The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

ROMEO AND JUILLIARD
a tragedy in 5 acts

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Romeo, an entering freshman cellist of aspect fair and true;
The Juilliard School, the redoubted music institution;
Mercutio, Romeo’s friend, an Italian violinist, also a freshman;
The Ghost of Dorothy DeLay;
Candy, a ballerina of slender build and slenderer intellect;
Mary, Queen of PreCollege;
Igor and Amy, severely jaded seniors at Juilliard;
Daria, a beautiful drama student;
Harold, eccentric sage of the violoncello;
a Nameless, Faceless Pianist;
Stanislavich, a Russian virtuoso of some kind;
Cedric, an extremely campy ballet dancer;
assorted officials, administrators, security guards, and bag ladies.

Act I
[A marble court in front of revolving doors; inside a sinister lobby can vaguely be seen. Orientation meeting. A group of incoming freshmen gathers on the court, mingling in groups.]

ROM. A freshened wind with soot and grime doth blow
o’er me, this once provincial Romeo.
Now perched amid this din of cab and truck
I thank persistence, and my ripened luck.

[Enter Mercutio.]

Ho, Mercutio! Well met, my fellow music geek!
Have you received your room assignment?

MER. I have, and never a more threadbare cubicle
hath fate imposed upon my Roman visage.

ROM. I too did find it cold; but we young men
must take fire from art, or from our bedmates,
if art doth not warm us sufficiently.
And we have passed through such ordeals,
such strains of practice and tedium of scales,
such etudes of octaves and thirds and travails,
auditions and juries, and financial worries,
to find ourselves here atop the blossom
of the flower of musical prestige, bees aflood
in honey, drowning in the hive of virtuosity.

MER. Agreed; We shouldst not complain of that
which we have pursued so assiduously.

ROM. Yes, Mercutio, we played and fiddled at Fate
and she hath dealt us her fairest card,
that horizon I have ever gazed toward,
to sign upon my resume the golden name: Juilliard.

[IGOR and AMY, passing through the crowd, come nearer]

IGOR: [singsong] Just hope these studies do not leave you scarred.
AMY: [singsong] Or tunefully beaten, harmonically charred,
Marred and hoisted by your own petard.
ROM. Why, what do you mean?
AMY: We mean to say
that what’s in a golden name is not always gold.
Beware this bill of sale, thy soul is sold.
ROM. Sour seniors!
Wouldst thou spoil our pleasure and delight?
I think the circles ‘neath your eyes have ranged you round
so that you must only roam your jaded ground.
[Fanfare.
President of Juilliard enters, with assorted faculty and retinue of bagladies.]

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3 am Prussia Cove, I am sitting in the candlelit refectory, chatting about who knows, after a concert and well-spiced lamb stew and Ashley’s Cornish ale and eccentric lyrical speeches by the festival’s father figure, Hilary, and a dubious reading of the Brahms A Major Piano Quartet… As I said, it’s 3 am, and the composer-in-residence comes wandering in: he cannot find his cottage. He has been wandering in the darkness.

A performer, I am ever the humble servant of the composer, right? I offer to show him home. We set off through the night, over the stony paths, along the cliffside. I feel like Virgil. My Dante is not sure-footed. I brandish my WalMart flashlight confidently; I am a beam of navigational surety, a compass, a well-worn path. And under the hedges and over the hills and dales and there we are, at the thatched cottage, and I open the door and welcome him into the inn, which has vacancy for him (unlike “Das Wirtshaus” from Winterreise which we heard earlier in the evening) … He stumbles into the light, and I close the door behind him, and set forth, feeling bold and adventurous (though with no specific adventure in mind).

