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

by Blair Tindall

At first, it felt like someone else was playing the concert. I concentrated on the difficult ornaments I’d written into the music, the extra notes that a performer is expected to add to simple phrases of Baroque music, much like a jazz player’s improvisation. Still, my mind shot to every other subject but playing this concert I’d planned for so long.

  People paid to hear me? Can you see through my dress? Did we order enough cheese for the party? I left the iron on. I left the iron on! I’m gonna miss this fast scale.

  At last the Inderal kicked in. My mind had cleared and my hands calmed by the time we played the last chord of the Telemann. Next came the first bug piece, Antal Dorati’s The Grasshopper and the Ant. We were relaxed, and the audience murmured at the musical joke. I’d gone from feeling as though I might die from fear to having fun communicating with my listeners. I was so well prepared, there wasn’t a chance I would miss anything. That sense of security freed me to play more expressively than usual. Even if I did fluff a note here or there, this wasn’t an orchestra audition that had to be note-perfect. People had come to be moved by an emotional performance, not a musical automaton.

  The dressing room was a zoo at intermission, since the second half of the recital involved not only Brian but also Bobby White and three of the Colorado Quartet’s string players, all of whom needed to dress in the small room. At the same time, Bobby wanted to go over some of the Blake Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams that would open the second half of the recital. We didn’t have time for much rehearsing and soon made our way down to the recital hall again.

  The Vaughan Williams arrangement was unusual, as it called only for tenor and oboe without any other instrumental accompaniment. The text used poet William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Once onstage, Bobby and I arranged our music quickly and began. From the moment he began singing, I felt as though I’d been transported to a higher level of musicianship, where my phrasing flowed naturally, almost like an extension of my thoughts and emotions. Bobby and I started the second song, “Eternity,” a work that had a surprisingly moving effect on the listener, given the composition’s simplicity.

  He who binds to himself a joy

  Doth the winged life destroy;

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

  I was still frightened to be onstage but, at the same time, filled with joy and enthusiasm. I felt a physical sensation that I’d only experienced a few times before, when everything was going right. I’d never known it to happen in any other situation and believed it might be specific to making music, or perhaps dancing or performing athletically. It combined elements of preparation, emotional expression, physical involvement, precise motor skills, and several different mental processes, all in real time. Anyone who has felt it knows it’s as addictive as a drug.

  The concert continued with the Mozart Oboe Quartet, and before I knew it, we ended with the flourishes of Saint-Saens’s Oboe Sonata. I didn’t want the recital to end, so I played an encore, repeating “The Wasp,” from Benjamin Britten’s Insect Pieces.

  Afterward, people congratulated me in the back of the hall. My friend Lisa Monheit, a wonderful contralto with whom I’d played Bach cantatas while at Manhattan School, told me it was one of the most satisfying musical events she’d ever heard. Since Carnegie’s reception room was under renovation, everyone set off for my apartment, where Sydney had set up food and drink for a celebration. Surrounded by friends and relatives, I felt like the toast of New York. The only sad note to the day was that my teacher, Joe Robinson, had not attended the concert, nor had he responded to the invitation and complimentary tickets I had mailed him.

  Two nights later, I went out for the paper. Fine snow blanketed the Allendale’s decrepit crevices. I stopped to admire the tree that was covered with pink flowers in the spring, the light from car headlights now dancing through the ice coating its branches. Skidding down to 96th, I handed over my dollar just as the Times bundles bounced off the truck.

  In the glare of lights under the Red Apple’s grocery awning, I held my glove between my teeth, pawing through the arts section until I came to the headline: OBOIST ALONE AND AIDED.

  Blair Tindall ... played a clever, stylistically varied debut program.... Her sound was narrowly focused and as sweet as an oboe timbre can be, and her phrasing in the finale was bright and playful. With Brian Zeger, a pianist, she played a Telemann Sonata in C Minor and applied ornamentation that was adventurous, sometimes unconventional, and consistently rich in character.... Ms. Tindall met those technical demands easily. She and Mr. Zeger also gave a graceful, vibrant performance of the Saint-Saens Oboe Sonata.

