe chair, meaning that the oboist didn’t double on flute, sax, or clarinet. The pop opera had taken Broadway by storm and promised to last for years.

  I met the show’s regular oboist, who led me to the Broadway Theater pit. In my black silk blouse and billowing skirt, I was overdressed next to musicians in faded black jeans and sneakers. The audience couldn’t see in, anyway. The pit was deep and covered with netting, to catch props, scenery, and even actors that sometimes flew off the set’s revolving turntable.

  This was the typical scenario for Broadway subbing. Watch the show go by, and play it the next night without a rehearsal. The music was lyrical, and a long tuneful oboe solo provided the mood for much of a scene in the Paris sewers. Recording the show on my cassette Walkman, I watched attentively and marked my part.

  The next night my performance went off perfectly, and the oboist called me once or twice a month from then on. Once I knew the show, it was easy money. A three-hour performance paid $160 in 1990 dollars. It would only be for a while, I told myself, just until I won a gig of my own playing “real” music. The best classical musicians looked down on those of us who worked in for-profit venues playing these crowd-pleasing tunes, instead of what we were trained to do.

  I didn’t want to go sour like some of these Broadway pit musicians. Two of the fiddle players who shared a stand didn’t talk, turning away from each other all night. It felt like toiling in the salt mines. I wondered if the audience even realized they were hearing live musicians piped through the speakers.

  My fall from glory was a little depressing, but I was more concerned about Sam, whose health was quickly deteriorating. He and I had ended any romantic relationship, but I still loved him like a member of my family. Since we both lived under the Allendale’s roof, it wasn’t hard to maintain our new status as near relatives.

  Sam told me he was in trouble early in 1990. Backstage at a recital with Itzhak in Cleveland, his fingers hadn’t worked right. He couldn’t fasten his tie. His toothbrush slipped into the sink. Bartok’s fiendish First Sonata began and ended as if someone else were playing. At the airport, presenters had bustled to bring Itzhak a wheelchair, while no one noticed when Sam fainted and slid down the wall.

  At home in his apartment, Sam had eased his swollen feet from wide black sneakers and peeled off support socks. Diuretics had turned his ankles a shade of dark yellow. “Shit!” he shouted, as a prescription bottle he reached for clattered off his bedside table. “Sorry, sorry,” he said sheepishly, scowling at hands that were swollen with uric acid. He pleaded with me to open the medicine vial, pulling out five more bottles. Pills were everywhere: on the floor, in his briefcase, sprayed across the bed. He threw back a handful and lay back, breathing hard. The ball bearings ricocheted inside his heart.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, hoping to calm him. I felt guilty that I had rejected him as a lover. Sam was literally disintegrating. I wondered if his heart would explode, or if his imperfect arteries would leak slowly until he died. My eyes wandered to a spot where a brick was missing outside the windowsill. It was hard to see out, the building’s windows were so sooty.

  Across West End, I found the windows of the co-op where I once watched the couple having sex. The woman was bouncing a gurgling infant. Her eyes smiled as she twirled the baby overhead, cooing. In the next room, her husband leaned over a drafting table, their toddler playing beside him. Sam’s eyes followed my gaze. His breathing had finally slowed, and he squeezed my hand.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said softly. “I understand, I really do.”

  In September, Sam’s doctors checked him into the hospital. I learned that a few months ago he had found out the name of one of the world’s leading cardiologists, Valentin Fuster, and simply showed up at his office. When he told the nurse he hadn’t made an appointment because he didn’t have time, she had misunderstood. “I mean, I won’t live that long,” said Sam. Dr. Fuster saw him immediately.

  As dire as his situation was, Sam treated his hospital visit like any other performance. He folded tissue paper between his pajamas and robe as he packed, smoothing sleeves against lapels and folding more tissue paper on top. Shuffling to his Steinway, he centered piles of violin sonatas and straightened his toy soldiers. Some were from his former student Margo Garrett, a few rare ones from Alice Tully, and a goose-stepping Nazi from me. As always, he left his piano room in perfect order.

  Once he was in the hospital for a few days, Sam seemed to recover with bed rest. His drawn face filled out, and he was calmer. Parts of him still had an alarming appearance, however. His ankle, now nearly black as fluid crystallized into gout, stuck out beneath stiff hospital sheets. Blood caked his lips. His heart monitor frequently skipped, tracing a mountain range of jagged peaks. Sam pointed at the lights blinking from the George Washington Bridge. They had given him hope on the ride to Baltimore back in 1947; they gave him hope now. Not expected to survive grade school, Sam had already made it to fifty-two.

  Bringing over his mail one day, I handed him a bundle of cards, fliers, and bills. I had peeked inside his bank statement, which was already two thousand dollars overdrawn. Sam hadn’t worked for a month and a half now. He owed rent and tuition for his daughter’s freshman year in college. I could hardly fault his estranged wife, after years of separation, for trying to make their divorce formal before the hospital bills came. Perhaps they hadn’t split legally because of child support or shared health insurance.

