In the Light of What We Know (26 page)

My friend Zafar, his face grave and intent, fell silent at this point, his thoughts carried to some remote region in his cavernous dark eyes. Between the criticisms of religious parochialism, I had the impression of another sentiment, one that isn’t quite apparent in his words as I look over them now but that I felt nonetheless at the time. If his exposition had seemed, on its face, to consist of one rejection after another of Christianity, it also left the impression of a man possessed of strong, even violent feelings, which, one might speculate, is a sufficient basis for religious conversion. That is the Pauline story, is it not?

Tell me about that evening, I said to him, about the church and Emily.

There I was, he said, hidden in the shadow of a column, looking over the pews to the altar and beyond that the cross, contemplating this alien people clutching their God, when the door slammed shut and a shaft of ice-cold air struck me. The first musician had arrived. Violin case in hand, she walked through the aisle between the rows of pews.

I still retain a vivid impression of that young woman moving between the aisles, but I have wondered if it’s an image I have transposed from subsequent memories, as if history has insisted on pushing outward at the beginning, for the fact is that she did not seem at all remarkable to me then. She was pretty, I thought, even beautiful in a way, but not … not arresting. Women change so much in those years between eighteen, when I first saw her at Oxford, and twenty-five, when I saw her next in New York. From this vantage, so many years later, it is possible to absorb that change, to regard it with a scientific eye; at eighteen, women move into the prime of their sexual attractiveness. The heroines depicted in nineteenth-century novels might well have been feisty and strongheaded well into their twenties—things, by the way, which if found in a man would scarcely get a mention—they might even have had a canny awareness of male motivations and even some guile, but they were nothing without the physical bloom of postadolescence that has always been lauded and craved everywhere. At eighteen, Emily possessed this; there was enough beauty for her youth to hold up but not, I think, so much as to endure the passing of it.

She pulled a chair from a low stack at the side of the small stage. Rather than carry it, she dragged it across the floor to center stage. I remember imagining the scuff marks being made on that stage, I remember wondering whether the chair legs had rubber tips, I remember wondering whether she had looked to see if they had rubber tips. And, perhaps, as I recall all this, if I am permitted to read anything into something so small, I might be inclined to think that in that tiny act of omission, of not carrying the chair but dragging it across the floor as she held up her head—so that I can now see she could not have noticed any scuffing or scratching of the floor—perhaps in that act there was contained the whole of her character.

She retrieved a music stand from a cluster in one corner. Her movements seemed to me strangely clumsy, as if I had expected something finer from a violinist. I have seen grace in her, though much later and in other places. I’ve seen her in the bath, for instance. I saw the grace with which she held a bar of soap in her hands, as if holding a dove, I thought tenderly, rousing it from sleep for release into the air. I can see it now. Or the grace in entering a restaurant and taking a seat, the unthinking ease, the movements so slight they barely mark the memory. But I understood only later that her grace was confined, circumscribed within the pattern of household habits, that it was the grace of a woman tended to by comforts, so that when she was taken out of her sphere of convenience by even one music stand with an unfamiliar mode of opening, its limitation was exposed. So much about those people looked like one thing but was actually another. Emily’s grace was not physical grace; she was graceful when she powdered her face but without grace when she opened a car door. Grace, as I have seen it elsewhere often enough, comes from an understanding, which resides in the muscle, of the relationship between the body and the world; it not only recognizes the limitations of the body it inhabits but works with those limitations so that each act shows respect toward the physical world, respect for its dominance, and proceeds from an acknowledgment that the world will not simply do one’s bidding. How easy it is now to read so much into each moment and every careless act.

On the stage, chair and music stand now assembled, she sat down, unzipped a flap in the violin case, pulled out some sheet music and placed it before her. The young woman looked about her and, seeing the piano, she walked over to it, violin in hand. She wedged the instrument under her chin and then, as she held the bow, she struck a key. When she tuned the violin braced in her neck, I noticed that her chin was very slight, disappearing no sooner than it had made its presence known.

