by Rick Blechta
“I am charmed to meet someone so famous,” he said, bowing stiffly.
“And how do you feel about being asked to hear the first performance of a new work by Beethoven?” I asked.
Only a small tightening around the eyes showed that I had inadvertently insulted the man. “Were you not told? I am to accompany you tonight.”
At that point, Baron Rudy stepped up to bat. “Heinrich, I did not have time to tell Fräulein Morgan much about our plans.” He turned to me. “Herr Doktor Schatzader is a most excellent pianist, besides being a respected Beethoven scholar. It was he who established the authenticity of our little treasure and who also did the excellent piano reduction.”
Behind me, more people entered the room. “Ah, Herr Baron! Es freut mich, Sie wiederzusehen!” one of them boomed in loud German.
Everyone in the classical music business knew Caspar Montenegro, and for one reason only: he was the producer of some of the biggest musical spectacles of the last quarter century. Want to see an opera performed in the exact setting about which it was written? Montenegro had done it. Want to bring together three of the greatest operatic superstars for a special concert beamed around the world? Call on Montenegro. The man had the reputation of not only being able to deliver the goods—but also for his complete ruthlessness in attaining those ends.
“Caspar,” the baron crooned to the overweight, overbearing producer and proceeded to make introductions.
Montenegro had brought his latest tootsie, introduced as Lorenza, a blonde, Italian bimbette who looked to be less than a third his age, in other words, well under twenty-five. Within five words, she confirmed that her only asset was a balcony big enough to play Shakespeare from.
Behind Montenegro was a man who reminded me of a rat, all slicked-back hair, big nose and one of those pencil mustaches that looked ridiculous forty years ago and still does now. His name was Henri something-or-other, and he had “major-domo” stamped all over him.
***
We were all standing around with glasses of sherry or scotch (mineral water for me, since I never touch alcohol before I play), making nice noises about the von Heislinger homestead when a sixth guest came into the room. Him I had met before, and from the looks we exchanged, it would’ve been obvious to anyone present that there was no love lost between us.
Luigi Terradella owned Edizione Roma, one of the largest music publishing houses in Europe and the most aggressive, as well. I’d earned his undying enmity when I’d indiscreetly referred to him as Tarantula because of how the man acted most of the time. When he wanted, he could be charming, but if he didn’t feel you were worth the effort, or if you’d earned his enmity, his blasts of frosty hauteur could freeze the sunniest personalities. Many other people I knew agreed that he was a pompous, self-important phony, but hadn’t been dumb enough to say it in public. Talking to him, you’d think he personally wrote all the music he sold.
Terradella didn’t even offer me his hand.
“Ah, Luigi, my friend!” Rudy said expansively to the new arrival. “So good to see you again! I am glad you could be here for such an historic occasion.”
“I would not have missed it for the world, Herr Baron. If your find is what you claim, it will be the jewel in the crown of Edizione Roma.” Terradella looked across to me. “Is she ready to play it?”
Stung by the condescension in the Italian twit’s voice, I snapped out, “Of course! And I am so glad you made the journey to hear me perform this evening.”
“Come, come, Luigi,” the baron said soothingly. “Let us not start on this again.” He looked over to the Schatzaders, who were hovering nearby. “My chef has prepared a delightful meal, and afterwards, we will have the Beethoven!”
Our host led us into the cavernous dining hall, now alight with more candles than that famous scene in Phantom of the Opera. The eight of us sat at one end of the vast table, our host at the head, with Frau Schatzader on one side, me on the opposite, Egghead next to me, the Tarantula next to her and so on. During dinner, I learned that most of the baron’s guests were involved in the plans for presenting our “momentous” find to the world. With Montenegro on board, it was easy to see that this would be a Full-Stops-Pulled Out-Broadcast-to-Everyone-on-the-Face-of-the-Planet Production. Henri was present to take notes for his master and be generally sycophantic. Terradella had been offered the first rights to print the Beethoven concerto—once Baron Rudolph gave the go-ahead.
Dinner was fascinating, as everyone jockeyed for position with Baron Rudy. Not having sufficiently thought things through, I hadn’t realized what the damn piece of music might actually be worth. With a pay-per-view TV broadcast, a DVD of the concert, a CD and even a background TV show and DVD on “the making of”, there were tens of millions to be made. From where I sat, greed showed on everyone’s face. I tried to keep it carefully wiped from mine and wished that I’d brought Marty with me for the business. I’d only come to play.
“It must be from Wien, the city of Beethoven!” Montenegro pontificated about the premiere. “We will use the Musikverein and the Wiener Philharmoniker. You all, of course, agree?” he added, making it clear that he couldn’t care less if we did or didn’t. “The audience will be sparkling. We will have interviews with them going in and coming out. We could sell tickets for...”
As Montenegro continued, Schatzader, leaning over to me, asked in a more friendly manner than he’d shown earlier, “I understand you have practised our little masterpiece all day. What do you think of it?”
“Extraordinary! Fantastic!” Then I smiled. “And a royal pain in the derrière to play. I feel like I’ve just barely scratched the surface of it.”
“You are having trouble with the technical difficulties, then?”