Paces, breaths. Halfway back I found my friend C, waiting along the curve of a wall. My flashlight was weaving wildly in the darkness apparently. Off it went. And in twenty seconds my eyes were stripped of their annoying certainties. The next day, in the rumbling crowded train, I was repeatedly revisited by this near-silent moment, this singing absence. You click the button, and at first you see nothing at all: just void or impossibility. You are looking, but there is no information; you’re the same person, but no longer plugged in; you are running on the battery of your memories, of your idea of the world. All you can do is wait. If the void went on forever, you would be dead. But it doesn’t (this time); your brain slides open, begins to feel light on a different scale, more subtly, like the slightest touch of a finger along your arm. Truth is associated by tradition with light, with sun, rays, beams and bulbs, but at that moment it seemed truth was darkness, a dark embrace which helped you to perceive: the slight silver of the water, oscillating; the dark dark black of the hills, cliffs and trees; the lighter, freer black of the sky; and, of course, a million festive lights above, a slow-moving, eternal fireworks; finally, there was the vague shape of the Milky Way draped like a carelessly strewn scarf, and if you had to pick one sound it would be the careless washing of water down below in the cove, the barely audible heartbeat of the sea.

The world has gone dark and then relit itself, from within; and you are displaced. Something like walking into a room you have been in a million times (the room is yourself) and sensing that a piece of the furniture has been shifted, but you can’t say which, or why it is different. 3 am drifted towards 4 am or maybe 5, we listened to the ocean. I remember so few words of so many conversations.

Day 1. First reading. Apparently the charming, devastatingly handsome pianist of the group (a certain Jeremy M. Denk, Esq.) is a wee grumpy. There is some disagreement about tempo, with the group dividing more or less strings vs. piano (how unusual!), which devolves further and further into animosity. When asked his opinion of a passage just played, Mr. Denk opines: “unbearably tedious.” Mr. Isserlis thinks this is “not exactly encouraging.”

Day 2. On to the third movement. Mr. Denk is all sweetness and light, but no one seems to believe in his smiles, suspecting irony. (Perhaps correct?) Three hours into the rehearsal, we seem still to be in the development section, though it is hard to tell. Fugatos are waddling everywhere like stilted Russian chickens, in horrendous keys like G# minor with gobs of double sharps.  We dash madly for the coda, seeking fulfillment and completion. Each tempo marking seems to be paradoxical in a different way, and we perversely enjoy explaining to ourselves things such as “sempre piu a tempo”!

For the first time, the name Celine Dion is invoked to explain the ecstatic arrival point of the first movement.

Day 3. It is theorized that Mr. Denk was “jetlagged” on Day 1, in an attempt to explain his ongoing delightful demeanor. (Mr. Isserlis makes a scoffing comparison: “I guess Hitler was jetlagged.”) It is a veritable virtuoso exercise in charm, despite a return to the controversial first movement and its tempo marking of 46 to the half note, which drives the pianist half out of his mind. (The pianist begins to suspect he may be in the clutches of madmen:  these people not only want to play the Medtner Quintet, but they want it to last as long as possible.)  The Celine Dion moment is mounted at a kind of Messiaen-on-quaaludes pace, and finally the string players believe they have reached too sluggish a world; the pianist feels vindicated, and is allowed to broach a more flowing tempo. He oozes ahead, emotes.

Composers: don’t write hymns or chorales any more! Please! After the rehearsal, the second violinist, a certain Mr. Francis, and Mr. Denk are so inspired and feel so deeply, emotionally committed to the score that they begin to invent words for the hymn theme of the last movement.

Cornish ale helps to inspire certain turns of phrase. These words cannot be printed here, for copyright reasons. I can only say that the recurring, tonic-centered phraseology suggested certain recurring, urgent sensual implorings.

Day 4. We attempt to take in the whole work. The last movement needs to be addressed yet again, and its manifold themes gathered within the sausage casing (if you will) of a pulse, an architectural prophylactic.

Again, Mr. Francis and Mr. Denk are magnificently inspired after the rehearsal; they feel the need to fulfill this inspiration by finding expressive anagrams for the name Nicolai Medtner. Various combinations “[blank] enema” fail miserably, and this tragic impossibility is confirmed by computer. The computer however comes up with:

Amelodic Intern

Indelicate Norm

Medicinal Tenor

All of this is part of the extremely serious rehearsal procedure here at IMS Prussia Cove. (“Jeremy Denk” is also tried, and becomes Jerk My Need.)

We play through the last movement entirely without stopping. The work is therefore scheduled for performance (kidding!).  Stay tuned, there will be updates here at Think Denk!!! If you are anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, I think you should try your darndest to come to tonight’s performance in Camborne, Cornwall, England.  The program:

Golijov:  Clarinet Quintet (Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind)

Schubert:  Winterreise, Part 2 (arr. for tenor and string quartet?!?)

