The schumann proof, p.2
The Schumann Proof, page 2
Elly let the name sink in, then added, almost as an afterthought: “Whom, by the way, I hope you haven’t forgotten you’re to pick up at the airport on Tuesday.”
A gesture to my right, a flash of cobalt satin in the corner of my eye, and I was back in the Conservatory greenroom. Ulrike was adjusting a shoulder of her gown. Elsewhere, the bustle of jackets donned, dresses straightened and hair patted into place told me Janssen was nearing the end of his speech.
“Therefore, in closing, I think it not immodest to suggest that were it not for the Conservatory, those whom we honour tonight might never have become the celebrated figures they are today, recognized around the globe for their unique contributions to the world of music.”
Polite clapping and the thrum of an audience soon to be released from their seats. Janssen would be moving over to the shrouded easels, preparing to uncover them one by one.
“Jon Vickers.”
The applause grew, continued for a seemly length of time, then died down.
“Teresa Stratas.”
Further courteous approbation.
“And finally, Glenn Gould.”
Utter silence, then a noisy and protracted ovation. Janssen must have saved the best for last. I couldn’t help wondering how Gould would have felt having his portrait so publicly applauded, given his notorious boycott of the concert stage.
The unveiling finished, Ulrike and I led the other performers out for final bows. Afterward came the reception, an event I would happily have missed if Elly hadn’t asked me to stick around for final instructions concerning Mann’s arrival the next day.
I was shouldering through the Harry Rosen suits and Holt Renfrew dresses in the lobby, hoping to grab a cigarette outside, when she caught up with me. She’d made no sartorial concessions to the evening, I noticed. A tweed skirt, fraying cardigan and serviceable brown shoes mutely disdained the toniness of Janssen’s affair.
“Dieter’s plane comes in at eleven-thirty,” she said, not bothering with frivolous compliments on my playing. “You won’t have to worry about traffic either way. And you do know where he’s staying?”
An apartment-hotel on Church Street. The suites there had kitchenettes. Mann, a vegetarian, prepared his own meals. So Elly had told me, more than once.
“He’s known at the desk,” she went on, “but I want you to go in with him.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll deliver him without a scratch. Promise.” I held up three fingers, Boy Scout style.
She tilted her face up, checking to see if I was making fun. It was hard not to smile. Strands of salt-and-pepper hair escaped from a bun at the back of her head, making her look every inch a mother hen. The problem was, she was fussing over a man nearly thirty years her senior.
“You’re really fond of him, aren’t you?” I said.
“Of course. Dieter’s been coming to Toronto for nine years now.”
“That tells me a lot.”
“There was something else you wanted to know?”
“Just curious about you two.”
Despite his age, “the Great Mann” still travelled the globe, giving lessons in London, New York, Sydney. Elly Gardiner taught from a cozy, plant-infested studio on Bloor Street.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘you two.’ We met in New York when I paid to attend one of his master classes. Piano teachers who give instruction in lieder accompaniment are so rare I wanted to see what he had to say. We spoke afterwards. I asked if he’d consider adding Toronto to his itinerary.”
“And he agreed? Just like that?”
“Why not? We’re both teachers. Music is music. And we discovered we have something in common.” She forestalled further probing by taking a sudden interest in the baroque trio setting up near the front desk. “He’ll only be here for four days this time,” she said after the group launched into a Corelli sonata. “Laura Erskine will be singing in Wednesday’s master class. That’s the Schumann—” a look to see that I hadn’t forgotten “—and I’ve decided to have a lesson with him myself on Thursday. I’ll need you at one o’clock.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might not be available?”
I might as well have asked in Chinese. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“Do I get to sleep sometime this week?”
“It’s not that much work. Besides, I know you’re looking forward to Wednesday. Laura says your get-togethers are going extremely well.”
“They are. She has an incredible voice.”
“I thought you’d feel that way.” Elly permitted herself a smile of prim satisfaction. The informal weekly sessions had been her idea. “There’s one other thing. I’ve paid for an extra lesson on Friday, and I’d like you to have it. Dieter says he wants to work with you.” She paused significantly. “Alone.”
