The London Vampire Panic

by Michael Romkey

  "Of course, the same thing has been said of the great Liszt.

  "The Maestro's words soothed me and I was able to regain my composure. He does not speak English with a Hungarian accent, but rather a French one. He later told me his father had taken him to Paris as a young prodigy. He lived so long in France he literally forgot his native tongue and had to re-learn it as an adult.

  "As for the Etudes, he told me there were sections that could only be played by a man with large hands. 'I have been blessed with the ability to make unusual reaches,' he said, holding out his hands for me to see. His hands were unusually large, but the most remarkable thing to me was not their size but their appearance. They did not seem to be the hands of a sixty-eight-year-old man. The skin was smooth and blemish-free, not wrinkled and mottled with age spots. His fingers were long and delicate, tapering to perfectly manicured fingernails. 'I am embarrassed to acknowledge it now, but I have written music impossible for anybody but me to play correctly. When I was a younger man, I was very prideful. It was not a good use of my talents.'

  "He pulled a chair up and on a blank sheet of music manuscript paper dashed off alternate measures for the most unplayable passages in the Number 3 Etude. I told him it was very kind of him to help me. 'Nonsense, child,' he replied. 'It gives me tremendous pleasure to assist younger pianists in developing their talent. Now, my dear, play something for me. Some Chopin or Beethoven would be especially lovely.'

  "To perform for Liszt without practice or preparation—a terrifying idea, yet how could I refuse the Maestro's command? Liszt was a great champion of Beethoven. He once did an entire European tour to raise the money to build a monument to the composer. I chose the Moonlight Sonata. I began to think of Andrew as I played and quite forgot that Franz Liszt was sitting beside me as I poured my wounded heart into my playing.

  " 'Bravo,' he said in a low voice when I finished.

  " 'I remember when I met Beethoven for the first time…'

  "Those words—'when I met Beethoven'—made me feel faint, Lucian. Liszt is the greatest pianist of our time, maybe of all time. Through a chance encounter with him, I felt mystically connected, like souls reaching out to one another across time, to the greatest musical geniuses of all time.

  " 'It was in Vienna in 1821,' he said. He told me he had worshiped Beethoven from the time he was a small child in Raiding. His father had taken him to Vienna, an eleven-year-old wunderkind. Some called him another Mozart, although the Maestro said that was rather much. For his first concert in Vienna, he played Hummel's Concerto in A Minor, and a fantasia he'd written based on Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor. The performance was a great success. He prevailed upon Schindler, a mutual friend, to take him to meet Beethoven. He wanted to play for Beethoven and invite him to his next concert. The encounter was anything but a success. Beethoven was already forgotten by the fickle public, whose infatuation of the moment was Rossini. The things Beethoven had read about Liszt in the papers, gushing confections about the brilliant young virtuoso, made him even more cross than he usually was. Beethoven was not, by natural predisposition, a happy man, the Maestro said.

  " 'We were received coldly by Beethoven,' Liszt continued. 'He wouldn't allow me to play for him. He refused the invitation to my next concert. It was all the more exciting for me when I entered the concert hall for my next performance and found him sitting in the front row, so he could hear. He stared up at me with his baleful, unblinking eyes.'

  "Liszt said he had never been nervous to play for an audience, but for the first and only time he trembled as he lifted his hands to play. As the crowd shouted with approval when he finished, there was only one person in the concert hall whose reaction mattered to Liszt. But Beethoven was not in his seat. He had walked out, Liszt thought with disappointment. Then he saw Beethoven approaching him from behind on the stage. He took Liszt by the shoulders and kissed him on the forehead.

  "The Maestro got up to leave. I thanked him again for the courtesy he'd shown me. He waved it off as not worth mentioning, though it had been ten minutes I would remember and deeply cherish for the rest of my life. He stopped just before going out and looked back.

  " 'Try not to be sad, Miss Moore,' the Maestro said. And then he was gone.