  I bought five copies and hugged them to my chest as I hurried back up Broadway. My upstairs neighbor was just pulling down the metal security gate of the video store her family ran at the corner of 99th. I saw Betty up the street and slowed down. She was loading her elderly lover in a taxi, guiding him into the back as he gripped the car frame. It was hard to remember the opera star he’d once been.

  Betty slammed the cab door, waving at the taxi until it turned out of sight. Stepping under the streetlight, she looked old, haggard, and sad. Her dejected posture could not have contrasted more sharply with my sense of joy and accomplishment at that moment, yet I was starting to understand more about how Betty had become so sad.

  For one glorious afternoon, I had stepped out of the depressing ranks of freelance musicians and made some very special music. The debut qualified as my number-one life accomplishment, I thought proudly, but what came next? I could try to get a few solo gigs here and there. They wouldn’t pay much. Watching Betty plod up 99th Street, I was overcome by a deep sense of dread. The glow from my recital would fade soon, and I’d be back where I started. Now that I was thirty-one, I could start to see how Betty got the way she was, her life slipping away upstairs in the Allendale. If I didn’t take action, I could be heading in the same direction.

  Soon after my debut, Sam was released from the hospital and almost immediately began teaching again at Juilliard. In the late spring, he and I took a long-planned vacation to Charleston, South Carolina, to visit with his pianist friend Charles Wadsworth and other musicians at the Spoleto Festival. He didn’t know Sue well enough yet to travel with her, but he and I had agreed that we could be friends.

  We rented an old carriage house with twin beds on Queen Street and related like brother and sister. Stumbling up the creaky, twisting steps in the dark carriage house one night, Sam dubbed the passageway the Itzhak Perlman Memorial Staircase, irreverently joking about Itzhak’s disability. He and Itzhak relentlessly teased each other about their physical problems in the most politically incorrect routine imaginable.

  By April, Sam hit the road with Itzhak, traveling to Dallas, Quebec, and across the Midwest. Squeezing in weekly cardiac appointments, Sam endured painful catheterization as a tube snaked through his groin and up into his heart, where the probe sampled tissue for early signs of rejection.

  He took more pills than ever. Cyclosporine, a drug derived from Norwegian soil fungus, fought the body’s response to Sam’s new heart, which his system tried to reject as foreign matter. The drug dose constantly had to be adjusted. Imuran further reduced the white blood cells, compromising his immune system and giving him slight hand tremors. Prednisone, a steroid made from human adrenal gland hormones, suppressed his immune system but came with side effects: Sam’s face puffed out like a chipmunk, and fluid pooled in ankles already plagued with “flea bites,” he called his phlebitis. The drug also clouded his eyes with cataracts.

  Sam had no time for cataract surgery. His Cape Cod festival started next week, and he had our new piece to learn. Weaving tales of shipwrecks and ghosts, the composer named her work A Fragile Barrier, depicting shifting sands, sailors’ tombs, and the struggle between man and sea. She used contemporary techniques in her composition, such as strumming strings inside the piano and sounding eerie microtones between notes on the oboe.

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p; Sam and I rehearsed in a hot Hyannis church. He squinted through his cataracts, patiently marking fingerings and notes in gargantuan scribbles. Checking the music, Sam bent inside the piano with a guitar pick. He strummed a dissonant chord, and his anger rose and overflowed in a fury that had probably been building during his recovery. He simply couldn’t see well enough to play the piece.

  Eva, a violinist playing the festival, rushed from the pews, where she’d been listening. She rubbed his back and, after a few minutes, found the right strings for Sam, color-coding them with bits of tape. Standing by as page turner, she rearranged the pages, whispering to Sam like an opera prompter.

  Before the performance, I waited alone in the rectory of Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church as Margo Garrett performed a four-hand piano piece with Sam. The chapel stood only a few blocks up the hill from Cape Cod Bay, and I could smell the salt water. I skimmed off my summer dress, pulling on a pink crepe gown whose fluid drape and low back eliminated any possibility of a bra. Inspecting my reflection, I rummaged in my purse and pasted Band-Aids over my nipples for modesty.

