Body & Soul (31 page)

As the weather warmed Claude and Ivan resumed their old habit of occasionally eating at the bench by the river. Ivan had just finished a long description of Schliemann's discovery of the buried city of Troy, which had been presumed to be mythical, waving his Coca-Cola bottle with enthusiasm as he explained how the great man, a relative amateur, had the audacity to take the classical poetic sources literally, and had been led right to the spot.

"I love it when somebody comes in from the outside and confounds the experts," Ivan said. "It's so delicious."

"Hmm." Claude took a bite of his bologna and cheese sandwich.

"I say, old chum, you've been rather quiet the last couple of weeks. And looking a touch peaked. Is everything all right?"

"Have I?" Claude was surprised. "It's just I've been working. I'm fine." Impulsively, he decided to share his secret. "I'm going to play the Mozart Double Piano Concerto in June."

"Oh, splendid," Ivan said casually.

"No, I mean I'm going to play it in a concert, with an orchestra and an audience. At the Longmeadow Music Festival."

"Good heavens!" Ivan said, catching on now.

"With Fredericks," Claude said, turning away to throw the rest of his lunch in the trash barrel.

"Your debut. And with him!"

"Yes."

"I see, I see, I see. Well, this is tremendous. I'm so happy for you." His round face broke into a smile.

"Yes, it's a great chance." Claude paused. "Don't tell anybody, will you? I don't want to tell anybody yet."

"When in June?"

"The tenth, I think."

"Blast! Blast and double blast. I sail for England on the seventh." He leaped up from the bench and strode back and forth. "Maybe I can change it. The trouble is, I'm going with my uncle, but maybe I can—"

"Don't worry about it," Claude said. "It's no big deal. A student orchestra way up in the boondocks somewhere."

"Ha! Tell that to yourself if you need to. But don't expect
me
to believe it. I know what it is."

Claude stood up and they began to walk back to school. "Just don't spill the beans," he said.

If there was tension building in Claude—stomach pains and short episodes of diarrhea, a tendency to break the pencils he habitually rolled in the fingers of his right hand, exasperation when he had to wait for something or stand on line, sudden headaches, a tic under his left eye late at night—he was barely aware of it, and in any case it seemed of no importance. But it all went away when he worked with Weisfeld. It was like the old days. As if they had all the time in the world.

They sat together at the Bechstein, gazing at the Breitkopf & Härtel edition of the full score. "No one would claim," Weisfeld had said at the outset, "that this is a tremendously deep, profound, earthshaking piece of music. The spirit is more like a game. I'm not talking frivolous, naturally. I mean a kind of elegant, subtle game that once in a while gets a little serious. Almost despite itself, maybe. But if you miss the fun in this, well..." He gave a shrug. "They say he wrote it to play with his sister."

"Is that why he played the second part?"

"There isn't a great deal of difference. Maybe he liked the sonority better down here. Remember, he wasn't playing a full-sized piano. Up above, it could be it sounded more feminine. Who knows? But definitely there's some high-level fun going on here. Between the orchestra and the pianos, between the pianos, between the players and the audience. It's a dazzler."

They had spent more than a week breaking down each of the three sections into its component parts, and then another week putting them back together. Weisfeld concentrated on the orchestral score, identifying the themes and lines that would flow into the piano parts, noting those parts that were merely supportive.

"In here, for instance." Weisfeld pointed to the ninety-sixth bar of
the opening allegro. "The violas with those sustained whole notes—the F—and then the violins add to it, like everybody's holding their breath so that here"—he moved his finger to the right—"you get the crescendo, and then this is just pure joy. You play with joy in here. You see what I mean? The strings help set it up."

During another session he stopped at the fifty-fourth bar of the andante. "Look at that oboe! The sustained C! It's special, because you're going into this special section down here. Down here it's practically opera. The second oboe comes in two measures after the first, playing a D a seventh below, and then the resolution to B-flat, you see? That painful clash against your B-flat appoggiatura? Wonderful. You play Fredericks's part and I'll play yours." He counted off the beat, sang the C in a soft thin voice, and they played eight bars to the letter break. Jumping in so fast at a technically difficult passage, Claude had missed a note or two, but Weisfeld didn't mention it. "That's a real highlight in the whole concerto, as far as I'm concerned. But you see what Fredericks says."