  "The next day a package arrived at the house, a beautiful volume of Goethe's Elective Affinities. It was inscribed, 'To a promising young pianist,' and signed 'Franz Liszt.' One passage was neatly underlined in blue ink; I could not but help think the Maestro intended for me to pay special attention to the words. I remember them perfectly:

  " 'The arts are the surest means of escaping from the world; they are also the surest means of uniting ourselves to it. Art is concerned with what is difficult and good. In seeing what is difficult performed with ease, we begin to think of the impossible.'

  "I continued my studies with Doktur Jutt, who expressed pleasure at the sudden progress in my playing, which he attributed to his own good efforts. He did not realize that music had become my 'means of escaping from the world.' "

  Lady Olivia and Lucian watched as a pair of ravens flew over the pavilion and landed at the edge of the lake. One stood with its eye cocked as its partner scratched at the snow and ice with its clawed foot. The birds, blue-black against the perfect whiteness, seemed displeased that the water was frozen.

  "Two weeks passed. An invitation arrived for me to call on the Maestro for tea on Sunday afternoon. The note said he had just acquired two Boesendorfer pianos. One was new. The other had belonged to Robert Schumann. Liszt bought it from the composer's widow, Clara, one of my personal idols, who is teaching at the Frankfort Conservatory. The Maestro invited me to bring my family. Father was away on business, and Mama was reluctant to go, but she knew how important it was to me. It was a warm day, the sun bright in the sky, the air scrubbed by rain the day before. The fresh air would do Andrew good, we agreed.

  "We began our visit with the Maestro showing us some of his treasures. In his library, behind the glass doors of a lawyer's bookcase, were autographed scores by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Hayden. He also had a complete collection of Wagner's scores, addressed 'my dear friend' in the most affectionate terms. Of course, Wagner would have been nothing without Liszt's support. He was the first to recognize Wagner's genius, and through his efforts as patron ensured that Wagner's operas were performed until the world caught on to the new but brilliant Wagnerian ideas of harmony.

  "It was a delightful afternoon. Liszt proved to be a charming host and conversationalist, entertaining us with stories about the world's musical luminaries and his many adventures as court musical director in Weimar. Even Mama forgot her troubles, listening to the Maestro weave a spell with his musical voice.

  "After tea in the main parlor, he showed us the two pianos he kept in his study, an Erard and a Broadwood. The Broadwood was a sacred instrument. It had been Beethoven's. It was the last keyboard the great composer played before his death. Liszt said he played it only once or twice a year, gently touching the closed keyboard.

  "The twin Boesendorfers were in the library, arranged so that the players could face one another. Liszt sat at one and invited me to find a place at the other. 'Clara's piano,' he called it. Upon each piano were transcriptions of an unfinished fantasia for two pianos. With his usual graciousness, the Maestro pretended that I would do him a very great service by playing through what he'd finished of the piece, claiming he needed to hear the two parts played at once to determine how well they worked together.

  "I had to look over my shoulder to see Mama. She was in a window seat with little Andrew listless on her lap, where she would not be in my line of sight and distract me. She gave me an encouraging smile, no doubt suspecting the challenge before me in the untried Liszt manuscript.

  "I looked back to the Maestro and nodded. We began to play.

  "Since you don't play, Lucian, I should tell you that sitting down at a piano you've never played is a lot like getting on a horse you've never ridden. I always approach an untried
piano at a recital with a certain degree of trepidation. One never knows what to expect. How will the keys be weighted? The action may be light or extremely stiff. And the sound—each piano has its own, and you only get to know it through experience. Some instruments are boomy in the lower registers and require a light touch with the left hand to keep the bass lines from overpowering the melody. With others, you must pound with all your strength to get anything out of the registers below middle C.

