Death and Transfiguration

by Gerald Elias

  So there was no curtain. But there was a pianist, hired to accompany the concertos in order to give the committee some inkling of how the candidate meshed with and responded to another musician on scant rehearsal. A poor substitute for an entire orchestra as accompanist, but auditions are universally acknowledged to be an imperfect science, continually tweaked to make them more effective in identifying the true best candidate.

  Though the finalists had had a chance to rehearse their concertos with the pianist after the semifinal round, they were not informed in advance which orchestral excerpts they would be asked to play for their forty-minute auditions. One reason for this was to see how innately they knew the music and how they would perform under even greater duress. The other consideration was fairness: to not give the second and third candidates the advantage of having more time to practice. The committee, and Herza, also had the option of asking someone to play an excerpt a second time with specific instructions as to tempo, dynamics, or other nuance, to see whether the candidate was not only a fine player—they had already determined that—but could also respond immediately to instructions.

  At the conclusion of the three finalists’ performances, a vote would be taken. If the result was obvious, the committee would recommend that Herza hire the winner. If the result was contentious, which was far more likely, there would be discussion, and perhaps another vote. There was the possibility that the committee would recommend that Herza consider two candidates, or none. They could even ask the finalists to play again. In reality, in this round, the discussion was more important than the vote tally, because the vote was almost always nail-bitingly close.

  * * *

  The three candidates pulled yet another little piece of paper out of Tiny Parsley’s U.K. hat. Yumi chose number one; Michael Morrell, who had been a student of the legendary Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard and was at present a first violinist in the San Francisco Symphony, was second; Scheherazade O’Brien third and last.

  Yumi was encouraged by the order. Her adrenaline was flowing and she was primed. When she walked onstage, though, she was caught off guard by dozens of orchestra members scattered about the hall who had come to watch her audition, and even more so by the ghoulish visage of Vaclav Herza, radiating power and intimidation from his place far back in the audience, surrounded by a sea of empty seats.

  She began the Adagio introduction of her Mozart concerto cautiously, feeling out her surroundings, careful to maintain control, making sure not to throw the accompanist a curveball. The last thing she could afford was to play a note out of tune or have her bow shake from nervousness at the very outset. As the music progressed and she began the Allegro aperto, she felt more comfortable, and as her confidence grew so too did the energetic expressiveness of her playing. By the time she played the Brahms concerto, she was in full stride, combining absolute focus on the mechanics of her playing with a warm, flexible interpretation. She finished the movement, including the virtuosic cadenza by Brahms’s friend and colleague, Joseph Joachim, with tasteful flair. Then she waited, in silence, for the committee’s instructions.

  “May we hear the solo from Shostakovich Fifth, please?”

  Yumi leafed through her music to find the part. This solo was the aesthetic opposite of the Brahms—a spare, sardonic nursery rhyme, a caricature of a minuet with hints of turning nasty. In her preparations, Yumi had listened to Harmonium’s recording of it with Moskowitz playing the solo, and she performed it with character, flawlessly.

  “Could we hear that once more, please,” asked Nowitsky, “with a little more bite?”

  Perhaps she hadn’t accurately gauged the acoustics of the hall. Considering this, Yumi assimilated the request, translating it into a need to be more active with the fingers of her bow grip in order to enhance the articulation, and therefore the sarcasm, of the music. She played the excerpt again and felt she succeeded in addressing Nowitsky’s concern.

  “Play it again,” came another voice. An unmistakable, slurred, accented voice. In command. Herza. No suggestion what to do differently. No one else made a comment.

  Yumi played it again, once more to the best of her ability.

  “Play it again,” said Herza.

  This is a test, Yumi said to herself, to see if I can take the pressure. She forced herself to inhale deeply, looked carefully at the music, listening to it again in her head, and then played. She finished for the fourth time and held her breath.

  “Play it again,” said Herza.

  Once more through the gauntlet with this innocuously treacherous little waltz. It was like a Venus flytrap. Sooner or later it would devour her.

