Gryphon (7 page)

She wanted to test me out and had brought along her recital numbers, mostly standard fare: a Handel aria, Mozart, Schubert, and Fauré. The last set of songs,
Nine Epitaphs
, by an American composer I had never heard of, Theodore Chanler, was the only novelty.

“Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.

“I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis Curtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”

“Oh.”

“They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from
Il Pastor fido
. I could immediately
see why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in anticipation. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God’s more complicated pranks.

Her choice of songs highlighted her failings. Their delicate textures were constantly broken by her lapses. When we arrived at the Chanler pieces, I thought I was accustomed to her, but I found I wasn’t. The first song begins with the following verse, written by Walter de la Mare, who had crafted all the poems in archaic epitaph style:

The vocal line for “She were so small” consists of four notes, the last two rising a half step from the two before them. To work, the passage requires a deadeye accuracy of pitch:

Singing this line, Karen Jensen hit the D-sharp but missed the E and skidded up uncontrollably to F-sharp, which would sound all right to anyone who didn’t have the music in front of his nose, as I did. Only a fellow musician could be offended.

Infuriated, I began to feel that I could
not
participate in a recital with this woman. It would be humiliating to perform such lovely songs in this excruciating manner. I stopped playing, turned to her to tell her that I could not continue after all, and then I saw her bracelet.

I am not, on the whole, especially observant, a failing that probably accounts for my having missed the bracelet when we first met. But I saw it now: five silver canaries dangled down quietly from it, and as it slipped back and forth, I saw her wrist and what I suddenly realized
would
be there: the parallel lines of her madness, etched in scar tissue.

The epitaphs finished, she asked me to work with her, and I agreed. When we shook hands, the canaries shook in tiny vibrations, as if pleased with my dutiful kindness, my charity, toward their mad mistress.

Though Paul Hindemith’s reputation once equaled Stravinsky’s and Bartók’s, it suffered after his death in 1963 an almost complete collapse. Only two of his orchestral works, the
Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber
and the
Mathis der Maler
symphony, are played with any frequency, thanks in part to their use of borrowed tunes. One hears his woodwind quintets and choral pieces now and then, but the works of which he was most proud—the ballet
Nobilissima Visione, Das Marienleben
(a song cycle), and the opera
Harmonie der Welt
—have fallen into total obscurity.

The reason for Hindemith’s sudden loss of reputation was a mystery to me; I had always considered his craftsmanship if not his inspiration to be first-rate. When I saw that the
Harmony of the World
symphony, almost never played, would be performed in our anonymous city, I told Cascadilla that I wanted to write a story for that week on how fame was gained and lost in the world of music. He thought that subject might be racy enough to interest the tone-deaf citizens of leafy and peaceful Maple Street, where no one is famous, if I made sure the story contained “the human element.”

I read up on Hindemith, played his piano music, and listened to the recordings. I slowly found the music to be technically astute but emotionally
arid, as if some problem of purely local interest kept the composer’s gaze safely below the horizon. Technocratic and oddly timid, his work reminded me of a model train chugging through a tiny town inhabited only by models of people. In fact, Hindemith did have a lifelong obsession with train sets: in Berlin, his collection took up three rooms, and the composer wrote elaborate timetables so that the toys wouldn’t collide.

But if Hindemith had a technocrat’s intelligence, he also believed in the necessity of universal participation in musical activities. Listening was not enough. Even nonmusical citizens could learn to sing and play, and he wrote music expressly for this purpose. He seemed to have known that passive, drugged listening was a side effect of totalitarian environments and that elitist composers such as Schoenberg were engaged in antisocial Faustian projects that would bewilder and ultimately infuriate most audiences, leaving them isolated and thus eager to be drugged by a musical superman.

As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day, therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, using a text by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of
De Harmonice Mundi
. This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called
Harmony of the World
. Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.

It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.

For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity:
I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different-colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.

She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. They don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”

I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top dinner table, and one nondescript poster on the wall. Trying to keep my advantage, I looked hard for telltale signs of instability but found none. The piano was off in the corner, almost hidden, unlike those in the parlors back home.