  Sam’s teaching job at the Peabody Institute provided health insurance but covered only part of the costs, which included an annual prescription bill of $30,000. He had little family left, but he knew he could count on his brother Martin for help, even though he desperately wanted to handle it himself.

  The room was filled with cards, baseball trinkets, and other gifts from his circle of friends. Someone had brought him a Walkman. Sam didn’t even have a stereo at home. “Listen,” he said, more lively than I’d seen him in months. He passed me the headphones, looking uncharacteristically happy. I recognized the song, “An die Musik”:

  O sublime art,

  In how many gray hours

  When wild tumult of life ensnared me

  Have you kindled my heart to warm love?

  When the Schubert finished, Sam revealed his gri
m prognosis. With three open-heart surgeries behind him, his heart couldn’t be patched any more than a shredded tire could. A transplant, though, might work.

  Get on with it, Sam had told his doctors decisively, as if he were talking car repair. A heart with the right blood type could come today or never, but with his medications adjusted daily, Sam could hang on for a while longer. The view from his hospital window was better than the Allendale, too, he said, in an upbeat tone that almost sounded genuine.

  He asked if I could run some errands. For days there hadn’t been visitors, and he needed a little help: some good company, he said bashfully. Sitting in his cubicle, I brought the latest gossip from the Allendale, stories about my subbing gig at Les Miz, and the details of what was probably the last concert I’d play with the Philharmonic, which I was hired to play before bombing my audition.

  It was planned as a week of Shostakovich, I told Sam, but changed suddenly when we learned that Leonard Bernstein had died. Tonight’s concert, the orchestra manager had announced during the rehearsal, would start with an elegy, Mahler’s “Adagietto” for strings and harp.

  Mahler himself had served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1909 to 1911, during which time he wrote his final three symphonies. Most listeners knew the Fifth Symphony’s lush music, a paean of passion and remembrance that was featured on the soundtrack for Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice. Music fans also knew that Bernstein championed a renaissance of Mahler’s music in the 1950s.

  The death of Bernstein, America’s only classical music superstar, signaled an onerous changing of the guard for a foundering music business. That night I sat onstage, ready to play the Shostakovich, while string players started the Mahler. The audience fell quiet as Leonard Slatkin conducted without a baton, shaping the music with his bare hands.

  It had been a long and emotional day, and the musicians were tired. The Philharmonic usually played Mahler passionately, but not tonight. One cellist came in too early; another made a scratchy attack. The harp wasn’t quite together with the strings. First violinists fell out of sync and others began weeping. In their moment to pay tribute to Bernstein, these musicians were blowing it colossally.

  The mood turned tragic. Slatkin set his jaw, as if he could will the performers into submission. Just as the orchestra played another messy chord, Slatkin’s cummerbund popped off. One hundred pairs of eyes watched as it hung in the air, along with a diminished seventh chord, before sliding to the floor. Slatkin’s face froze as if he were about to burst. Musicians twitched with laughter. Bernstein was here somewhere, mocking us all.

  Sam snorted over the story, doing overwrought Bernstein impersonations from his hospital bed. Yet isolated as he was with other critically ill patients, Bernstein’s death depressed him, and he seemed desperately lonely.

  Where was everyone? Where were Sam’s friends? Sam wasn’t at the parties anymore, not networking like he usually did. And with the severity of his health problem, his chances of ever coming back didn’t look so good. He’d been forgotten by all but a few. Even though we were only friends now, I felt a responsibility to take care of him, since no one else was doing it. Part of me imagined how I’d feel in Sam’s position. A more selfish part of me probably wanted to feel needed. I vowed to visit Sam every day.

  During one of my visits, Sam told me about his debut recital in 1951, at the age of thirteen. With a rave from The New York Times, Columbia Artists signed him to their roster of pianists, violinists, cellists, and singers—performers with the greatest and most versatile repertoire from Bach to Bartok. Listening to Sam, I decided to jump-start my career by giving a debut of my own.

  I was just an oboist, without the solo career opportunities of a pianist, yet a debut would offset the Philharmonic audition, improve my playing, and maybe even heighten my image so I’d be offered better work. I wouldn’t get a free ride like Sam had, after winning his all-expense-paid concert as a prize in a piano competition, but my parents, concerned about my stalled life, offered to help pay for a recital of my own. A debut could catapult me from freelance obscurity. I was sure of it!

  Sam perked up, happy to be useful, and helped me plan a program that would attract a newspaper critic. Getting a review was the goal, I knew. We put together a set of oboe pieces about insects that included a short world premiere that would be composed for the recital, all accompanied by famous assisting artists, mostly from his network.

  In daily contact with a familiar face like mine, Sam’s buoyant personality returned, even though he still looked like a skeleton. I’d never seen anyone pull himself up by the bootstraps as strongly as Sam did. He started planning the chamber music programs for his summer festival, which was still nine months away, from his hospital bed. He invited me to play there and even let me pick a composer to write a piece just for us.