  This time there was silence. Yumi waited. The committee waited. Time waited.

  “Thank you,” said Nowitsky, finally. “Prokofiev Fifth, slow movement, please.”

  This, too, had its famous pitfalls. In addition to requiring the violinist to sustain a very lengthy, inexorably intensifying melody, at its climax there is a dramatic leap up of a minor ninth high up on the E-string. From day one, every violinist practices octaves, an interval so fundamental to classical music, until they’re perfectly in tune. But the conspicuously dissonant minor ninth, just a half step higher, had to be nailed, like an Olympic figure skater having to do a triple whatever from a standing position.

  Yumi took her time perusing the music before she started, visualizing that single crucial minor ninth, feeling it in her unmoving fingers. She then played the excerpt with the control of the veteran musician that she was, knowing when technique trumped even musical considerations.

  “Thank you,” said Nowitsky, when she finished. “Beethoven Third, funeral march, beginning, please.”

  This excerpt was chosen for the audition because it requires expertly sensitive bow control in order to achieve the phrase shaping and sudden but subtle inflection that Beethoven calls for. Keeping in mind years of Jacobus’s cautions regarding rhythm, she tried to keep the musical pulse steady without it becoming stagnant, and conscientiously followed Beethoven’s markings regarding dynamic levels and accents.

  “Thank you,” Nowitsky said, after she had played only the first phrase. Yumi was perplexed. Had they planned for her to stop there, or had she done something unconscionable?

  “Schumann Scherzo, please,” Nowitsky said.

  Yumi had practiced this virtuoso perpetual-motion movement, on the repertoire list of every violin audition, until she could play it in her sleep. She knew she would have no problem with it and even gave it some extra bravura flair in the coda, accelerating the tempo into overdrive even a bit more than was traditionally done at most performances, though Schumann himself had not called for a change in speed.

  “Thank you,” said Nowitsky. “Tiny, please tell Mr. Morrell we’re ready.”

  Yumi left the stage thinking that she had played her best but couldn’t gauge anything from the lack of response by the committee. Why hadn’t they requested any of the big concertmaster solos? she asked herself, and concluded she had lost the audition.

  * * *

  Morrell also had chosen the Mozart fifth concerto. He took to heart Mozart’s unique tempo marking, Allegro aperto—meaning openly energetic and joyous—and played with the impetuous exuberance of the nineteen-year-old composer. It might not have had the smoothness or refinement of Yumi’s performance, but it was certainly a statement of youthful confidence bubbling over.

  For his Romantic concerto, Morrell chose the Tchaikovsky, and for sheer power and virtuosity, not inappropriate for this concerto, he managed to raise some approving eyebrows from the committee, if not from the accompanist who had to struggle to keep up with him.

  “Thank you,” Nowitsky said when he finished the concerto. “Thank you very much. Shostakovich Five, please, the solo.”

  Morrell, buoyed by his promising start and by the positive energy flowing from the committee, jumped on the Shostakovich. This time eyebrows were raised, but for a different reason.

  “Could you try that again, please? Perh
aps taking a bit off the tempo. And please follow the dynamics.”

  Morrell played it again a little slower and softer. The result came off a bit stiff, and one committee member drew an empty square next to his penciled SH5.

  “Thank you,” said Nowitsky. “Prokofiev Five, slow movement, please.”

  Morrell found the music in the pile on his stand, and without contemplating the particular challenges of the excerpt, started immediately, a miscalculation common to inexperienced musicians seeking to impress. Suddenly the minor ninth was on top of him, sooner than he could wrap his mind around it. He made the shift, and it came out perfectly in tune. Except it was a perfectly in-tune octave—the wrong note, justifying the very reason this excerpt was on the list. Pencils began scrawling in earnest. The square now had an X in the middle. Morrell must have realized he had made a critical blunder, that in fact he might have just lost the audition, so he redoubled his efforts, trying to play with even greater intensity, greater musicianship. The strategy backfired, as it almost always does, and he missed badly on several notes in the rest of the phrase.

