Chapter 1 New Haven – May 27, 2000 As an experienced string player, Rose is able to follow her older brother’s mecurial lead on first violin. Until her recent sabbatical, she has played daily in one ensemble or another, bringing her gift for the simultaneously strong and supporting voice to the viola section of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and to the lead singer in Austra. Then, too, she plays with Jay often enough, living an hour or so away, to know even the most idiosyncratic of his signals for a new tempo or a different dynamic. His wife, on cello, knows the signals, too. But Rose’s younger brother is in his own world on second violin. While the others slow down and fade into the double pianissimo at the end of the third movement, Varden plays his final notes at a solid forte. “What are you doing?” cries Jay, coming out of his musical trance. “What do you mean?” asks Varden. Behind his glasses, his dark eyelashes and nervous blinking remind Rose of the darting minnows they used to catch on their childhood camping trips. “Honey,” Sindy whispers, touching her husband’s shoulder with one hand and holding her cello and bow with the other. “What do the three ps mean?” “Oh.” “Let’s take it at sixteen measures from the end,” the older brother snaps. “And remember… ritardando and diminuendo.” “I need a little break,” Rose says. “We’ve been at it hours.” The sister of these two men feels her shoulders stiffening with the stress, not of the afternoon only, but of the past six months. “Well, if we’d all practiced our parts like we were supposed to, we’d be done by now.” “It’s a memorial service, dear,” Sindy says gently. “Not a recital.” “Doesn’t matter. We can’t make fools of ourselves.” “Does anyone want some water?” Rose asks, resting her viola in its case. As she turns toward the kitchen, she sees her younger brother’s feet move. The rest of his body remains motionless. “I didn’t have a chance to look at the music before this weekend,” Varden confesses. “But don’t worry. I’ll know it cold before we get together again.” “That’ll be just days before the service.” “Don’t worry.” “I will worry,” says Jay. “You missed the key change after the a tempo.” “In case you’ve forgotten,” Varden says, his voice suddenly loud enough to be heard by his niece and nephew upstairs, “I do have other commitments. I didn’t get back from Saclay until Wednesday night.” “Do you think you’re the only person here with other commitments?” “Last call for water.” “No, thank you,” answers Sindy, arching her obsessively tweezed eyebrows into the shape of two fermatas. “I won’t make a fool of you, Jay” declares Varden. He is getting to his feet now. “You do that quite well on your own.” Varden follows his sister into the kitchen, which was remodeled soon after Sindy, an ethnomusicologist at Yale, got tenure. He takes off his glasses and stands perspiring amid the gleam of underused appliances. “That man will never grow up,” he complains. “He’s still the bully who slept in the bunk above me.” “We’re all exhausted.” “Why couldn’t our father have picked something easier to play?” “When did you ever know Dad to let us off the musical hook?” “You’re right,” admits Varden, checking the cupboards. “There’s bottled water here in the fridge.” “It’s just that I’d never even heard the piece before.” “You’re out of practice, that’s all. Like you said, you’ve been busy.” “Do you think anyone would care if we played one of the early Mozarts?” “The quartet’s not that hard, Varden. You’ve played harder parts.” “I know it. I’ve just been too tied up with my research. Plus I’m distracted. I’ve got this serious deadline hanging over my head.” “Well, you know Dad always had a particular fondness for Zemlinsky’s music. We have to honor his request.” “Do you think anyone would care if I ate some of these cookies?” Varden bites into a Fig Newton as he looks out over the weeds in Sindy’s window box. In the next yard, which is sedulously maintained by a retired anthropologist, a bottle tree flares in the late-day light. “I wonder why,” he says. “Why what? Why we have to honor Dad’s dying request?” “No. Why he was so wild about Alexander Zemlinsky.” “What’s wrong with Zemlinsky’s music?” asks Rose, feeling suddenly protective of the father she nursed through the final months of his illness. “I love Zemlinsky’s music! And the third movement of this quartet is utterly haunting.” “Don’t get me wrong,” Varden protests. “I like Zemlinsky, too. I was just wondering…. It’s almost like our father had a personal connection with the guy. Maybe it’s the similarity of the names.” Rose twirls her bottle of water clockwise. When pressed by prying acquaintances, she always explains that she has never changed or hyphenated the name, Zokovsky, by quipping that she is already married to her dual career as an orchestra violist and a rock-band violinist. “That’s just an amusing coincidence,” she says. “Dad was always a champion of forgotten composers. Of forgotten artists generally. Zemlinsky just happens to be one of them.” Varden looks out the window again. Suffused by the declining sun, the branches of the bottle tree send out rays of green and blue and red light. The jetlag