  "I got no trouble from Robert and Clara Schumann's Boesendorfer. The instrument practically played itself. Which was fortunate, for the music before me was difficult. It was typical Liszt, beautiful but strange, the melodies drawn from the haunting Gypsy songs he remembered hearing as a child. I worked very hard to keep up with the music, and with my partner at the other piano, whose performance was at once effortless and sublime. As we progressed into the second movement, I moved into that magical realm of otherness one experiences when the music and the person listening to it seem to become one and the same. Perhaps you have had such a transcendent feeling in a concert hall. It is impossible to express in words. The music seemed to pour not from our hands but from our souls, an aria of shared bliss rising in the air. I had a vivid impression of what the music described—Gypsy women whirling around a campfire to the music of a bewitched violin, dark hair, dark eyes, colored silk ribbons, tambourines, and finger cymbals flashing in the firelight.

  "We reached a point where my part rested for a measure and then ran to catch up. It gave me just enough time to glance up at the Maestro. I was struck by how handsome he was, even as an old man with long gray hair falling down either side of his face. His brow was high and as magnificently raked as his noble nose. His eyes were closed and he seemed lost within a spell. He didn't need to see the music; he knew it perfectly. He had somehow reached up to loosen his collar as he'd played. I had the sense that I was glimpsing into his past. As a young man, Liszt had been something of a Don Juan. There are still women who worship him. Listening to him perform, it was not difficult to understand why.

  "My part resumed. We went on together a bit longer, until I turned the page and discovered the transcript suddenly ended. I must have looked startled, because the Maestro began to laugh. 'I warned you it was a work in progress,' he said.

  "Mama clapped her hands and little Andrew mimicked her. It was so precious to see—and yet, in that single moment the terrible tragedy we found ourselves trapped within returned with all its dark force. Mama's face went from joy to agony within the single beat of a heart. I felt it come crashing down on myself, too. The chill was not lost on the Maestro, whose smile sank into a grave frown.

  " 'I do not mean to intrude upon your private affairs, Lady Moore,' he said, addressing Mama, 'but I know of a physician renowned for his prodigious healing powers. He does not often agree to take on new patients, but perhaps I could prevail upon him to see your child. God willing, he might succeed where others have said there is no point in even trying.'

  "Mama was starved for hope. She drank in the Maestro's words as if they were water and she had been lost for many days in the desert. With tears flowing down her cheeks, she said she would be forever in Liszt's debt if he could arrange for the physician to see Andrew.

  "Liszt's offer brought Goethe's lines back to my head, the words striking me with an almost physical force: 'In seeing what is difficult performed with ease, we begin to think of the impossible.' But the impossible in music seemed an altogether different matter than the impossible in medicine.

  " 'I promise I will do everything within my power,' he said.

  "It had grown late. Andrew was sleeping in Mama's arms, the Maestro's words bringing peace to him, too. The time had come for us to go. At the door Liszt again promised to arrange for Andrew to have an audience with the great doctor. He gently touched the boy's head as Mama turned to carry him to the carriage. The child was smiling in his sleep, dreaming happy dreams, unaware of how precarious his purchase on life was at that moment.

  " 'I cannot begin to thank you for all your kindness,' I said.

  " 'The pleasure is entirely mine, Miss Moore,' he said, and bowed. 'I am no longer a young man, but being able to enjoy the company of someone so young and lovely is almost enough to bring back my lost youth.'

  "While it may be scandalous for a proper young British woman to say so, I confess that at that moment I felt more than a small attraction for Liszt. The differences in our ages was too great for there to be anything more than an unexpressed mutual appreciation, yet even at his age, Liszt was a handsome, Byronic figure.

  "I noticed something else as we said our farewells, something rather puzzling. Close to the roots of the Maestro's gray hair was a discernable darkening in color. I have seen older women and even older men who dyed their hair dark black or brown in the vain attempt to retain a simulacrum of youth. When they go too long between treatments, bits of gray become visible at the roots of their hair. What I saw in the Maestro's hair appeared to be just the opposite. Though nearly seventy, Franz Liszt apparently had been fortunate enough to retain his dark hair.

  "Then why, I wondered, had the Maestro decided to dye his magnificent long locks a steely gray?"