“No,” I said firmly. “One needs time to digest the shape and mood of music so profound.”
“Does not her honesty make her special?” Rudy said, overhearing my words. This earned me a rather venomous look from several faces around the table. “My dear Victoria, you played like a goddess this afternoon, an absolute goddess!”
Gertrud jumped in at that point, placing her hand on Rudy’s arm.
“But Rudolph, maybe Fräulein Morgan is right. She is perhaps not...capable—”
“The word you want is ready,” I interrupted. “I don’t feel I can do the music justice yet, but I assure you I can most certainly play the notes! If your husband is willing after dinner, we can take a good poke at it.”
Gerty gave a wild laugh and slid her hand down to rest on the baron’s. “Doesn’t she have such a funny way of speaking? It is so quaint!”
Ah ha! I thought when I saw her oh-so-casual movement. Her husband noticed it as well, although he only showed it with a slight tension in his body. I wondered very much what her game was. Why should she be jealous of me? I had no interest in the baron, but the studied insult in that simple movement was abundantly obvious, as if she were saying, “See? You are no match for me when it comes to men. When I am in the room, you do not exist.”
The fight between us for Baron Rudy’s attention lasted right through the main course and into dessert. It was downright childish, but damn it all, she’d started it. Even though I had no “interest” in our host, I wasn’t going to sit still and let her walk all over me!
In retrospect, both of us were totally shameless. Every comment we made for the rest of the meal was loaded with double entendres on top of double entendres.
At one point, Gerty stated that one big difference between American women and the women of Europe was that while most American women talked about having affairs, most were too conservative to do anything about it. European women, on the other hand, found that having a lover or two only added more spice and enjoyment to their lives.
Terradella spoke. “But you forget that Signora Morgan has also had several, ah, encounters. And what about the wretched photograph we see all the time?”
Gerty instantly looked suspicious. “What photograph?”
“Oh, that!” I laughed in a carefree manner, ignoring the Italian worm’s adjective. “I occasionally practice in the nude, and I’m afraid I wasn’t being careful one time. Some photographer happened to have staked out my hotel window. It’s been in just about every tabloid. So embarrassing...” As the words came out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I was spouting such drivel.
“It is really quite a wonderful picture,” Rudy said, looking at me. “In fact, I thought it so wonderful that I purchased it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I now own the negative. In correctness, I should say that I own the final print. I had one last one made, on a very grand scale I might add, and then had the negative destroyed. That print now hangs in my private sanctum.”
I finally had Gerty on the ropes, and her glare told me she knew it. After taking a last sip of coffee and trying to keep the smirk off my face, I said cheerily, “Now, I feel like playing some Beethoven. Would anyone care to listen?”
Herr Doktor Schatzader, who had remained silent for the duration of his wife’s verbal duel with me, slowly rose to his feet, looked his host squarely in the eye and said in German what I thought to mean, “I will say it again. She is not deserving.”
“It is my decision, and she will do it.”
Terradella added in an undertone, “We could have done...”
I couldn’t catch the last part and wished I’d attended more of my German classes in high school.
***
If anything, I felt more at sea with this startling piece by the time everyone bid me good night. The totality of the work left me stunned. For nearly two hours as we worked at it, Schatzader and I had filled the old ballroom of that castle in the middle of the Austrian nowhere with shimmering cascades of sound, startlingly daring harmonies, music filled with the most sublime emotions imaginable. It sounded as if Beethoven had seen his approaching doom and reached out to reaffirm what had been his life.
The piano reduction was a bitch (as most are), but Herr Doktor turned out to be a real trooper, although rather pedantic in his interpretation. At least, he kept up with me most of the time. By the end, he was able to play some of the easier sections well, sitting at the keyboard with a dreamy smile on his face. The rest of the time, I got the feeling the music was just beyond him.
Out in the hall, the other guests, having eventually wandered in, had taken seats and sat there, transfixed. The way they all stared at me made it feel too much like an audition, especially with Henri the Rat scribbling from (mercifully) whispered dictation by his boss, Montenegro. It was difficult to ignore them all. Normally when I play, I shut my eyes, but when you don’t have the music memorized, doing that can make things far more exciting than you want. I avoided looking at Schatzader, too, when I could. That hawklike face and the stretched parchment skin gave me the creeps.
At one point, Schatzader, probably looking for the little boy’s room, excused himself, exiting the hall by the door at the back of the stage. Gertrud and Baron Rudy took the opportunity to leave by the door at the opposite end. I stood looking at the room around me reflected in the windows, the music still echoing in my ears, holding me in its powerful spell. Terradella, an unreadable expression on his face, came over to the piano and thumbed through the piano reduction as if he couldn’t believe the notes written there contained what we had just played. Like me, he probably was trying to imagine what it would sound like with an orchestra.
Montenegro sidled over. “We really must recreate this for our video production.”
“What video?” I asked.
“You rehearsing the concerto for the first time, working over notes written almost two hundred years earlier. They have been waiting that long for someone to give them life. I can make it a very touching moment. You will see!”
“I think the music can do that without much help,” I observed dryly.