Now, at the Bechstein, they looked at the opening bars for the orchestra. "You're going to be excited," Weisfeld said. "The orchestra sound all around you, so strong you wouldn't believe it, so strong you've got to remind yourself you're sitting there with a job to do. So you concentrate, listen to them, focus on them."

"Okay."

"I'm going to tell you what to listen for. When you go out there and sit down and everything's going so fast, I want you to remember to listen to what they do with
this
note." He pointed to a grace note in the fifth bar. "This one." He played the fourth, fifth, and sixth bars. "Dut-dut-dut dah-dah-dah
duh
-dah dah dah."

"Okay. The B-flat. I got it."

"The reason is, people can play that several ways. They can play it fast or slow, and if you listen it'll give you a hint how the conductor is going to approach those shapes. Slow gives you one kind of impulse, fast gives you another, and if you can get with their impulse immediately, so much the better."

"Okay. I'll remember."

"It doesn't mean you have to repeat it when
you
play it, but you'll know what you're coming off of."

Claude played the three bars several times, tipping the B-flat first one way and then the other.

"See?" Weisfeld asked.

"Yup." Claude said with a smile of pleasure. "Right there. Right at the start."

"Okay. Now I want to show you something in the rondo."

On the train Claude read Stendhal's
The Red and the Black,
required for a Bentley Great Books course, with complete attention. The story of Julien Sorel and his rise from the company of his doltish brothers at the provincial sawmill to the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful fascinated Claude no less than would have the wide, winged head of a cobra swaying before his eyes at roughly the same distance as the book he held aloft with both hands. He almost missed the stop at Frank's Landing.

Everything seemed smaller—the town, the trees, hedges, and houses. It did not seem as long a walk to Fredericks's mansion. The sun caught a window on the highest turret, blazing more brightly than fire, and the gravel of the driveway crunched once again under his feet. He felt well prepared.

The great hushed room with the French doors and the pianos had not changed. Only the light, since it was later in the day, angling in thick mellow shafts over the polished instruments.

"The entrance," Fredericks said from his piano. "Letter A. The trills. Not loud, but firm." He played the trills in his part, using both hands. "Go ahead."

Claude played.

"We want," Fredericks said, "an even sound. Rounded, rolling smoothly. Let's do it together."

When the unison trills were satisfactory, Fredericks called Claude's attention to the subsequent two grace notes. "Softer, but distinct. Distinct. It's the first sense of direction, so be distinct, rolling to the grand unison E-flat." He played the whole passage three times, then listened to Claude. "Good. I remember your instincts with this. Good." They played it together, breaking off the E-flat crisply.

"Yes," Fredericks said, looking at the music. "It's a grand announcement of the root of the tonic. A bold announcement no one could miss. I think of a tall, periwigged, powdered, ruffled personage at the door to the ballroom rapping his great stick. 'E-flat!' he shouts."

Claude laughed.

Fredericks looked over. "Of course, we're not supposed to think of
pictures, are we," he said with a quick sly glint, "like a couple of fat burghers. I take it back."

"Too late," said Claude. "I'm impure. I won't be able to get it out of my mind."

"We'll see. Now these sixteenth notes, this running shape. It isn't easy, because we have to play together with phrasing. The whole thing descends, but let us ever so slightly emphasize the higher notes. See if we can phrase together."

They spent the better part of an hour on the first four bars. Claude felt it coming together and was grateful when Fredericks kept on having them play it anyway, until it sounded utterly seamless. Claude had the illusion that he could reproduce it at will, even by himself, back in the basement.

"Now this melody," Fredericks said. "I've got it first. Dut-dut-dut dah-dah-dah
duh
-dah dah dah." He played it rapidly. "Watch that B-flat appoggiatura to the A."

"Mr. Weisfeld told me to listen for that in the orchestra, bar five."

"Mr. Weisfeld is, as usual, correct. I'll be listening to them also. But you should pay a bit more attention to what I do with it, since you have to play it yourself ten or eleven bars later. You're responding to my statement, most immediately, whatever else you're doing."

