The Morels Read online

  We stumbled out into the empty corridor bleary eyed, holding each other’s damp hands, parting ways in the company of the security guard at the front door. There existed now a pleasant tension between us, a play of eye contact and little smiles whenever we happened to be in each other’s presence.

  But she is currently doing little for my nerves; what small degree of focus I gathered on the walk down from my teacher’s room has scattered. She is telling me a story about something-or-other involving people I don’t know. I fight the urge to stick my fingers into my ears. Please, I want to tell her, shut the hell up!

  The jury sits some rows up on the right. I can make out each member’s frosty head: they are the only ones here who look at ease, bored even. They’re running late, three people behind. I should be ascending the stage at this moment, nodding to the accompanist, feeling the stage lights sunburn my neck and the backs of my hands, uncertain as I scoot my bench in and adjust its height whether I will remember the opening chords.

  The violinist onstage is wrapping up the rondo when I see Arthur in the aisle up front, violin under his arm, tightening his bow. He is executing a stiff-legged rocking side to side, on his face an expression of stern concentration. When his eyes are in my line of sight, I offer a little wave.

  Who’s that, my studio mate asks. Pei-Yee: that’s her name! She tells people to call her Peggy. This little triumph of memory gives my confidence a momentary lift. There is a smattering of applause as the violinist finishes and climbs down to put his instrument away.

  Arthur says something to the jury chair, Mr. Strasser, and then takes the stage.

  He gets his note from the piano and, holding his instrument like a ukulele, strums it into tune. Some players will obsess over tuning their instruments, drawing on each string and testing it against the harmonics of the adjacent string as though performing a laboratory experiment, like a tuned instrument might help with tone deafness. But for Arthur, it’s a few pinches at the pegs and a curt nod to the accompanist, who then begins.

  Arthur tucks his instrument into the crook of his neck and raises his bow.

  Composition was my last class of the day, and afterward I usually hung back, letting Arthur go ahead of me to spare myself the annoyance of an hour-long journey with the class know-it-all. But on the day of our morning subway chat, I made a point of following him out so that we could continue our discussion.

  Applause is the kiss of death, Arthur said. They might as well be saying, I didn’t hear a note you played. You can feel it in your hands. Bring them together, bam-bam-bam, until they’re numb. Numb: key word. It’s a white noise that replaces the noise the performer makes, like they’re erasing what they’ve just heard. Numbing their ears, numbing their minds. God forbid they let the experience linger. It might—gasp!—actually have an effect on them. And they wouldn’t want that. This is supposed to be a nice, quote ‘evening out.’ Wouldn’t want to spoil things.

  But who are you imagining, I said. I think you underestimate people’s desire to be moved. This audience of yours, they’re caricatures. What about me? I mean, I’m in the audience. Our composition teacher’s in the audience. We’re listening to your performance and are moved. And so we clap. It’s the only response available to us to show our appreciation.

  My point is about politeness. It’s the death of art. You may be applauding out of genuine appreciation, but the guy next to you, maybe he didn’t particularly care for me, but he doesn’t want to appear rude, so he applauds, and by adding his applause to yours, he’s devalued it, canceled it out.

  Then what would you have me do?

  It’s not about what I’d have you do, it’s what I’d have your neighbor do. It wasn’t always like this. Think of Gluck, what the reception at the premiere of Iphigenia must have been like. These people were barbarians. I don’t even think they had seats back then. The guy behind you slopping his mead onto your shoulder, fist-fights, if you had to piss you did it in the corner. Do you think they clapped politely if they didn’t particularly like what they heard?

  You’re thinking of Elizabethan theater. Gluck was Vienna, the Enlightenment. Your average Hans didn’t go to the opera. It was strictly the powdered-wig crowd.

  Then Monteverdi, Orpheus, if you want Elizabethan times. Fine, or a more recent example, Le Sacre du Printemps.

  May 1913. Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Stravinsky’s savage rhythms and Nijinsky’s flat-footed rendition of the pagan rites of rural Russia provoke catcalls from the audience. Fellow composer in attendance Camille Saint-Saëns storms out. Supporters shout for the catcallers to sit down, and the catcallers tell the supporters to shut the hell up, and soon enough a punch is thrown, followed by an aisle brawl. The scene, astonishingly, degenerates into a full-scale riot. Stravinsky slips out the back door just as the Paris police are arriving to restore order.

  That’s real, Arthur said. That’s honest. A standing ovation from that crowd would be something to be proud of. But these days, a standing ovation is meaningless. It’s gotten so an ovation is expected of any performance that doesn’t go horribly awry. How absurd is that? Go see Sacre at the City Ballet today, and I guarantee you five out of five performances get a standing ovation. Why? Have the performances gotten that much better? Or the music itself? Has our intrepid composition teacher given a private ear stretching to each audience member so she can appreciate Stravinsky better? Hardly. They’re standing and clapping because it’s expected. You say it’s all one big dare game with modern music, that composers are alienating their audiences at a time when we should be cultivating them, but this code of manners, this politeness, is smothering art, and composers are just trying to fight for their survival. That’s why we’re pushing pianos off stages, why we prefer the riot to the ovation. The riot has become the ovation of the twentieth century. At least it’s honest.