from his cross-country flight begins to lift. “Or at least Zemlinsky’s forgotten for now,” Rose adds. “There’s a new biography of Zemlinsky coming out, which would have thrilled Dad to no end.” “Cookie?” “No thanks. Jay and Sindy are waiting on us. Besides, I don’t want to get fig on my fingers.” “Speaking of new books,” says Varden, still munching. “my friends are talking about a great, new book by a guy named Brian Greene.” “That name sounds familiar.” “He’s been getting a lot of press. Anyway, when I read a book like that, I realize it’s possible to be an intellectual pioneer and a brilliant populizer both. And then I find the superior airs of a man like Jay all the more intolerable.” “I know you and Jay have always clashed. He has picked on you since you were kids.” “Remember when he fed my school experiment to the hamster?” Rose smiles. “Or tried to anyway. That hamster was an epicure.” “What was that stuff?” “Scientific slime. What else?” “It would be nice,” Rose says in a more serious voice, “if you two could get along… at least until after the service.” “Am I supposed to let him badger me?” “He’s jealous of you.” “Jealous? That’s ridiculous.” “All I’m saying is that Dad would have been so happy to see you guys get along.” Varden rolls up the package of Fig Newtons and shoves it to the back of the cupboard. He makes a mental note to ask Sindy about the significance of the bottle tree. “Don’t forget to wash your hands.” “Now you sound like our mother, God rest her soul.” Returning to the living room, Rose, who was named after her mother, recalls the complicated mix of disappointment and pride with which her father watched his younger son abandon the violin for resonance tubes. She remembers, too, how when Varden picked up the violin again after his postdoc, Roland redirected all the rancor of his perfect pitch to his older son, the family competition winner whom, for uninterrupted years, he’d browbeaten from the piano bench. In the living room, Sindy is standing behind her husband, massaging his shoulders. Her cello is resting on a corner chair, her bow on her music stand. “By the way, how was your trip to France?” she asks her brother-in-law. “Were you there for a conference?” Varden wipes his glasses with his shirt tail. “Several of us at USC are conducting research with a few of the scientists at the Institute for Theoretical Physics,” he replies. “We’ve been traveling back and forth to Saclay for months.” Jay picks up his violin, the favorite of his three. It is a Stainer. “We’re hoping to present our findings at a conference this fall,” Varden says. His last syllables are submerged in the sound of his brother’s instrument. Sindy brings her cello between her knees and tunes to Jay’s “A.” Rose, likewise, begins to tune her viola. Then her eye catches the music on her stand. “What’s this? I thought we were going to finish up with the last movement of the Zemlinsky.” “Why waste our time? We’ll give Varden a chance to practice first. I thought we could try something new instead.” “New for you?” Varden asks. Instead of taking his seat again, he drifts toward his brother’s music stand. “Well, no.” “Jay has decided to return to his first love, “ Sindy announces. “You mean he still has that Raggedy Andy?” “No, Varden. I mean he has taken up composing again.” Rose plays the first few lines of the viola part. With its chant-like intervals and its occasional tritones, the music has an otherworldly yet edgy quality. “I like it,” she says. “Sort of Saint Hildegardian, sort of Schoenbergian.” “Exactly the effect I was after. I’ve even incorporated a few bars from Schoenberg’s second string quartet.” “Why is there a fifth stave?” inquires Varden. He is frowning at the score over Jay’s shoulder. “That’s for the voice part. The entrance is on the next page.” “A string quartet with a voice part…,” muses Rose. “That’s cutting edge.” “Not really,” Jay admits. “Schoenberg created a soprano part for his second string quartet… and that was over ninety years ago!” Rose is noticing the crumbs on her younger brother’s shirt. “So is this some kind of homage to Arnold Schoenberg?” she asks. “Actually,” says Sindy, “it’s more of an homage to Schoenberg’s wife, Mathilde.” “That’s right,” Jay concurs. “I’m thinking of it as the tribute that Schoenberg never got around to writing for his wife, whom he loved intensely.” Varden looks puzzled. “If he loved her so intensely, why didn’t he get around to writing the piece himself?” “They had a complex relationship,” explains Sindy. “To say the least,” Jay laughs. “How often do you read a requiem libretto that raises the possibility of hating the deceased? That’s exactly what you find in the long poem Schoenberg wrote, but never set to music, after Mathilde’s death. I guess you could say the couple had a bit of a love-hate relationship, a little like the relationship the public still has with Schoenberg’s music.” Varden walks back to the chair where he has left his violin. He positions the instrument under his arm and sits. “Are those the words you’ve set to music?”he asks. “Yes. I’ve left out the parts about hate and cruelty, along with a few of the others. And I’ve taken the liberty of rearranging