"Okay," Claude said. Maintaining his concentration, he was on edge, but comfortably so, willowed by a balmy, gentle sense of contentment, something like what he felt after an especially good meal.

"But let's go back now." Fredericks played the first variation, which began with the same three staccato quarter notes, although this time a tone above. "You see how he plays with our expectations? No
duh-dah
this time. He just marches right up dah-dah dah-dah dah to the half-note C, and that delicious hesitation, and up to D, and then, with the decoration, our old friend E-flat. How cunning he is, how artful!" For an instant Fredericks seemed to forget Claude's presence. He played the two sequences together. "Great care with the first," he said, "and the second is an invitation to be a bit fanciful, a bit expressive. Do you hear it?"

"Yes. There's room. There's space."

"Exactly. I'll play through now to your entrance. Then let's keep going till the tutti."

Fredericks played, then Claude, then Fredericks, and then Claude to the end of the solo section.

"Good," said Fredericks. "In these exchanges we want to preserve the identity of each player. You picked up on a certain—what should I call it?—a certain eagerness toward the end. You might amplify that the tiniest bit. We're eager to join them,
n'est-ce pas?
My trill, your trill, and then
boom,
they're sawing away like mad. You're closer, so you get to be even a shade more eager. Let's try it again from the very beginning. Letter A."

They met every other day, for a total of four sessions. Fredericks seemed to forget about his schedule, and twice Anson Roeg had to come into the room to remind him he was expected somewhere. He grew increasingly demanding with Claude, although never impatient.

"We must agree on how we're going to do these left-hand chords. They shouldn't sound blocky."

Or: "Favor the lower note on these descending mordants."

Or: "We have to keep it flowing in here. This whole page. Those thirds must flow like single notes. Again!"

Or: "This is very dramatic. Orchestral almost. Try for some power. Kick it. Get on top of it."

Claude's notations began to fill the white spaces of his score. He scribbled down so many he had to introduce underlining and exclamation points to differentiate between their degrees of importance.

"These bars of parallel tenths. They'll sound better if we favor my piano just a bit, just a shade."

Or, toward the end of the middle section: "The game here is to make it sound like one piano. The mood is playful, and we should hand it back and forth without the audience knowing who's got it. You see? Like a magic trick."

Claude was particularly impressed when Fredericks made a casual remark about a low grace note, in Claude's part, five bars before the end of the andante: "He was after sonority here. That was the lowest note on his piano. The bottom key. A vast, sonorous, spacious sound across the whole keyboard." It was as if Fredericks felt Mozart was alive, in the next room perhaps, and Claude in turn felt himself to be the recipient of special secrets, special mysteries carried down through time, unchanged and vigorous. When he left the great house it was necessary for him to collect himself, to remind himself to stop at the corners, watch where he was going, and try to remember the shortest route to the train station.

***

School was ending, and when he reported to Mr. Weisfeld that he'd gotten straight A's, he was wrapped in a brief but exuberant bear hug.

"I'm proud of you," Weisfeld said, his eyes glinting, holding him by the shoulders with straight arms. "I know it's been hard with so much, but believe me it was worth it. Perfect marks at Bentley! They'll pay attention to that, they'll pay attention."

"It wasn't anywhere near as hard as when I first went there." Claude said. "You get the hang of it, and Ivan sure helped."

Weisfeld was actually rubbing his hands together. "So now you've got, what, a week and a half before you go up there? You can play as much as you want. This is terrific. You can get more sleep."

"I will."

"Relax a little. We'll have some schnitzel, maybe. See a movie, maybe, one night."

Claude was pleasantly surprised, and instantly resolved they would sit in the orchestra, well away from the action in the balcony. "Great," he said.

The plans for the concert had been explained to him in the library of the mansion by Anson Roeg, who had handed him his railroad tickets. Claude was to leave on Tuesday by train for Springfield, Massachusetts, where he would be met and driven to Longmeadow in time for dinner. Wednesday he would rehearse with the student orchestra, Thursday Fredericks would arrive from Boston for a single full rehearsal, and Friday at three
P.M.
the concert would begin under the great tent. Since Fredericks was to arrive from Boston by rail, Anson Roeg, Weisfeld, and any guest Claude might want to invite would be driven up in the Rolls on Friday morning, to return the same night.