Death and the Maiden

by Gerald Elias

  “Yes. I am Lensky. And what is your dog’s name? He is castrated, I see.”

  “We call it neutered.”

  “That is a strange name.”

  “No, we say neutered instead of castrated … so we don’t hurt woozie’s feelings. His name is Trotsky.”

  “Trotsky? After the Russian revolutionary?”

  “No, because he can’t runsky.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind.”

  “So, Mr. Jacobus, what can I do for you?”

  “I didn’t know we’d met previously,” said Jacobus.

  “Perhaps not face-to-face,” said Lensky, “but my brother told me he had an enlightening conversation with you last night, and the Japanese girl has mentioned you to my mother.”

  “Girl? She’s older than you are.”

  “That may be. You are looking for my mother, no doubt.”

  “I was hoping she’d be here. My friend Nathaniel Williams spoke to her yesterday.”

  “She is out, Mr. Jacobus. One of her shopping forays, no doubt.”

  “Forays?”

  “She provides for my needs, shall we say. She doesn’t believe I am capable of living on my own, and I don’t try to dissuade her.”

  “Why would she think that?” asked Jacobus. “Shall we invite her in when she returns?”

  “I prefer to maintain my privacy, but if she returns, we’ll see. Why don’t you come in where we can be comfortable?”

  Jacobus couldn’t form a stable mental image of Peter Lensky. His spoken voice, though a rich baritone, had almost feminine mellifluous overtones. His accent showed faint traces of Jewish-Russian heritage, but, from his singing most likely, also contained hints of German, maybe even Italian.

  Peter Lensky ushered him to a plain wooden chair. Peter’s hand, on Jacobus’s arm, was as large and strong as his older brother’s, but softer. At least Peter hadn’t whacked him on his back. Yet. From the light, impatient arpeggios coming from the keyboard, Lensky had obviously returned to the piano bench.

  “Where’s your friend?” asked Jacobus.

  “Friend?”

  “The mezzo. That was pretty virtuoso stuff. Vivaldi?”

  “Porpora. And there is no one else here. Except for you.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why should I lie?”

  Jacobus shrugged. “You speak English a lot better than your brother, who’s several years older,” Jacobus said. “How’s that?” Jacobus set his cane down next to the chair, but Trotsky having already usurped that spot, grabbed the cane between his jaws and began to gnaw on it. Jacobus didn’t even try to yank it out and resigned himself to hear a snap any moment.

  “I came to the U.S. in 1987, to be with my mother,” Peter said. “She missed Russia, though Russia had no need for her except for their propaganda, and she missed family. She was expatriated, and with all of the quartet’s touring she said she needed grounding, so I came. You should see her home. It is like a little Russian dacha. Here in Queens.”

  “Nathaniel told me all about it.”

  “Ivan stayed in Moscow and completed his music training. Real training. You can’t find that quality of violin teaching in this country. Everything here is rushed. Superficial. Success before substance.”

  Jacobus held himself back from saying, “Thank you for your kind words,” but instead said, “And no doubt singing helps.”

  “Singing?” asked Peter.

  “With the languages. Nathaniel heard you singing Schubert. Just now I listened to Italian.”

  “Ah! Of course. Also there is French and English. Spanish. My native Russian, some Yiddish from my father. Yes, I know most of the languages. Ivan is not so good at speaking in any language, but he communicates well in the language of enthusiasm.”

  “Yes, I’ve learned that. So, what do you do?” asked Jacobus.

  “What do you mean?” replied Peter Lensky. “I play music.”

  “Professionally?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I would not allow my music to be polluted by such a toxic cloud. Look at what concerts are these days. Look at my mother’s quartet. They must play in any hall their manager books, regardless of the quality of the acoustics, of the lighting, of the stage, of the chairs they sit in, of the backstage facilities, of the lavatories, of the parking. They must play any program the presenter requests, which is usually drivel pabulum. They must play at a time that suits the public: in other words, late enough for the audience to have had time to stuff themselves at the local sushi bar but early enough so that it isn’t too late for postconcert drunkenness, never mind that the musicians have to get up the next day at dawn and fly to the next city by the next afternoon for the next concert the next evening.

