The schumann proof, p.32
The Schumann Proof, page 32
Around five o’clock that afternoon, I went back to the main house, past the Pan-Abode screened by trees several hundred metres away. I’d visited the cabin the first day I felt up to walking. It, too, had suffered memory’s sea-change. The tongue-in-groove cedar walls surrounded a single floor ten by fifteen metres—bigger than an average suburban bungalow, not as intimate as I remembered. Conversely, the veranda looked less spacious. The windows that had lit up Christian’s body a year ago loomed less large. Only the chestnut tree, still in bloom, looked right.
Léo had said he’d be driving up for the weekend, and sure enough, as I got near the house, I saw his Lexus coming down the driveway. He tooted when I waved, then disappeared behind a stand of maples. I waited for him outside the kitchen, stooping to pick mint from Evelyn’s garden. A minute or two later, I heard footsteps on the flagstone path.
“Hello, Vikkan.”
The voice wasn’t Léo’s. I straightened up and turned around, taking in the University of Waterloo sweatshirt and the grey eyes that went with it.
“I hope you don’t mind—I got myself invited for the weekend.”
A black gym bag rested on the ground, with a change of socks peeking through the half-closed zipper. Out of nowhere, Evelyn had appeared. I smelled a conspiracy, and couldn’t think what to say.
Léo came around the corner of the house a moment later, grinning, and flashed a little thumbs-up sign.
AFTERWORD
What is a work of fiction, if not a delicious blend of what we know and what we imagine?
Most of the settings in this book are real. Toronto is a realcity (a fact its mayors forget in their drive to make it “world class”), the Faculty of Music really does sit halfway up U of T’s Philosopher’s Walk, and so on. However, the events I have described taking place in these locations—and, to some extent, their architecture and layouts—are either imaginary or a patchwork of the past and present.
My Conservatory, in particular, is a hybrid of the real, the imagined, and the remembered. After nearly a century of staying pretty much the same, the Con has, at the time of this novel’s publication, neared completion of a massive restructuring and renovation. The changes are good for the Conservatory, but, alas, not so good for my story. Rooms that once served a particular function have been put to other uses. Internal policies and procedures have been thoroughly updated. But the school’s history lingers on, and so, quite shamelessly, I’ve borrowed portions of its past, as needed, to make my story work.
My characters are fanciful, although two do bear similarities to real people. The model for Elly Gardiner is a former Conservatory teacher who will no doubt be amused by the recalcitrance Vikkan shows at not heeding her well-intentioned and eminently practical advice. The character of Dieter Mann evolved from unforgettable lessons and classes I took with Karl Ulrich Schnabel, son of the great pianist, Arthur Schnabel. The remainder of the characters in the book are as fictional as the human mind can make them.
Rewriting history is not solely the province of novelists. Writers with less ingenuous aims than pure entertainment have been doing it for millenia. Therefore, I make no apologies for concocting events in the nineteenth century that did not take place. At least I have the decency to admit my fabrications.
The texts for Schumann’s Liederkreis, Opus 39, are by the German poet, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857). My translations at the chapter headings are intentionally liberal.
With the exception of short references to the texts of Richard Strauss’s “Zueignung” and to Peter Warlock’s “Robin Goodfellow” and “Sleep,” all poetry in this book—German and English—is of my own invention.
Lastly, I would like to thank Melanie Fogel, editor of Canada’s Storyteller magazine, for her part in the writing of The Schumann Proof. An early draft was languishing in a drawer when, through a coincidence that makes me wonder whether Charles Dickens and God aren’t, perhaps, related, Ms. Fogel dropped into my life. For no other reason than that she believed in my work, she voluntarily critiqued, scoured, and edited the novel, giving up hundreds, if not thousands of hours to become my teacher, my mentor, my goad and my friend.
Words cannot convey my gratitude.
Peter Schaffter, The Schumann Proof