“Very nice,” I said.

“Well, thanks,” she said. “It’s not much. I’d like something bigger, but … where I work, I’m an administrative assistant, and they don’t pay me very much. So that’s why I live like a snail here. It’s hardly big enough to move around in, right?” She wasn’t looking at me. “I mean, I could almost pick it up and carry it away.”

I nodded. “You just don’t think like a rich person,” I said, trying to be hearty. “They like to expand. They need room. Big houses, big cars, fat bodies.”

“Oh, I know!” she said, laughing. “My uncle … Would
you
like to stay for dinner? You look like you need a good meal. I mean, after the rehearsal. You’re just skin and bones, Pet—… May I call you Peter?”

“Sure.” I sat down on the sofa and tried to think up an excuse. “I really can’t stay, Miss Jensen. I have another rehearsal to go to later tonight. I wish I could.”

“That’s not it, is it?” she asked suddenly, looking down at me. “I don’t believe you. I bet it’s something else. I bet you’re afraid of me.”

“Why should I be afraid of you?”

She smiled and shrugged. “That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I know how it goes.” She laughed once more, faintly. “I never found a man who could handle it. They want to show you
their
scars, you know? They don’t want to see any on you. If they discover any, they
just take off.” She slapped her right hand on her forehead and then ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, shit, I didn’t mean to do this
at all
! I mean, I admire you so much and everything, and here I am running on like this. I guess we should get down to business, right? Since I’m paying you by the hour.”

I smiled professionally and went to her piano.

Beneath the high-culture atmosphere that surrounds them, art songs have one subject: love. The permutations of love (lust, solitude, and loss) are present in abundance, of course, but for the most part they are simple vehicles for the expression of that one emotion. I was reminded of this as I played through the piano parts. As much as I concentrated on the music in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that my employer stood next to the piano, singing the words sometimes toward me, sometimes away. She was rather courageously forcing eye contact on me. She kept this up for an hour and a half until we came to the Chanler settings, when at last she turned slightly, singing to the walls.

As before, her voice broke out of control every five seconds, giving isolated words all the wrong shadings. The only way to endure it, I discovered, was to think of her singing as a postmodern phenomenon with its own conventions and rules. As the victim of necessity rather than accident, Karen Jensen was tolerable.

When we were done, she asked, “Sure you won’t stay?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You really haven’t another engagement, do you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I didn’t think so. You were scared of me the moment you walked in the door. You thought I’d be crazy.” She waited. “After all, only ugly girls live alone, right? And I’m not ugly.”

“No, you aren’t,” I said. “You’re quite attractive.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, brightening. “It’s so nice to hear that from you, even if you’re just paying a compliment. I mean, it still means
something.
” Then she surprised me. As I stood in the doorway, she got down on her knees in front of me and bowed her head in the style of one of her songs. “Please stay,” she asked. Immediately she stood up and laughed. “But don’t feel obliged to.”

“Oh, no,” I said, returning to her living room, “I’ve just changed my mind. Dinner sounds like a good idea.”

After she had served and we had started to eat, she looked up at
me and said, “You know, I’m not completely good.” She paused. “At singing.”

“What?” I stopped chewing. “Yes, you are. You’re all right.”

“Don’t lie. I know I’m not. You know I’m not. Come on: let’s at least be honest. I think I have certain qualities of musicality, but my pitch is … you know. Uneven. You probably think it’s awfully vain of me to put on these recitals. With nobody but friends and family coming.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t care what you say. It’s … hmm, I don’t know. People encourage me. And it’s a discipline. Music’s finally a discipline that rewards you. Privately, though. Well, that’s what my mother says.”

Carefully, I said, “She may be right.”

“Who cares if she is?” She laughed, her mouth full of food. “I enjoy doing it. Like I enjoy doing this. Listen, I don’t want to seem forward or anything, but are you married?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” She picked up a string bean and eyed it suspiciously. “Why aren’t you? You’re not ugly. In fact you’re all-right looking. You obviously haven’t been crazy. Are you gay or something?”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed, “you don’t look gay. You don’t even look very happy. You don’t look very anything. Why is that?”