  You’re telling me that if you win this competition, when you get up there on that stage and perform, you don’t want people to clap?

  I want people to be honest. Anyway, they’d be clapping for my performance, not for Mozart.

  What about your cadenza, I ask. (That moment in a concerto where the orchestra stops playing, and the soloist, freed from the baton’s constraints—freed even from the composer’s constraints—is given space to let loose, to show his stuff. It’s an open hole in the score, to be filled by the performer. Way back when, it had been an improvised flourish less than a minute long, though throughout the ages this practice has devolved into lengthy, shameless displays of virtuosity. Rarely improvised anymore, these spots that composers once left blank have been filled in by transcriptions of legacy performances—Paganini, Heifetz, Kreisler—included in modern editions; and, although marked “optional” most often they were performed verbatim.)

  I said, I assume you’re not planning on performing one of those store-bought cadenzas, are you?

  I wasn’t planning to, he said. No.

  So you’re telling me that when writing your own cadenza, you’re going to go for the riot and not the ovation?

  Maybe I should, he said.

  Mozart’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, K271a. Odd choice for someone counting on winning this competition. Of the dozen violinists on the roster, half are playing Mozart violin concertos. Arthur is one of three this year auditioning with the Seventh; and both of the others study in the same studio with Arthur. He isn’t exactly making himself heard with his choice of repertoire.

  But the moment Arthur’s bow touches string, it is clear why he’s chosen the piece all the other violinists are playing: he’s encouraging comparison. The difference is so clear, so sharp, as to surprise one into a new awareness about the nature of greatness. Arthur’s control is astonishing. His pianissimi a throaty whisper, his fortissimos a roar. His sound is a personality all to itself, a presence that seems to hover somewhere between the top of his head and the grand, twinkling chandelier. Whereas with the previous player each gesture was a reminder of a technique perfectly mas
tered, Arthur’s playing is somehow beyond technique and manages that contradictory illusion of making the impossible seem effortless. It is as though Arthur is displaying some essential mystery of music’s unalterable truth, a truth the other player’s fastidious attention to technique all but obscured.

  Holy moly, Pei-Yee whispers, crouched in her seat, this guy’s good!

  By the end of the first movement, there isn’t a single person in that concert hall not held rapt by his sound. If I am any measure of what the rest of the contestants are feeling right then, Arthur won to a collective capitulation.

  When he is done, there is a moment of awestruck silence. I’m thinking of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the mother ship lands and everyone watches this perfect glowing being emerge, ending once and for all any doubts any of them still might have had. That is who we have in our midst. Or maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe before us is the only real native of a land in which the rest of us—including the judges—are aliens. The only one among us who can speak the language fluently.

  I tell Pei-Yee that I have to use the bathroom (Wait, I think you’re next!) and go to my practice room and gather my things. My mother is surprised to see me home so early but is glad for the extra hand and enlists me in helping her with dinner.

  And dare I ask how the contest went?

  The best man won, I say. Unfortunately, that man turned out not to be me.

  The previous year mourned the fluke loss of the ASO’s entire cello section: six of its most advanced players to graduation, the principal to our more prestigious Midtown rival, and Mischa—who’d been doubling his shot at a college scholarship as his school’s star forward on the basketball court—to a broken forefinger, out for the season. This has meant a begrudging promotion of most of our rank from the intermediate orchestra, at least until the school could recruit some better cellists. I used to sit in the back row and fake my way through silently, timing my bow movements with the fellows in front of me. Here, in the advanced orchestra, this strategy has failed.

  Mr. Strasser was a ferocious little man who refused to suffer our inferior cello section quietly. Hold it! He’d call, then turning to address the empty seats in the auditorium: Is there a veterinarian in the house? Hello? Quick, we have a dying moose over here! To each of us in turn he’d point. From your entrance, if you’d be so kind. Rooting out each foul note with the tip of his baton.

  Darling, your sound. How shall I put it? Your sound could give my deaf grandmother a stroke. And she’s been dead thirty years!

  In retrospect, I see that his cruelties were not baseless; on the contrary, they were particularly effective in whipping me into shape. For the first time I began practicing my part, and with better discipline than I practiced the piano. I worked over tricky passages until I had them down, memorized even, careful to keep my fingering consistent, bowings as marked. Anything to avoid the humiliation of being called out to saw away in front of a roomful of glaring musicians. I began listening to my fellow cellists and picking out the lightest touch of the baton in our direction. By the night of the Spring Concert we are actually carrying our weight, more or less. Gone is the sneer on Mr. Strasser’s face when looking in our direction. We have improved. We have passed his test. All right darlings, he says to us by way of pep talk. Put on your best underwear and play like that next Saturday and we’ll have a show!

  Those weeks following Arthur’s win the whole school seems to wake to his presence. In the cafeteria I watch the sight of Arthur silence each table he passes, one by one. And after he is out of earshot, a topic change, sotto voce:

  Where’s a bully when you need one?

  The Ensemble Contemporain commissioned him to write an encore, I heard.