  “How about George Tsontakis?” Sam asked. He suggested composers who were his friends. A new work by mainstream names like these would become standard. Look at Bert Lucarelli, he said, who traveled the circuit playing an oboe concerto commissioned from John Corigliano, his name forever associated with the work. It was also a good political move, as I’d be welcome in the composer’s network too. Corigliano was part of Sam’s crowd and had not only written classical compositions but also the Oscar-nominated score for the 1980 film Altered States. He’d also finished his AIDS Symphony on a commission from the Chicago Symphony.

  “But I want her,” I said, naming the composer who was writing “Boll Weevil” for my recital. She was virtually unknown, without any connections in the academic world that most composers inhabited.

  “You’re absolutely sure?” Sam gave me a quizzical look. “Your call,” he said, shrugging. He paused, then jotted her name down, along with our composition idea, a work based on Thoreau’s walking tours of Cape Cod. Despite his cheerful outlook, Sam looked so physically frail, I doubted we would ever play the piece together.

  I told Sam how much I was looking forward to my recital, since life had been less than glamorous lately. Driving nightly to Poughkeepsie for a gig with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic this week, I also had to fit in a wedding, a kiddy concert with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and a contemporary music recording in Albany.

  Today was Saturday, and I’d already taught a private lesson at eleven and subbed in Les Miserables from two to five before racing to the convenience store at 96th and West End to meet my Poughkeepsie carpool. By five-thirty, fifteen people milled in front of the bodega, which was a sort of a Grand Central Station for freelance musicians because its location gave easy access to several subways and the West Side Highway. The cast of characters waiting for rides here didn’t vary; only the venue did. These freelance classical musicians pieced together employment with part-time orchestras like the Stamford Symphony, Greenwich Philharmonic, Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, and New Jersey Symphony. Sometimes, musicians got in the wrong car, ending up in Springfield instead of Scranton.

  Transportation could become more complicated than playing the oboe. Sometimes public transit worked, but if you only had two hours, say, to leave a gig in Newark, travel through Manhattan, and out to the Tilles Center for the Long Island Philharmonic, a car was required. Musicians phoned each other to arrange multiple carpools. “Are you doing Jersey next week? Long Island too? Oh, then never mind.”

  All the driving posed an occupational hazard for freelancers. One friend, French hornist Maureen Snyder, died en route to the Long Island Pops. The family of a flutist who was also killed collected $3.75 million in damages, part of it from the musician who’d been driving. Another flutist died in a pileup on 1-95, and a French hornist lost an eye while driving drunk. One carpool of musicians never showed up for a Hudson Valley concert after they were broadsided on the Taconic. No one was seriously hurt, but one musician passenger successfully sued the driver for $1 million.

  I kept dashing around to gigs and squeezing in daily hospital visits. Sam had been in the hospital for weeks, and tol
d me that Itzhak hadn’t visited in all that time. Without connecting with the famous violinist, I guessed Sam was nothing to his circle of friends either. There was an unspoken feeling that he was abandoned. No one wanted to invest their time in visiting a dying man.

  Somehow he kept his spirits up. Down by the river, the autumn leaves turned and fell. Sam said he saw the little red lighthouse beside the bridge’s east pylon, but I couldn’t make it out. I often thought about Sam’s gift, the strength to see what no one else believed could be possible.

  Coming home from Les Miz one night, I hustled by the crack house across from the Allendale’s 96th Street entrance just before midnight, clutching my oboe. It was already Halloween. The wind blew a child’s costume mask between cars, and dead leaves swirled in its wake.

  Joan, one of the spinsters, was coming outside to walk her matted dogs as I hurried upstairs. The elevator stank of cat piss, because Angelo used the same mop for both the basement and the lobby. I fumbled with my lock as the phone rang, flinging open the door just in time to pick it up. Sam’s voice squeaked on the other end as if he could barely speak.

  “We’re doing it now. The heart is coming,” he said. His daughter’s dorm phone was busy. He pleaded with me to help him. I told him I’d get the operator to interrupt. “Thanks, oh, thanks. I love her so much....” He trailed off. I was beginning to realize that this could be our last conversation. “Blair,” he said, “wherever I am, I’ll always be there for you.”

  I held the phone receiver, reluctant to sever the connection. After a minute or so I hung up, got through to Sam’s daughter, and puttered around my apartment. My most recent roommate, a pianist Sam had introduced me to, had moved out a few days before and left a dusty mess in her empty bedroom. Unaccustomed to the extra space, I felt restless and poured myself some cheap brandy, sitting on the radiator to watch the street.

  Out on West End Avenue, Halloween revelers wobbled down the sidewalk. I saw a couple dressed as East and West Germany, a drunken bee, a Carmen Miranda shedding grapes and bananas on the ground. The street fell quiet for a moment. I felt utterly hopeless and empty: Sam would probably not survive this surgery.