“Dare I ask how he even knows I’m back in Toronto?”
“Your name came up when we spoke in March.”
“I’m surprised he remembers me.” I’d only played for him twice, both times as Elly’s accompanist.
“He thinks very highly of you. Why else do you suppose he gave your name to Ulrike Vogel?”
“I was meaning to ask about that. What’s the connection between them?”
“His daughter, Anna. She and Ulrike are old friends. They went to school together, I believe, in Vienna. And Dieter helped launch Ulrike’s career. He was her coach when she started singing professionally.”
“That’s a lot of information about a woman you hardly know.”
“It’s no secret,” she said, the gossip’s first line of defence.
“You wouldn’t also happen to know why her pianist backed out? I wanted to ask her myself, but I got the feeling the only question she’d allow was ‘Am I playing too loud?’ ”
“I gather he’s sick. And whatever he’s come down with,” she added, her voice rich with irony, “it must be near-fatal.”
“Why?”
“Her accompanist is David Bryce.”
“Ah.”
I knew Bryce from our student days. He taught history classes at the Con now, as well as giving private lessons in music theory. Too handsome by half, he’d always shown a remarkable talent for insinuating his Ken-doll good looks into other people’s limelight. Elly was right: it would have taken something life-threatening to tear him away from accompanying das Vöglein’s comeback performance.
My yearning for a cigarette, forgotten while we talked, suddenly resurfaced. Elly must have seen it in my face. “Go,” she said, making shooing motions with her hands. “I’m keeping you from your habit. I’ll be here when you come back.”
I lit up and leaned against a low iron rail separating the Conservatory lawn from its parking lot. Humidity in the air sharpened the bite of tobacco in my throat. I looked up, exhaling. Only a few stars were visible, even though the night was clear. Across the street, dance music thudded from an upstairs bar, joining with the idle and rev of slow-moving traffic. Over on Queen’s Park, a siren wailed and dopplered into the distance. City sounds, traitorously familiar. I straightened up and started pacing, taking long hauls on my cigarette, getting the most out of it.
I wonder if non-smokers grasp the syntactic role of cigarettes in a smoker’s life? Between the clauses of existence, they act like punctuation—emberous commas, periods and semicolons that provide an interval in which to pause, reflect, assimilate.
Ten months now I’d been back in Toronto, ten months of Elly’s peremptory strategies to draw me back into the world of serious music. Hadn’t she understood? I didn’t re-contact her because I wanted to resume what I’d abandoned three years earlier. I’d picked up the phone and called her because I needed to hear a familiar voice, one that would be happy to hear mine. Perhaps she had understood, and thought what I needed was the distracting balm of work.
It was difficult to fault her meddling. Arranging a lesson for me with Mann would cost her upwards of two hundred dollars. And her belief in my talent wasn’t unfounded if Mann himself remembered me from four years ago. The problem was, I didn’t want her faith, nor her generosity. I wasn’t ungrateful; I simply had no desire to go where she was steering me.
My cigarette started to give off the sweetish smell of burning cellulose. I crushed it underfoot and went back inside.
The caterers had done a good job decorating for the reception. Cream-coloured swags adorned hand-lettered, wooden scholarship plaques, normally relegated to the Con’s administrative tower but trotted out for the occasion. Seating had been removed, a trade-off between gaining space and exposing pristine patches of dark varnish on the scuffed hardwood floor. A snowy linen cloth covered the lobby’s low library table. Atop it, plates of sushi and carved crudites surrounded a vase of peonies. Hot house, I decided. It was too early for the shaggy pink-and-white blooms.
The trio of musicians had moved into Telemann. I silently complimented Janssen’s choice of acoustic wallpaper. Nothing matches the conversational bouquets of a genteel party like the cool pulsation of a harpsichord under strings.