  “And these are the best conditions! What happens when the lighting is bad? When the heat is not working or, in your death traps like Phoenix, when the air-conditioning is not working? When the acoustics are like playing in a cardboard box? When they have to play outdoors at these so-called festivals? Tell me, Mr. Jacobus, what is so festive when you have to perform the Pachelbel Canon in blinding heat and you sound like so many little tin cans as the sweat pours down your back?

  “And who are they playing for? A bunch of illiterate monkeys! Consider this, Mr. Jacobus. Would you say Schubert and Beethoven and Mozart are great composers? That they have attained the highest degree of human accomplishment?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Then what does it say about humanity when the response people have to this music, any music, is to slap their hands together; and the more they like it, the louder and faster they slap? This is the behavior of apes beating on their chests, not supposedly intelligent beings. And then, if the hand slapping is not sufficient to convey their excitement, they stomp their feet on the ground and even jump up and down, yelling incoherently. Can you imagine a greater extreme in behavior, Mr. Jacobus, than this bestial response to the most sublime human achievement? Must we pander to the beast in us?”

  “You’ve got a point. Can’t say I’ve ever thought of it that way.”

  “But this is not the worst of professionalism. This is not the worst.”

  “No? Sounds pretty bad to me.”

  “The worst is when the music itself becomes corrupted. When the purity of the musical vision becomes perverted by egomaniacal interests. When you add the light shows, the dancers, the videos, the—”

  “The Power Ramseys?”

  “Precisely. You understand. The Power Ramseys of this world have made my mother into a strumpet. And they call this ‘professionalism.’”

  Jacobus laughed. “Ah! Absolute Power corrupts Ramsey! I’d actually been daydreaming of writing a book along those lines, Peter. I was going to call it ‘Crimes Against Humanities.’”

  “We think alike, Mr. Jacobus! I have already written such a book.”

  “Really! That’s very precocious for someone so young.”

  “I have an old soul, or so I’m told. Translated into English it would be called ‘Crimes Without Punishment,’ but unfortunately for you it is in Russian.”

  “Too bad. By the time it’s published, translated to English, and then Braille, I’ll be dead.”

  “We’ll both be, no doubt.”

  “So I presume you don’t go to concerts, either,” Jacobus said, after he stopped laughing. “What recordings do you listen to, then?” he asked, an aficionado, via old 78s and LPs, of the great violinists of the early twentieth century.

  “Recordings, never!”

  “Why not?” asked Jacobus. “You don’t hear the kind of playing anymore that I heard when I was a kid. Kreisler, Horowitz, Heifetz. One can learn from great musicians of the past.”

  “One can learn from the music, not the musicians. It is all in the music. A piece of music is a life. It exists in time and space. With the first note it is born and with the last it dies. The Rewind button is the death of real music. If we were able to replay our lives over and over again, wha
t a tragedy that would be, for it would make our real existence, the precious beauty of every moment, meaningless. When I hear music, true music in front of me, I see color. I see all colors. I feel the radiation of the vibrating air. It is an invisible force molding all life. But when I hear a recording, I see nothing. I feel nothing. Only blackness. No. A performance must live, then it must die, and that is why when it ends, there should be silence and contemplation, not the slapping of the hands. When I sing Schubert, I am the ichor of Schubert.”

  When Lensky began the gently pulsating eighth notes on the piano, Jacobus immediately recognized the song, even before Lensky began to sing in a glowing, radiant tenor. It was one of Schubert’s great uplifting songs, “An die Musik,” Hymn to Music, and within a few irresistible verses, Jacobus found himself humming along.

  “Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,

  Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,

  Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb’ entzunden,

  Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrückt!

  “Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf’ entflossen,

  Ein susser, heiliger Akkord von dir

  Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,

  Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!”

  In one way, thought Jacobus, it was just the opposite of “Death and the Maiden.” In another way, though, it was exactly the same. It was not Death, but Music, beckoning the singer into the next life.

  “Oh dear Art, during how many gray hours,

  When life’s savage cycle traps me,

  Have you lit my heart with warm love,

  And placed me in a better world!