  “Would you like to hear that excerpt again?” Tiny Parsley, the facilitator, asked the committee.

  “Thank you,” said Nowitsky. “That won’t be necessary. Beethoven funeral march, please.”

  “Which symphony?” asked Morrell.

  There was a momentary silence.

  “Third Symphony,” Nowitsky said politely. “Beethoven Third Symphony. ‘Eroica.’ Funeral march.” In his notes, however, Nowitsky wrote: 1. candidate spoke out loud; 2. didn’t know FM is 3rd symph!? Nerves?

  Obviously disconcerted, Morrell started tentatively; by the second measure, the string players on the committee noticed the hint of a tremor in his bow arm that became more audible as the music progressed. Soon, even the wind players on the committee could hear it. “What gives?” wrote the principal flutist on her pad. Morrell pressed down harder on the string, trying to force the shuddering to stop, but succeeded only in making it worse. His bow began sliding over the string, losing contact with it.

  His loss of bow control became contagious. The vibrato in his left hand was now going wild. He began clutching the violin between his chin and shoulder, as if in fear of dropping it, and squeezed the neck of the violin with his left hand in such desperation that his fingers were barely able to move, like an engine that had seized.

  Nowitsky stopped Morrell in midphrase. “Thank you. That will be all.”

  “Would you like to hear the Schumann?” asked Parsley.

  “Thank you. We’re fine,” Nowitsky said mercifully. “Please bring Ms. O’Brien.”

  Parsley assisted a trembling Michael Morrell off the stage, already whispering to him that this was an experience to grow from—“Don’t be discouraged. You made the finals of a great orchestra and you’ve got a fine future ahead of you”—but it appeared that Morrell, hunched and glassy-eyed, hadn’t heard a word.

  A few moments later, Scheherazade O’Brien made her way onstage, followed by Tiny Parsley. She had chosen to play the fourth Mozart Concerto, the D Major, that begins with a trumpetlike fanfare on the violin, to be followed by the Sibelius Concerto in D Minor, calculating that Herza would be particularly drawn to its brooding darkness. She had performed both concertos with significant orchestras several times and felt supremely confident of her ability to play them under the stress of an audition. Having also played the audition repertoire and all the concertmaster solos over the years in live performance, it was not pressure she felt but great exhilaration. The moment was hers for the taking.

  She tuned her violin to the piano A, nodded to the accompanist, and stood in comfortable attention through four bars of introduction to the Mozart concerto. She readied herself and played the first note, a crisp and lustrous D-natural on the E-string.

  “That’s enough!” It was Herza. O’Brien stopped.

  “Excuse me?” said Tiny Parsley, who from the stage hadn’t understood the words.

  “Are you deaf? I said that’s enough. I’ve heard enough.”

  “But, Maestro,” said Nowitsky. “I must protest.”

  Herza rose to leave.

  “I am the music director. This candidate is dismissed. Her employment is terminated as of this moment. Hire the Oriental girl. If you don’t like it, go file a grievance.”

  The audition was over.

  * * *

  Jacobus was listening to his LP of Otto Klemperer conducting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He preferred Toscanini’s recording, but that one had a scratch on it causing the last chord of the first movement to repeat endlessly. One can take only so many C-sharps, even Beethoven’s.

  Toward the end of the fugato in the Allegretto, his private concert was interrupted by a car coming down his driveway. At first he was annoyed at being disturbed, but upon recognizing the sound of the particular engine, he became alarmed. Trotsky, excited by the same sound, jumped up barking.

  “Shut up,” Jacobus said in a murderous undertone. Surprisingly, Trotsky obeyed. Jacobus turned off the record player and went to the door.

  “Hi, Jake,” said Yumi.

  “You’ve been crying,” said Jacobus. In all the years he had known Yumi he had never heard her cry, though she had had plenty of justifiable reasons to do so. She had been a woman of iron even when she was still his teenage student, but now her tears were enough to make her rust.