Medtner:  Piano Quintet

This program will likely never be heard again, and survivors will be given cream tea, warm blankets, and a consolatory hug.  There is, by the way, a pub right next door to the venue; I’m just saying.

I have a tip for you.  Don’t check in online for your London flight at 4 AM, while lying sprawled in bed, after closing down Little Branch (a favorite spectral haunt, these days.)  You may fall asleep in the middle of check-in, snoring peacefully while you get assigned—by default, that rascally demon of bureaucracies—a middle seat.  You may, then, attempt to rectify the situation the next day by phone, which might land you in a surreal dialogue:

—There’s plenty of aisle seats, sir.
—So give me one now.
—But you already checked in.
—Yes.
—Don’t worry sir, there are plenty.
—But when I arrive at the airport, there won’t be.
—Sir, don’t worry.  There are plenty.  And everyone is requesting the middle seats.

I swear to you he actually told me that!  Which meant he was truly desperate to get me off his case.  And I let him off, weakling that I am, avoider of conflict.  Of course, when I arrived at beautiful Newark Airport (a structure which never ceases to make me feel glad I am alive), the first words the young man at the counter said to me were…

—We’re completely overbooked, sir.
—But the man said to me on the phone [etc. etc. tedious unconvincing pleas etc. etc.]
—Okay, I can give you an aisle seat, but it’s at the back of the plane.

I smiled gratefully, admiring his perfectly crafted hair.  He smiled back.  Everyone was happydappy in the land of airplane travel:  everyone gets what they want, more or less!  And yet this story was not yet at the end of its tether:  when I boarded, I discovered that my seat, 63F, though delightfully proximate to the engines and toilets, was not in fact at all aisle-ish.  AGGGGGHHHH.  What had I done wrong?  Had I offended someone?  Was this deliberate revenge?  Vast conspiracy theories sailed through my brain.

I found myself, in fact, well-hedged between two ladies, of very different aspect.  One was bone-thin; she was 80, Indian, garbed in white and walked up and down the airplane all night, a ghost, a moth.  She was the spryest 80-year-old I have ever seen.  When she consented to be seated, which was rare, she contorted herself into all sorts of yoga positions—pretzels, half-Nelsons, polygons—and her flying knees soared across my airspace and collided with my appendages.   Finally, bump 93, waking me yet again from nascent sleep, made me sniff with annoyance;   she beamed at me saying

—you know knees good you know and I move

She had a cane.  She walked a good game with her cane, amid turbulence remaining untossed.  Each time she got back in her seat she had to resettle the cane under my feet (lift, squeeze, jiggle, giggle).  Again, I became annoyed …

—does it hurt you?, she asked,
—No, it doesn’t hurt me.  (What more could I say?)

My other neighbor–a Haitian woman–was built thickly where the other was thin.  She was not fat, but broad; she settled in her seat like a marshmallow.  But she was a stubborn marshmallow.  Her elbow fought with mine furiously for control of our armrest.  It was a silent battle to the death; her will seemed indomitable.  She left her light on most of the night.  I turned it off when she went to the bathroom.  She mumbled something at me (perhaps some voodoo curse?) and turned it on again.

I felt squeezed by fate and humanity, by a kind of counterpoint … firm plump elbow pressure from my right (pedal point, trombones), against an endless series of spry touches and nudges floating, fluting their way at me from my left (fluttertongue, agitating tremolo).  A physical music of discomfort.  I was never happier than to stand on my own two feet in the middle of Paddington Station, bags hanging from my shoulders, with a dangling superhot coffee … exhausted, but free of my lady brackets.  I was monophony, I was plainchant.

Then some hours later, after sleepily falling in and out of Balzac’s harlots on the train, I felt an urge for crisps.  I staggered to the cafe car.  Something didn’t look or sound right.  I blinked, looked again.

—Will you be paying for your tea?

Blonde flowing stewardess hair, deep baritone.  There was a transvestite working the cafe car.  Outside, sheep dotted the green, green meadows of Cornwall.  Wool and grass and estrogen and Thai chili crisps.  Surreality hounded me, a jetlag quicksand, the nightmarish confluence of the deepest sleep insanity with the absolute weird fact that everything is really really happening.