  “Often, a sigh, released from your harp,

  And a sweet, holy chord of yours

  Has unlocked the heaven of better times for me,

  Oh dear Art, I thank you for this.”

  Jacobus had never heard a more blissfully moving rendition of the song. Peter indeed seemed to be Schubert when he sang it, and Jacobus was about to applaud gratefully at the song’s conclusion but caught himself just in time.

  Finally, it was Peter who spoke first. “You said I was precocious, Mr. Jacobus, but Schubert was my age when he composed this masterpiece. It was also not long after when he died. I am but a servant of the master. Please wait here. I must ablute. I am wet.”

  “Go ahead and ablute.”

  While he was gone, Jacobus pondered Lensky’s radical ideas about the state of music and concluded they were not so unlike his own. Maybe when he was younger he had shared Lensky’s cocksure certainty of the truth of his convictions, though “younger” had been so long ago, he couldn’t really remember. In any event, he never would have been able to express his thoughts with such eloquence.

  He did remember, though, and would never forget the experience of 1931 when he was a youthful contestant in the Grimsley Violin Competition, which in so many ways was a perversion of what music should be about. Students who had been force-fed music for seven, eight, nine hours a day for months, like geese having gavage stuffed down their gullets to engorge their livers, only in order to compete against each other like pint-sized gladiators. Children who were instructed to play music not with each other but against each other.

  “Trotsky, what the hell are you doing now?” Jacobus said, as the tension on the leash pulled him off his seat like a daydreaming fisherman who had just hooked a marlin. He had no choice but to follow the dog to the piano, where he heard Trotsky sniffing animatedly around the piano bench. Jacobus, curious, followed suit, but with his sinus congestion wasn’t able to smell much of anything, except perhaps some lingering body odor. “Well, he did say,” Jacobus said quietly to Trotsky, dragging him from the piano, “he had to ablute.”

  When Lensky finally did return, it wasn’t perspiration Jacobus smelled but the seductive aroma of ripe imported cheese.

  “I like talking to you,” said Lensky, “so I’ve brought us a meager repast. Some cheese, a little caviar, some biscuits, black bread.”

  “Peter, you know, I think you’re being a little too hard on Mama,” said Jacobus, accepting his first tidbit. “After all, we’re living in a capitalist society here and she needs to earn money to make her shopping forays so that you can stay here in your inner sanctum eating canapés and keeping your music pure.”

  “Money? One can survive without it. One can survive so many things. She has made her choice to play for the monkeys.”

  “Perhaps, but this is the real world we’re talking about.” Jacobus accepted proffered caviar on a cracker without any qualms and popped it in his mouth. “People have to make livings, and what your mother is doing is not coal mining. Yes, there is a difference between a recording and a live performance, but there is also a difference between an audience and no audience. There is a great mystery to music.”

  “We know this.”

  “But it’s not the one you’ve been talking about. It’s the one where thousands of people pay good money to sit in a room and watch other people create a highly complex set of vibrations. And of why those vibrations, which literally physically enter the bodies of those thousands of people, create a common subjective, visceral response, even if the music was composed three hundred years ago in some far-off country that the person in the audience has never been to. There’s something mystical about this—maybe science will someday explain how it all works—you call it color, I call it a force—but for now it’s definitely mystical, and your mother is creating a set of some of the world’s greatest vibrations at an extremely high level. She can’t help it if she’s playing it for philistines. Could you pass a slice of the Havarti?”

  “Or with philistines?”

  “Look, Peter, everyone has his own taste,” Jacobus said, swallowing. “There’s no right or wrong in music. Let me take that back. There’s a little bit of right and a lot of wrong, but there are no absolutes is what I’m saying. You might not go for the likes of Kortovsky or Crispin Short or—”

  “It is intriguing, is it not, Mr. Jacobus, how an artist can at the same time have the ability to create something intensely beautiful, yet still have an off-putting, even repulsive personality.”

  “Like Short?” asked Jacobus.

  “No. Not Short. He is a good, sincere musician.”

  “Really? I’m surprised to hear you say that, considering he’s suing your mother.”