  “How do you know?” asked Yumi.

  “Well, it’s the first time you’ve ever come here unannounced, which means you’re either very happy or very upset. From the tone of your voice it’s clear you’re not very happy.”

  “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” said Yumi, trying to gather her composure, laughing and crying simultaneously.

  “Go ahead,” said Jake. “I’m waiting.”

  “I won the concertmaster audition for Harmonium.”

  “And what’s the good news?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No? I thought it was a pretty good one. Congratulations, anyway. You now have a great job.”

  “The bad news is, I’m not taking it.”

  “Come on in, O Enigmatic One, and tell me about it. Can I make you a liverwurst sandwich? With mustard and onion?”

  Yumi politely declined.

  When she finished relating the story of the audition, Jacobus said, “What Herza did was clearly unfair. He should’ve let O’Brien play, for sure. But have you considered that maybe he had already made up his mind he wanted you because you played a superlative audition? Did you think of that possibility? Look, he’s heard O’Brien’s playing for two years now, so he already knew how she sounds. Maybe he just didn’t want to waste everyone’s time. After all, it was the end of a very long and taxing day. Two days, in fact.”

  “I thought about that possibility and tried to convince myself it was true. But I have to tell you, I heard Sherry warming up before the audition, and Jake, she’s a better orchestral player than I am. Hands down. I’ve never heard such great orchestral playing before. She should have won that audition. What Herza did was out of sheer malice. I’m sure of it. I could never work for someone like that, and after what he did to Sherry, if I were to take the job, all the other violinists would just be stabbing me in the back.”

  Jacobus tried unsuccessfully to cover up his laugh with a cough.

  “Is that funny?” asked Yumi.

  “Only that tutti players always stab the concertmaster in the back. Comes with the territory.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the concertmaster gets paid twice as much as they do and gets to tell them how to play.”

  “That seems petty.”

  “Welcome to the world of symphony orchestras.”

  “Is that the world you wanted when you auditioned for concertmaster of the Boston Symphony?”

  “I’d rather not go into that.”

  “Please, I know it hurts, but think of it as a lesson for me. It’ll help me know where t
o go from here.”

  Jacobus had never spoken to anyone about his own audition and now Yumi was prodding him. He had intended to take that experience with him to the grave and was almost there. So close. That and the Grimsley Competition. Separate events, but two of the three tragic pillars of his life. And they were all connected.

  “All right,” he muttered. “Just no editorializing, okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t all that different from your audition,” he began. “I practiced my ass off until those damn excerpts were coming out of my pores. I had one advantage over you, having played in the orchestra for some years. The repertoire was already under my fingers. I was pretty cocky in those days, cockier than you, even.”

  “You said no editorializing.”

  “I meant from you. Anyway, that’s not editorial. That’s a statement of fact.

  “I was confident of myself, but I made the youthful indiscretion of doing a lot of backstage hotdogging. Showing off stuff. Got a lot of sniggers and looks to kill from my colleagues. I got the message damn quick and thereafter kept my practicing to myself. After all, some of those guys were going to be on the committee, and it wouldn’t be politic to piss them off in advance.

  “I went to an art exhibit the day before, just to calm down, like you did. I saw this painting by Turner.” Jacobus stopped in order to keep his voice from choking.

  “It was the last art I ever saw. No matter. I went to bed that night but couldn’t sleep. Not nervous. Energized. I knew I was ready. Some people think they’re ready, but that means you’re not ready. You have to know. I knew.

  “I finally fell asleep. Slept like a baby, in fact. The alarm went off in the morning. I woke up, went to turn it off, and couldn’t see a damn thing. At first I thought it was just dark in the room, but nothing could be that dark. So I closed my eyes for a minute, hoping it would go away. The alarm kept on ringing. It was driving me nuts. I opened my eyes again. It was still pitch-black, but I couldn’t stand the alarm ringing. I felt around for it and threw it against the wall. That stopped it.