  * * *

  37

  The Gate of Sighs

  I DID NOT see Liszt for several days. I was in a rehearsal room at the Academy, playing the piano, and I had the uncanny sensation that the Maestro had come into the room and was standing behind me, watching me perform. I resisted the impulse to stop and look over my shoulder. I finished the piece. He was there, exactly as I'd imagined. I pretended to be surprised.

  "I wanted to inquire whether he had been able to arrange an appointment for Andrew with the physician he had told us about, but I didn't want to be impolite. We made small talk until he suggested we take advantage of the beautiful day and go for a stroll. I happily consented, flattered at the great Franz Liszt's attention.

  "We walked together through the streets, pausing to admire gardens and flower boxes. The Maestro talked of his friends Chopin and Berlioz. It was fascinating to hear his stories, not only because of my interest in music, but for what Liszt had to say and how he said it. I could not help but note again that he was extremely vigorous for a man his age. It was difficult for me to think of him as old. His eyes were bright and full of humor, his stride strong and certain. He stood up straight and tall, not hunched over, the way some people become as time and rheumatism bend their bodies and fill them with the aches, pains, and infirmities of old age. The golden-headed cane he carried lightly in his right hand was for fashion, not support, and from time to time he would use it to point out a particularly lovely or significant piece of architecture.

  "We paused by a gate in the great walls that surround the old city. By then it was late in the day, not yet twilight, but close to it.

  " 'Do you know what they call this?' the Maestro asked.

  "I shook my head. I had been too engrossed in my piano studies and family concerns to spend time exploring Budapest. Liszt told me it was called the Gate of Sighs. As his eyes roamed over the heavy doors of scarred wood ribbed in iron and set into the heavy stone walls, he drew in a long breath that he exhaled in an extended sigh, as if the power of the place commanded him to feel and act out a portion of its drama.

  " 'When I was a child, I would listen to the Gypsy violins play haunting melodies,' he said. 'Though my father took me away to Paris to study and perform, the music of my motherland lived on, whispering quietly in my blood. I was away so long I forgot my friends, I forgot my home, I even forgot my language. Still, the sad, strange music of the motherland was with me always. It was in me, a part of me. I am indistinguishable from it. The soil of the motherland is soaked in blood. For century after century my forebears fought to hold onto their homes, their faith, their lives. We have lived in a constant state of siege, the Germans attacking from the west, the Moslems from the south, the barbarian hordes of the steppes from the east.

  " 'This gate,' Liszt
said, and pointed with his cane, 'the Gate of Sighs, is where thousands died defending the city. Wives, children, and parents watched from the ramparts as the brave died by the thousands, but they held the city. In Budapest, at least, the streets did not run ankle deep in the steaming blood of the innocents. What desperate prayers were offered begging God for deliverance? How many long nights did the people of Hungary spend on their knees, begging for the power to save their families, their faith, their immortal souls? And their prayers were answered. Behold the evidence. The Gate of Sighs, where the tide was broken.'

  "The Maestro asked if I was Catholic. I told him no. He considered this for a long moment. Liszt, somewhat infamous for amorous scandals in his earlier career, had grown to be a deeply faithful man. After a bit he asked if my faith was strong. I said it was.

  " 'Life has its ways of testing one's faith,' he said. 'But you, my dear, will be tested more than others.'

  " 'You mean with Andrew?' I asked.

  "The Maestro nodded. He said he would take Andrew to see the great doctor, but indicated that would not necessarily be the end of our troubles.

  " 'You need to prepare yourself,' he said.

  " 'I know there is no guarantee of a cure,' I said, 'but at least we now have a reason to hope.'

  " 'There is always hope,' Liszt replied a little sternly. 'You will have an important role to play in your brother's recovery. It will require personal sacrifice. You may well be required to care for Andrew for a great many years.'

  "I said I would gladly agree to all of that and more.

  " 'Saving your brother's life could change yours in the process.'

  "I repeated that I would pay any price to help little Andrew. He took me by the arm and turned me back in the direction we had come.

  " 'My best advice to you then, Miss Moore, is to pray to God for the strength and discernment to get you through the ordeal ahead. That is all I can say at this time. We leave tonight.'