She tuned efficiently, methodically, and yet her face gave no expression whatsoever, no furrows that might suggest an intensity of listening. Presently, she finished tuning, went back to her seat, turned a few pages and, returning the violin to her neck, she began playing.

Normally the first musician to arrive for rehearsal sets out a number of chairs and stands. That is what I had seen. Of course, this isn’t true if the rehearsal is for an orchestral piece, but if the program is for chamber music and the stage isn’t set, then the first musician usually gets started on putting out the chairs and the music stands. This young woman hadn’t brought out any other chairs and music stands. And now she was playing a solo piece, which had me doubting that I’d got the program right; perhaps she was to be performing a solo recital.

She played and I recognized the piece. Bach’s Chaconne. Do you know it?

I do.

One of the finest pieces of music written for the violin. Johannes Brahms wrote about Bach’s Chaconne in a letter to Clara Schumann, saying that it captured every emotion possible in a few minutes and that if he, Brahms, had written it, he would surely have gone mad.
*

How did you come to know it?

Mathematicians like Bach. You must know that.

Zafar was right in a sense. I read in one of my father’s science journals about a study showing that a strangely disproportionate number of mathematicians rank Bach as their favorite composer.

Yes, but how did you first hear it?

I arrived for a tutorial with Professor Sylvester one day. There was classical music playing in her room. As I sat down, she went over to turn it off, but I asked her if we could listen for a minute. After the tutorial, she asked me if I wanted to borrow the cassette. That’s how I found my first ninety minutes of Bach. The Chaconne was on that tape.

Emily, continued Zafar, played with technical mastery. The violin was in tune, the harmonies were in tune, there were no scratches of the bow, the music was straight and clean. I am not a musician, I have never learned to play a musical instrument, but I’d heard enough music to be able to tell these things at least. What I could not account for then was the emotion I had: I felt nothing. The music was lifeless.

I have heard musicians speak of phrasing and shaping, I know that they talk about articulation and interpretation, but I do not know what they mean when they use these terms, not precisely, and I knew less then. All I could say was that her music, music that was perfect in its notes, was cold to me, but I doubted my authority; I felt I could not pronounce on these things, that I would exceed my station.

These rehearsals were fraught with guilt for me but not because of the subterfuge involved. I tell you why I sneaked into those halls. I did not sneak in because these were rehearsals from which the public were excluded; in fact, many of them were open to the public, and there were rehearsals where I saw visitors come and go, sit and listen. I sneaked in because this music did not belong to me and I had no right in it. And because I had no right, there was guilt. I felt treacherous, but of what?

Of course you have a right! I said with an emphasis that surprised me.

But that was how I felt. It’s not about passports or naturalization certificates.

Exactly. It belongs to everyone.

Do you know Bach’s Prelude No. 1,
The Well-Tempered Clavier
?

Not by name.

You probably do know it. It’s a beautiful piece and quite short. It has a lot in common, I think, with his first cello suite: a geometric simplicity and progression. I heard it once—the prelude—at one of those lunchtime concerts in Hall, and the student sitting next to me asked me what I made of it. I thought he was probably asking me about the performance rather than the composition, and I remember thinking it would be presumptuous to comment on the skill of the pianist when I knew nothing of playing the piano. It’s a beautiful piece of music, I replied. The young man smiled and said that he’d always thought it a trifling thing, a practice piece for children.

That’s ridiculous, I said to Zafar.

I now think he was wrong, continued Zafar. But it takes time to overcome another person’s educated confidence. The feeling of entitlement is just that, it’s just a feeling. Just as the feeling that one does not have an entitlement is nothing more than a feeling.

Isn’t that a matter of choice?

Can you choose
not
to love a person?

Don’t you mean: Can you
choose
to love a person?

Well, that would be more relevant to you, wouldn’t it?

Bach’s Chaconne, you were saying?

There might be ways to make it easier not to resent another person.