  It was a sweltering night. As the applause died, Sam followed the Lark Quartet down the dark stairs and into the rectory. “I’m schvitzed,” he declared, and splashed water on his pink face. With a hairbrush, he fluffed his damp curls, which were thicker than ever thanks to a positive side effect of the cyclosporine. He pursed his lips, posing for the mirror like a society matron.

  “Ready, deeeaaar.” He put on his best Alice Tully voice and prodded me onstage. Programs crackled as the audience fanned themselves. I gave Sam his cue, and we began the “Hymn” movement, an elegy for sailors who’d died nearby in the Atlantic Ocean. Sam, who’d memorized the piano’s guts by feel, strummed ethereal chords on its strings; by the movement’s end, sweat drenched my hair and dress. There was thunderous applause. In fact, a surprising amount of applause.

  As I bowed, I could see why. My pink dress was dark with sweat, perfectly revealing the Band-Aids plastered on my breasts. The scenario was a new one in my annals of concert clothing mishaps, which most often included broken spaghetti straps, popped buttons, or busted zippers that revealed too much skin. I whipped my long hair in front of my chest for the remaining bows and changed clothes for the reception.

  Backstage with Sam before performing at the Cape & Islands Festival, 1991.

  Over wine and cheese, I watched the composer accept congratulations for her beautiful music. She was happy the audience loved it so much, but I could see she knew to truly appreciate the moment. Given her relative obscurity compared to other composers, I feared the piece would never be played again.

  Sam climbed in my old Honda for the trip back to Hyannis, and I complained that we’d probably heard Fragile Barrier for the last time. I buckled him into the passenger seat, since he was always bewildered by the mechanics of seat belts. He gave me a silent told-you-so look, since he’d originally suggested more well-known composers. We passed the Cape Cod National Seashore. Impulsively, I drove across the empty parking lot to a wooden boardwalk leading to stairs that zigzagged down the dunes to the beach. The surf churned in the night. I still felt a high from the performance.

  I helped Sam out of the car, and we stood looking down the stairs. To me, a time like this was what made music worthwhile, this abstract emotional afterglow, but Sam’s personal relationship with music was nothing like mine. To him, moments away from hard work were wasted minutes, and he didn’t have many to spare. Salt misted his face. He was blind and vulnerable.

  “Can we go now?” he asked softly. “I need to practice.”

  The air-conditioning hummed inside Nashville’s performing arts center. In the warm-up room, one girl furiously scraped cane, squawking her reed fortissimo, to test whether it correctly sounded the note C. She was one of sixty oboists, about the usual number who showed up at each orchestra audition. I recognized people from other auditions; the second oboists from the Columbus Symphony and the Louisville Orchestra, as well as a San Francisco freelancer, were here. We had all met at these auditions many years ago and become friends.

  I’d arrived early and had already warmed up and arranged my instrument and music. As I waited for my audition time, I unfolded the clipping of a review from The Cape Codder that I’d brought along to bolster my confidence.

  Blair Tindall made an indelible impression as a creative musician, totally in command of her instrument ... pure tone quality, impeccable technique and phrasing.... Tindall and Sanders remained well-composed and undaunted by the technical and musical demands of this piece.

  I hoped the Nashville Symphony would like me this much too. The second oboe job only paid $18,000, but Nashville’s recording scene was America’s third largest after LA and New York. I could rent a nice apartment, pay off my credit cards, and buy a new car. From here, I’d climb to a bigger orchestra.

  Adopting Sam’s practice discipline, I’d drilled every excerpt. Setting aside three hours each day, I played through some excerpts one hundred times each, moving up the metronome beat bit by bit, then playing the entire list twice at half tempo. Not the creative bliss many audience members might imagine as the working life of a musician, that’s for sure, but together with the Inderal there wasn’t a chance I’d miss anything.

  I sat quietly until the personnel manager led me to the usual audition setup. I knew exactly what to expect, and despite a harsh-sounding reed the audition went well. Afterward, I waited with ten others for the personnel manager to return. As he flipped to a page in his notebook, I felt I was watching a familiar old film clip. “Number nine and number eleven will advance to the finals,” the personnel manager said. “The rest may go.” I had grown so accustomed to failing at these auditions, the rejection didn’t bother me this time.