the order of the other stanzas. But basically, yes, I’ve set Schoenberg’s libretto to the music you have in front of you.” “Cool,” says Rose. Varden peers suspiciously at his stand. “You know,” says Jay, addressing his brother with the initiated air that drives the younger man into a sulk, “the Arnold Schoenberg Institute used to be in your neighborhood. It moved from the University of Southern California to Vienna a couple of years ago.” “I’d forgotten that,” Varden replies, uncertain that he had ever known the fact. He has a dreamlike memory of taking another professor’s ex-wife to a concert at the Arnold Schoenberg Performance Hall when he first arrived at the university. “So what was there to ‘hate’ about Mathilde?” he continues. “Or…,” says Sindy, “what was there about Arnold to make Mathilde do the things that made him ‘hate’ her?” “Didn’t she elope with another man?” asks Rose. “That she did.” Jay softly plucks the strings of his violin. “She ran off with one of Schoenberg’s closest friends, the young and troubled painter, Richard Gerstl.” “Never heard of him,” comments Varden. “A lot of people haven’t. He lived to be only twenty-five, and he destroyed much of his work before he died.” “What happened?” Subconsciously, Rose is trying to figure out what is different about Sindy’s appearance. “The elopement came to an end when Webern and others in Schoenberg’s circle persuaded Mathilde to return to her husband. Gerstl, who was ostracized from Schoenberg’s set, didn’t respond well.” “Didn’t he kill himself?” “Spectacularly. After destroying many of his paintings, he hanged and stabbed himself in front of a mirror.” “Ouch,” says Varden, feeling the Fig Newtons settle in his gut. “Schoenberg composed his second string quartet while his wife was having the affair with Gerstl. A lot of people claim that the piece, which turned western music on its head, is as much a result of his turbulent personal life as his unhappiness with what other composers were producing.” “Jay doesn’t believe that, though,” Sindy observes. “No, I think that view’s too reductive and programmatic for a composer who didn’t write program music and who had no patience for the reductive, easy way out.” “On the other hand,” says Sindy, “we shouldn’t forget the feminist wisdom that the personal has far-reaching consequences.” “You mean into the cultural, as well as the political?” Rose asks. Noticing that the highlights in Sindy’s otherwise black hair are reverting to their natural, premature gray, she realizes what is different about her sister-in-law. “Exactly.” “Why don’t you read the parts of the poem you’ve set to music?” suggests Varden. Rose glances at her younger brother. She is surprised at this sudden show of interest in the work. Is he trying to honor her plea for peace? In the gradual twilight of this spring day, which is angling into exposure the haphazard dusting of rooms all across the city, Rose sees the features of her father, inert among the button tufts of his coffin yet alive in Varden’s favoring expression. “Better yet,” Sindy proposes, “why don’t I sing them?” Jay groans. “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Rose. “Your wife has a lovely voice.” As Sindy reaches for the score, Rose thinks, not for the first time, what a testament her sister-in-law is to the success of a well-run, publicly funded arts program. Though born in Cape Verde, Sindy grew up in Caracas, where the renowned music program, El Sistema, was founded and where her father and five of her seven siblings eventually bought and paid for their houses on the strength of the petroleum industry. Though she never developed much of an interest in petroleum’s possibilities, Sindy did learn to play the cello with both grace and gusto. From cello she later transitioned, with the discipline born of her early training, to voice and the study of African influences on Venezuela’s indigenous musical traditions. “Ready?” “If you insist,” says Jay. “Should one wish to die? What is mourning to the soul, When one is dead? Is it still aware of the loved one? Perhaps it stands so far above it all, that even that is lost. What has been gained in return? Do the wanderers ever meet again? In the realm of the directionless? Of the timeless? And yet on earth time passes! And all directions diverge! How is one to find anyone? Hopeless perhaps we pass each other by forever, and never meet again.” “Cheery stuff,” says Rose. “It gets better,” Jay assures her. “You can never pass away, For you have become an idea. Now you live in memory, that holds you not long, in its brevity, you sink, it passes you on, there to where all ideas reside and the feelings that possess us: in the treasure chamber of humanity, which no key of the everyday can lock. Thus are you now immortal: You have become a soul, whose immortality is our hope and our certainty. You must be immortal, for the immortality of your soul is our most fervent desire, which like any true desire, is not fulfilled in this life. Not in this life! But in the one whose clarity Is the aim of all our striving.” “That’s nice,” comments Varden. “This last part coming up is quite nice.” “To the Lord, a thousand years are as a day. Such a day, whenever they lose each other, He gives to lovers, To see each other again, To find each other, ever and again.” “Beautiful. I can’t wait to hear the string parts,” Rose says, applauding Sindy. “What inspired you to write this piece?” “It’s been nagging at me for a while. Then when Roland passed, I thought, ‘What better time?’ A requiem is appropriate, for obvious reasons. And Schoenberg is appropriate, given that he was Alexander Zemlinsky’s brother-in-law.” Rose tries to remember when Jay started calling their father by his first name. Certainly, he never did so in the presence of the man, who raised his children with a strict respect for authority. “We’ll have to perform this work in public sometime,” Varden suggests, again surprising his sister with his supportive attitude. Sindy, who has returned to her cello, assumes a knowing look. “I was thinking we could play it at the memorial service. That is, if everyone practices.” “At Dad’s memorial service?” “Yes. Instead of the Zemlinsky no. 1.” “But why?” “Why not? This is a requiem written by a blood relative of the deceased’s favorite composer… and, of course, by moi, a blood relative of the deceased.” “Why not?” Rose repeats. She is beginning to hear the high-pitched ringing that has troubled her for the past few months. “Because Dad specifically requested that we play Alexander Zemlinsky’s first string quartet at his memorial service. That’s why.” “Jay just gets carried away with his work,” Sindy says, adopting a look of conciliatory humor. “I’m serious,” her husband answers. “I’ve even asked Almarine to sing.” “Who’s Almarine?” asks Varden. “Some German soprano who is studying at the school of music,” Sindy says. She begins to fidget with her tuning pegs. “I’m serious, too,” Rose insists. “You can’t just disregard the dying wish of our father.” “Fine. We can play my piece as a postlude after the service.” Rose doesn’t say anything. She is thinking about the last six months of their father’s life when Roland, a talented amateur painter as well as a highly regarded piano teacher, reminisced constantly about the landscape of his native country. During those months, the old man, mellowed by morphine and his confrontation with mortality, lingered over the photographs of his children and lamented that he had never taken up portraiture. “Shall we play a little?” Sindy says. She has stopped fidgeting with her pegs. Rose is still quiet. Now she is thinking about how, during those final six months, Jay offered, time and again, to come into the city and relieve her of her nursing duties, only to end up at Lincoln Center or the Frick. “Only if Jay promises to write a cadenza for Rose and her electric violin,” Varden jokes. With a playful kick to the second violinist’s chair, Rose looks again at the hand-scrawled music on her stand. Then she glances at her older brother, who is staring up at the ceiling like he is receiving a message from beyond. “Hey, Sindy,” continues Varden. “Remind me to ask you later about that bottle tree next door.” “What did you want to know?” “I could do that.” “Do what?” inquires Sindy, turning toward her husband. “Listen,” says Rose, “I can feel one of my migraines coming on. Can we talk about this tomorrow? “What’s there to talk about?” challenges Jay. He is no longer staring at the ceiling. “This is our father’s sendoff. The service should be exactly the way Dad wanted it.” Jay rests his violin bow on his stand. “You haven’t even heard my piece. How do you know Roland wouldn’t have wanted it played if he’d lived to hear it?” “Rose is right,” says Sindy. “This has been a long day. We should start fresh tomorrow. Can I interst all of you in some freshly made ratatouille?” “Thank you, but I need to go home and go to bed.” Rose wonders if there’s a connection between her headaches and the ringing in her ears. Her doctor attributes the headaches to stress, and the ringing, she supposes, will let up when she starts wearing earplugs during her gigs with Austra. “Same time tomorrow?” “Sure. Come early if you’d like lunch.” “Where are you staying?” Rose asks her younger brother while packing up her viola. “At the Omni.” “Naturally, we invited Varden to stay with us.” “And I appreciate that, Sindy. I’ve got a deadline hanging over my head, and I just need my own space to do some writing.” “Well, please say you’ll stay for some ratatouille.” “You bet.” “Goodbye, all. Sorry to wimp out.” “Goodbye, Rose. Get some rest.” “Shalom, sweet sis.” “Goodbye, dear. Remember to come early if you want lunch.” As she carries her viola to her car, Rose thinks of the countless times she helped her father into the passenger seat. Even when he rested his full weight on her arm, his touch was as light as a child’s. Now the delicate pressure of his hands is gone, along with the much heavier weight of worrying about whether he had taken his medications or had slept. Settling into the driver’s seat, Rose positions the visor against the late-day sun. She feels like crying, but instead she puts the car into gear, steps on the accelerator, and drives toward I-95.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:14:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015