Chaconne.

We’ll come back to it, said Zafar.

But again he seemed to disappear into his own thoughts.

*   *   *

Some years ago, in my first year at Oxford as I recall, a friend of my mother, an actress-turned-director, came to dinner in my parents’ home. The director described tools an actor might use to convey intelligence. It seemed to me that certain character traits come off a person without words, that they just rise from the surface like moisture burned off by the sun, and intelligence, I thought, was just such a trait. I’ve met people whose intelligence is apparent, before sound waves can carry their words—not infrequently, they are a rather laconic sort. But how, I wondered to my mother’s friend, does an actor convey the intelligence of a character, an Einstein or a Newton, whose intelligence might be greater than his own?
*
The director explained that one device is to have the character appear to drift off into his thoughts.

Today I regard her thesis with a certain skepticism. There are many reasons why a person might wander off into his or her own thoughts, daydreams, and preoccupations. She might, for instance, be contemplating what color nail polish she should wear for the upcoming ball next weekend. He might be wondering if he switched off the gas on the stove and could be retracing his movements before leaving the house.

There I was, continued Zafar, sitting in a patch of shadow in the church, she oblivious of my presence, listening to this note-perfect rendering, technically accomplished even to my ear and yet hollow. It made a mark on me. A few years later, in 1991, at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I asked the German composer Nathanael Sandmann-Hoffmann, a visiting professor of musicology, if he had encountered this.

Encountered what?

I asked him if he’d ever heard a piece of music played perfectly, music that he knew was sublime, and yet had been completely unmoved by it. The professor’s face broke into a wrinkled smile, and I thought he was remembering some moment or episode, perhaps once forgotten, that had amused him.

I have, he replied, setting down his glass of wine by the stem.

In the last year, explained the professor, there was in Berlin a concert, which was of course the year after the coming down of the wall, in fact. Many musicians from East Germany are now in West Germany, the doors to which have suddenly opened to them. A number of such musicians are very good indeed. There was such a feeling of excitement in the German air, so much goodwill toward all men, with reunification now an imminent reality. The political mood added to one’s excitement as a lover of music to hear all these musicians from the East. As I have mentioned to you, I attended a concert that included a performance of … it was Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major by a young German pianist from Leipzig, the city where Sebastian Bach was cantor at St. Thomas, as I expect you know.

The German people, continued the professor, can be rather earnest about their music, which is not in every instance to be taken for discernment. On this occasion, the whole audience leaned forward and furrowed their brows in the most severely concentrating manner. I felt exactly what you have described. I wanted, so to speak, to shout,
The emperor has no clothes!
The music was stillborn. It was really quite dead. But, you know, this sort of thing is very common in conservatories. I see it all the time in students. I have under my tutelage one student now, for example, who plays in this way. He is from the southern part of America, from Alabama, I believe, and, I gather, he comes from a devout Baptist Christian family. I have wanted to say to him that he should get out more, that he should live a little. He should get himself fucked, I have wanted to say, as the great Martha Graham said to her dancers, but of course the sexual correctness of the American university being what it is, I have never done so.

The professor laughed as he spoke.

Such ratifications as the professor’s, they came later. Until, little by little, experience taught me otherwise, self-doubt permitted no judgment about great art, great music, and such things. If I was right and the young woman’s music was indeed lifeless—if I was right, I wondered, can she herself not hear that her playing is lifeless? It seemed to me an unbearable state to play the violin that way, without emotion, without love and joy.

Maybe they
cannot
play with emotion, I suggested to Zafar.

But there’s a simpler explanation still, which was: What the hell did I know? The wisdom of that German composer, the ratifying, the borrowed confidence, came only years later. What right, I thought, had I
to have
an opinion about this musical performance, to think it anything less than accomplished? It’s their music, not mine, and they know what’s what. I’d never touched a violin or piano, let alone learned to play either. It seemed an altogether neater explanation. I was ignorant and presumptuous and they weren’t.