  If you ask me, Nacoki was robbed—did you hear his Sibelius? It’s like ten times harder than that Mozart.

  And the Seventh? What were the judges thinking? Didn’t we do the Seventh last year?

  That was the Fifth. Three years ago.

  I often come across him in the hall now, engaged in some intense discussion with a member of the faculty. In music history, our teacher, who’d always given the impression that no musical achievement more recent than a century old was worth talking about, invokes Arthur’s name to illustrate the degree of the teenage Chopin’s prodigy as students nod their heads: Oh, you mean that good. I’m jealous, sure—jealous of his change in status, jealous of his effortlessness. How I struggled! With my lack of skill, with my lack of discipline. Arthur lacked for nothing I could see. The Annual Spring Concert is an all-day affair. In the morning the kiddie orchestra performs in the smaller recital hall, followed by a matinee program on the main stage, courtesy of the intermediate orchestra. Classes have ended; it’s a day for good-byes. The main event comes in the evening with the advanced orchestra, Mr. Strasser at the helm. It’s referred to as the “Concerto Concert,” although a full-length program has been prepared: three pieces, with an intermission after the first two.

  To start, an overture.

  Fidelio, Mr. Strasser says, addressing the audience after taking the podium, Beethoven’s only opera, was a failure in his lifetime. This was a student concert, after all, and even in the breaks between applause there was time for a teachable moment. Past the glare of stage lights I can see that this concert is better than well attended. It is packed. Although the mezzanine is dark—the only light comes from stray glints off the chandelier—it is alive with movement. It is rumored that scouts from CMA are in attendance, as well as several poachers from Juilliard. Zubin Mehta’s granddaughter is a student here, so I’m imagining that the grandfather is here too. Mr. Strasser looks dashing in his white bow tie and tails. He continues. During its short first run, he says, the score went through several revisions, and Beethoven wrote no fewer than five versions of the overture. In time, each has become part of the standard repertoire. Except this one. The “Characteristic Overture in C” was published posthumously. Beethoven considered it too insubstantial to open such a big opera, and indeed it is shorter and more lighthearted than its four brethren and remains mostly an academic curiosity. So, as we find ourselves seated here tonight in academia and as we are curious, let us draw back the curtain and behold!

  With a flourish of his baton, we begin.

  An oddly extravagant introduction for such a simple piece, as if he is trying to make excuses to the audience for its simplicity. Sometimes, there’s a discrepancy between how straightforward something sounds and how difficult it is to play. The hardest part of this piece for the cellos, the breve sixteenth notes, requires a light, steady bouncing of the bow coordinated with some fancy fingerwork. To get it right involves a metronome and many hours of painstaking work. To get nine other cellists sounding as one, and to have that section interlocking with the others, entail the coordinated efforts of several dozen players and weeks of rehearsal. And yet our passage should breeze by all but unnoticed—if Mr. Strasser has managed to get our balance right, the listener should only really be conscious of the few bell-like notes of the French horn, rounded out by the timpani, the strings a blurred picket fence seen from a moving car. If the listener is more than marginally aware of us, then we have failed. And perhaps this is our unsung heroism as skilled performers and the sacrifice great composers ask of us: to execute a difficult passage without drawing attention to the passage or to ourselves. It is something Arthur’s argument hadn’t taken into account: that sometimes not noticing is precisely the point. Does every piece and every performance have to hit one over the head? Isn’t there any room for subtlety? Couldn’t an evening at the symphony be, god forbid, pleasant?

  As the final notes give way to applause, Mr. Strasser looks over at us—at me, it seems—and winks. Our playing has pleased him. For the past three years here, I’ve felt like an impostor, faking my way through lessons and rehearsals, but tonight, in this thrift-store tux smelling of camphor and mildew, in this seat in the school’s most advanced orchestra, I feel like a star.

&nbs
p; Squinting out into the audience, I think: Arthur is wrong. Of the faces I see, not a single one is asleep or bored or even reading the program. All eyes are on us. The clapping, that burst of sound Arthur described as “white noise,” may have numbed a few hands to make, but its effect is anything but a canceling out: it’s a sound that enlarges us and fills our hearts.

  There is some nervous excitement tonight about performing this concerto because in spite of it being the headline event, it is in fact the piece we have rehearsed the least. Mr. Strasser had bigger fish to fry than Arthur’s concerto. The Dvorak we were planning to play after the intermission was a beast and required most of our attention; the Mozart was easy, in a key that facilitated everyone’s being in tune—lots of open strings, the brass and woodwind parts describing natural overtones—so that the thing could almost play itself. Mr. Strasser said that as long as we tuned our instruments carefully from the oboe, we would be fine.

  In rehearsals, we would always save the Mozart for last. Not a member of the orchestra, Arthur would arrive onstage as per Mr. Strasser’s instructions with fifteen minutes left on the clock, and after unpacking his instrument, he’d ride with us through entrances two, maybe three times at most, and then we’d call it a day. We had only played the piece through in its entirety once, earlier today, and although it had gone without a hitch, there was nonetheless something precarious about our performance, at least in my case, each phrase coming to my fingers just in the nick of time.