  “That’s not his fault. That’s the doing of Haagen and Kortovsky, and by making this all public, maybe they now cannot fire my mother as Crispin told me they would. But in the large scheme of things, someone like Kortovsky was small potatoes. I was thinking of great artists, like Wagner, like Beethoven, or even…”

  “Or even?”

  “Or even yourself.”

  “I suppose I should consider that a compliment,” said Jacobus.

  “Indeed, though to be honest, I haven’t found you as repulsive as your reputation led me to believe.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “But I cannot say the same for Kortovsky. In Russia, many years ago, when my mother played the Schubert Quintet with the great Rostropovich, he wouldn’t permit her to play the second-cello part. He made her play first cello, because he said when she played the slow movement it was like heaven opening for him. Every time they rehearsed it he would jump up, give her his bear hug, and kiss her on both cheeks. But what does Kortovsky say to her? He says, ‘Play on the string. You’re too soft. You’re too loud. Your vibrato makes me ill.’ What kind of treatment is this for an artist?”

  “So you have any ideas why Kortovsky hasn’t shown up to mistreat your mother some more? They’ve got a dress rehearsal tomorrow afternoon, and if he doesn’t make an appearance, it’ll be your big brother again.”

  “My brother seems to believe Kortovsky is in South America.”

  “And what do you seem to believe?”

  “I suppose he is off somewhere auditioning nubile, young cellists with large bosoms.”

  “Off somewher
e? Can you narrow that down?”

  “Nubile, young, blond cellists with large bosoms.”

  “Hmm. Could you pass some more of that caviar?”

  SEVENTEEN

  The Rose Grimes School of Music is located in an old four-story brownstone just a few blocks north of Central Park in Harlem. The building had been slated for demolition, but with the intervention of several prominent local politicians running for reelection and well-connected board members, the school was able to obtain a grant from the city to renovate the structure. That the director of the school, the young African-American violinist BTower, had achieved worldwide celebrity as a concert artist also helped focus public attention on the effort to create a tuition-free after-school music program for underprivileged students, young and old.

  The assembly gathered in the third-floor chorus room. Folding chairs had been set up for the guests; approximately fifty students sat on the floor. Jacobus and Nathaniel had arrived there early and, after exhausting themselves climbing the stairs that still smelled of new paint in the as yet elevatorless building, were sitting in the back of the room catching their breath.

  The New Magini String Quartet was introduced by BTower, who read a list of their accomplishments over the years—their tours, their recordings, their awards—and though the details meant little to the students who were by and large unfamiliar with names like Spoleto and Aspen Music Festival, EMI and DGG—in other words, the world outside their own neighborhood—the impressively daunting length of the list alone was sufficient to elicit enthusiastic applause.

  The quartet’s outreach program was in two parts. The first was a description of the story of the String Quartet in E Minor, “From My Life,” by the nineteenth-century composer Bedřich Smetana. The second demonstrated how Smetana gave each of the four instrumentalists an opportunity to tell a different part of that story by taking over the leadership of the music. Because the New Magini String Quartet had presented this program many times, and because it was the first occasion for Ivan Lensky, it was left to the three women to deliver the scripted explanations.

  They started with the story. How each movement of the quartet depicts a chronological autobiography of the composer’s life. How the first movement represents the turbulence of Smetana’s early years as a composer and his struggle to gain legitimacy for himself and for Czech national music in a country that had been under Germanic cultural and political domination for hundreds of years. How the second movement, rousing and exuberant, is a celebration of the Czech folk dance. How the third is a passionate love song to his wife. How the fourth begins with the celebration of Smetana as a beloved, revered composer in his homeland—a national hero, in truth—and the respect he gained for his music throughout Europe. But then how the triumph suddenly turns to tragedy with the playing of a piercing high E by the first violin, which represents the debilitating sound Smetana heard continuously in his head in his final years, a symptom of the syphilis that resulted in his loss of sight, hearing, sanity, and, ultimately, his life. How, though biographical music is not unknown on the concert stage, this quartet, by a composer describing his own death, is unique to the entire repertoire.