I looked around for Elly but couldn’t see her. My Strauss was still in the greenroom, but the lobby-side door was locked. Since I wanted to check out the Gallery portraits anyway, I decided to try my luck through the concert hall.
The sounds of the reception faded as soon as I stepped inside. A church-like stillness permeated the room. To me, empty halls are numinous with the solitude that music loves best. I examined the paintings. They’d been moved forward on the stage, screening the piano. Vickers glowered manfully out of his, every inch a Siegfried or a Tristan. Stratas looked dark and Greekly tragic. Gould’s picture was by far the best. Three quarters of the canvas—painted horizontally, like a landscape—was filled with the black mass of a piano. At the far left, a silhouette hunched over the keyboard, its posture unmistakably, reverentially, Gould’s.
A sibilance in the auditorium, a whisper of fabric on fabric, caused me to break off my inspection. I turned around, my vision partially obscured by a spotlight. I was just able to make out a figure in one of the side aisles, moving slowly toward the stage. Ulrike Vogel. She appeared to be studying something on the wall.
“There used to be paintings here,” she said, sparing me the decision of whether to speak. “Abstracts.” A singer’s artful knowledge of projection carried her voice without effort.
“Yes, I remember.”
“I never liked them. They lacked...Leidenschaft. Passion. I’m glad they’re gone.”
She entered the apron of light around the stage. An aureate glow suffused her hair. In CD photographs, she wore it long, falling across her brow like Veronica Lake. It was shorter now, flattering her features, but adding some years to her face.
“This is very good,” she said, indicating the rightmost of the three portraits.
“Gould?”
“Yes.” She moved in for a closer look. “I knew him, you know. We spoke many times. On the telephone. He wanted me to record Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten. He loved Schönberg. In the end, he did it with Vanni.”
Friends with Dieter Mann? On speaking terms with Glenn Gould? The enigmatic Vöglein was becoming more intriguing by the minute.
“You play well—Vikkan, isn’t it?” she asked. I nodded, unoffended. Singers often forget the names of stand-in accompanists. “I should have thanked you earlier. Such short notice. You will be paid?”
“Yes. It’s all taken care of.” Elly had said I could pick up a cheque from Janssen’s office in a few days.
“It was fortunate Dieter knew someone who could play for me. I can only work with talented people.” She looked from Gould to me. “Have you studied long with Dieter?”
“A few lessons, that’s all.”
“You studied here, then? Or at the Faculty?” She meant the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, the Con’s sister—and sometimes rival—institution of musical learning. The two schools eye each other from a distance of not more than a quarter mile, share staff, use each other’s facilities, and every once in a while engage in bouts of sibling hair-pulling as they jockey for preeminence. By tradition, budding musicians in Toronto attend the Conservatory first, then repeat a large portion of their studies at the Faculty.
“Both,” I said. “I majored in composition at the Faculty.”
“Who was your piano teacher, then?”
“Zoltan Berényi.”
“Ah. Poor man.” It was hard to tell if she meant me or Berényi, who had died the previous year.
She seemed distracted, quite unlike the woman whose demands had guided our rehearsal the day before. Stratas held her attention for a while, then Vickers. At length, she turned back to me. “Vikkan?” Once more, the hesitation over my name. “I may need you again. I have a young man already,” — Bryce— “but...” She let the sentence hang.
“If I’m available.”
“Natürlich.”
She went to a seat over which she’d folded a beige trench coat. Slipping into it without fuss, she began to walk away.
“Do you need a lift?” I called out, more from courtesy than a desire to make good on the offer. Our conversation seemed to have ended inconclusively.
“Thank you, no,” came the faintly amused reply. “I have a car. Good night. Und vielen Dank.”
“Bitte schön.”
I waited till she was gone before hoisting myself onto the stage and retrieving my music from the greenroom.
Back in the lobby, I looked again for Elly. I still couldn’t find her. Waiters in evening dress were conveying champagne to the guests, so I snared a glass from a passing tray and waited near the library table. She could have been anywhere. Elly barely surpasses five feet, making her difficult to spot in a crowd.