  My flight didn’t leave for a while, so I took a cab down to Printers Row. In a dive beside the Pink Poodle bar, a man in a redneck cap slumped over his whiskey. A woman took a long draw on her cigarette, giving me a suspicious look. Willie Nelson’s “Heartaches of a Fool” played on the jukebox.

  I traced my Bud’s weak froth with a bar straw, catching my reflection in the mirror. Dressed in a white blouse and pleated pants, I looked like a secretary. My hands were crosshatched with reed knife nicks and greasy with honing oil. A few cane splinters stuck in the fabric of my pants.

  I was tired of pretending I wanted this. Tired of my hopeless reed-making. Sick of the same old excerpts. Sick of spending every cent trying to win a job with an orchestra that offered only a minimal salary. After twenty-five auditions, I had spent $30,000 on flights, hotels, private oboe lessons, and missed work, most of it accumulating on a credit card. Even if I had won this gig, I’d never get out of debt.

  I signaled the bartender and ordered a double Dewar’s. He wiped down the bar. I swallowed the burning whiskey and cleared my throat.

  “I tried out for the Nashville Symphony today,” I told the bartender. He didn’t know Nashville had an orchestra. He loved music though, played a little guitar himself. What was my instrument?

  “Oboe,” I said simply. “I play the oboe.”

  “Oh-boe?” he asked, and stopped wiping, rag suspended over the bar. “What the heck’s an oh-boe?”

  Thunk! Like mine, Betty’s doorbell didn’t work. Given Betty’s often-grouchy personality I imagined that her apartment was a pack-rat’s mess, stuffed with double basses, out-of-style clothing, and 1960s magazines. I wondered how many empty wine bottles lined the closet. I scolded myself, remembering that I had started to accumulate quite a few myself.

  I dreaded visiting Betty, because I feared I might do something to antagonize her. So far, I’d navigated through Betty’s personal minefield, but she and nearly every other musician in the building were at war. Between laundry room spats and elevator squabbles, Sydney and I were the only Allendale musicians still playing in Basically Baroque.

  However, I’d been called just that afternoon to go on tour with a Broadway musical and had mixed feeli
ngs about whether to accept it. The money would be fantastic. I was dying to discuss it but was Betty a good choice? I was at a crossroads. Would going on the Broadway tour shut the door on my classical music career? Playing for Broadway didn’t exactly feel like a life’s work; besides, the gig was only temporary employment. Finally, I had called Betty to ask if I could stop by.

  She slid open the mechanical peephole, then flung open her door.

  “Wel-come,” she sang, radiant in a peach silk top and flowing taupe pants. Pearl earrings set off her tasteful makeup and freshly styled hair. Recovering from Betty’s surprisingly polished appearance, I took in her tidy apartment, which looked nothing like what I expected.

  Sparsely furnished, the place was painted in pastel shades that had not been applied by Hippolito or his sloppy co-workers. She’d arranged an assortment of olives, pâté, and goat cheese on a glass table. A brilliant white fur rug filled the space between her leather sofa and loveseat. She’d added her own cabinets and flooring in the kitchen, and book-shelves lined an entire wall. An original lithograph, a framed festival poster, and an oil painting hung on another wall.

  “Red or white,” Betty trilled from the kitchen.

  “Red,” I called. Glancing at the white rug, I changed my mind. “No, white. Definitely white.”

  Betty returned with two etched glasses and a slim bottle of Pinot Blanc. Striking a match, she lit a painted oil lamp beside the cheese and sank into her Scandinavian chair, cradling the glass.

  I told Betty about Nashville, my twenty-fifth unsuccessful audition. I paused, wondering if I should be admitting my failures to an orchestra contractor like Betty, who was in a position to hire me. Despite her volatile behavior, though, I sensed that she was supportive of other women. I continued, telling her that someone on the plane asked what I wanted to be doing in five years. I didn’t know. There was a nagging sense that I was supposed to head somewhere. Where?