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken—with Henri scribbling away madly. “...we will, of course, need someone more photogenic to play the part of the pianist. Perhaps...”
Schatzader eventually slipped back in, and we commenced with the solemn, bell-like chords which heralded the slow, second section of the work. I was not sure, but before I submerged myself once again in Beethoven’s genius, I thought I detected raised voices from behind the door at the far end of the hall. Probably Gerty the Cow complaining I was keeping her from her beauty rest. Then the music took me by the hand and led me away.
Finally, even though all the hours of playing had begun taking their toll on my muscles, Schatzader and I decided to try a start-to-finish performance. That first death-defying run burst forth from Tristan’s depths as my fingers raced up his fingerboard: Beethoven throwing down the gauntlet to his critics, those who’d started whispering around Vienna, saying that he was “washed up”.
The sublime music poured out, released like a torrent from under my fingers and bow and the notes from the piano, now tender and sorrowful, now raging against the cruelty of fate, the injustice of life, back and forth between hope and despair, happy memories juxtaposed against tragedies unable to be forgotten. Eventually, the music strove upward and upward in a Herculean effort, attaining a plateau high above the earth, where few mortal beings are ever given the opportunity to tread. The final notes faded into the hazy distance, serene now and finally at peace with the universe: stark, simple, achingly beautiful music.
The utter silence that greeted the end of the final, gentle pianissimo note from the violin made me realize that the potency of the music wasn’t only in my mind. The servant appeared with the briefcase and collected the music. My feelings were beyond words, my overused hands and arms felt stiff, wooden, as if they weren’t part of my body, but it had been a great day. Despite what I was feeling a few days earlier, I was still a musician.
The reviews were ecstatic. Bubbly was poured, and we all patted each other on the back. Then the jockeying began again, as everyone trotted out their ideas on how this great work should be presented to the world. As we all chatted, Terradella seemed to get rather upset at something Baron Rudy told him, but he quickly caught himself before his anger bubbled over into harsh words. They adjourned to a far corner of the ballroom, where their conversation continued with much waving of the hands by the Italian whose words crashed against the imperturbable calm of the Austrian. When they rejoined the rest of us, Terradella looked decidedly unhappy, and as is normal in these kinds of polite gatherings, no one asked what their discussion had been about, although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one dying to know.
Montenegro thought my red hair would look wonderful against all the gold in the main hall of the Musikverein. I think Lorenza had fallen asleep partway through the proceedings. She seemed even dopier than she had earlier. Gerty looked put out, about what I didn’t know, but since she was also developing great frown lines, I didn’t care.
Herr Doktor seemed pleased with the results of our performance, managing a real smile for my benefit. He seemed inclined to want to talk a bit about the music, but his darling wife interrupted with other ideas, telling him she simply had to get some rest (hah!).
Lorenza cuddled up to her sugar daddy and asked when they would be going back to Paris (from where they’d flown in on the baron’s private jet). In short order, the party stopped rather than ended. Heels clicked down the length of the hall, the door shut and Baron Rudy and I were left alone.
Even though I felt as if I could sleep for a week, I was way too wired to go to bed. Besides, I wanted more than ever to cement the deal. I’d gotten too many weird vibes throughout the evening. With all the whispering off to the side and seemingly offhand insults, I’d gotten the strong feeling that the baron and Montenegro were the only people who really wanted me to be part of this project, and I had to be certain I would be getting my hot little hands on this musical wonder. Then I could get on the phone to Montreal again. The amount of time I’d been incommunicado must have been getting perilously close to Divorceland.
“Would you like to celebrate with a little more champagne, my dear?” the Baron inquired as I hoisted the strap of Tristan’s case onto my shoulder. “Tonight was the first performance of what is one of the greatest additions to the repertoire of your noble instrument.”
“Well, to be rather blunt, I’d like to conclude our business arrangements first,” I said, then smiled to soften my words. “We could have a champagne toast after to seal the bargain.”
“No,” he said firmly. “Champagne first. We must toast Beethoven before we discuss business, Beethoven and the most beautiful and talented Victoria Morgan!”
Too tired to argue, I gave in. A toast to one of the greatest musicians who ever lived. From beyond the grave, he’d come back to give us one last gift of his genius. Then we could get down to brass tacks. For the work I’d done that day, it was the least I deserved: one more glass of bubbly.
It turned out to be the stupidest decision I’d made in my entire life.
“It was a tremendous shock when she just waltzed into the studio, even more when we played back the first take. I knew she was supposed to be this hotshot classical musician, but she can play like a rock star, too. They tell me Tory looks like an angel. I know she plays like the devil.”
—Singer/Guitarist, Kit Mason, from the liner notes of her debut CD, “Finally Seeing the Light”
Chapter 8
ROCKY
I woke up the next morning with a mouth that tasted like dirty gym socks, grit in my eyes and a headache a whole bottle of aspirin wouldn’t begin to touch. God, I love jet lag.
Rolling over, I half expected to find Tory there to cuddle against. Taking over her room had been a mixed blessing. I’d woken up several times during the night with the unmistakable impression that Tory was only an arm-stretch away, so strong was her presence.