Nils Janssen, on the other hand, stands nearly as tall as my six-foot-two. I spotted him over by the scholarship plaques, bent deep in conversation with a short, fat man whose girth nearly equalled Janssen’s height.
Elly came up beside me. “Doug Rawlings,” she said at my elbow, startling me into almost spilling my champagne.
“I’m sorry?”
“The man with Janssen. His name is Doug Rawlings.”
“Should I know him?”
“You would if you weren’t such a hermit. Rawlings is the reason for all this.” She gestured around the lobby.
“I was under the impression Janssen arranged it for the Alumni Gallery.”
“He did, but haven’t you noticed the money being spent? Hardly what you’d expect from the Con.”
She had a point. The Conservatory I remembered from my teens was a stodgy institution, the sort of place that made do with greasy mimeographs long after photocopiers had become the norm.
“Haven’t you told me Janssen wants to breathe life into the place?”
“Oh, yes. It’s why we appointed him. With Ludlow at the helm, we were turning into a mausoleum.”
Ludlow—Sir Geoffrey—had run the Con for twenty-five years from a musty office in which the Queen’s portrait figured prominently. He’d been in his eighties when he finally stepped down.
“But you’re saying there’s more to this shindig than meets the eye?”
There was. Elly took hold of my arm and drew me closer. A faint smell of sour wool emanated from her cardigan. “Rawlings owns a company called Bovitech. They manufacture livestock feeding systems, or some such. A few years ago, he finagled a contract with the government. Aid to developing countries, I think. The deal made him filthy rich, and now he wants to join the Old Boys club. Problem is, his blood’s not blue enough for them. He’s hoping he can thaw them out with a splashy donation somewhere, and he’s settled on the arts. That would be his wife’s doing. She’s quite the snob.”
If there’s rumour, Elly’s sure to have it. “This is all general knowledge, of course,” I said.
She had her excuse close to hand. “I teach his daughter, Siobhan.”
I glanced over at Rawlings. He seemed an unlikely candidate for the rarefied world of arts patronage: glistening moon face, thick lips, black hair pasted ineffectually over a visible pate. Next to Janssen, silver-maned and patrician, he looked like Oliver Hardy in conversation with Peter Cushing.
“He’s let it be known he intends to make ‘a significant contribution to the musical community of Toronto.’ The Globes words, by the way, not mine. Or his, I should imagine. His choice of lucky recipients has come down to either us or the Faculty.”
“How significant a contribution are we talking about?”
“Several million.”
“And you’re suggesting Janssen arranged this whole affair, Gallery and all, to woo him into making the right decision?”
I set my champagne glass on the table, next to a plate of zucchini whose skins had been incised with delicate meanders. Nearby, cornets of sushi fanned out on a lacquer tray, interspersed with tiny marigolds.
Elly reached in front of me and took a stick of intaglioed vegetable. “Hard to say who’s wooing whom. Rawlings’ financial charms are considerable. Janssen wants to move the Conservatory ahead, put us up there with Juilliard, Moscow and Paris. That’ll take a lot more money than we generate at present.”
“Heady stuff.”
“Indeed.” She popped the zucchini in her mouth. “And now, Vikkan, if you don’t mind, I have to be going. Don’t be late for Dieter’s plane. And call me once he’s at the hotel.”
“Yessir.” I sketched a salute.
She tsk-ed and walked away, her no-nonsense tweed disappearing quickly in a sea of designer fashions.
No one came up to me after she left. Janssen, who might have remembered me from his years as registrar, was introducing Rawlings to “name” teachers. Of those who’d actually taught me, none approached. Even the Rosedale and Forest Hill ladies stayed away, which surprised me since tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed usually acts as a magnet for critical effusion.
The sushi looked appealing. I took a piece, even though I wasn’t hungry. Japanese wasabi detonated in my mouth, blasted into my sinuses, and dissipated near the corners of my eyes. When the shock passed, I helped myself to more. No one else appeared to be touching it.
