The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Woke up groggy on a beautiful morning to find that Gyorgy Ligeti has passed away. On top of this sad news, I think it unfortunate that the AP headline reads, essentially, “Space Odyssey Composer Dies.” We are no longer free creatures, my friends, we are all subjugates of the vast cinematic dictatorship, and only insofar as our activities pertain to movies (preferably Oscar-nominated ones) do they possess any true importance. Cinematism?

Just a couple posts ago I noted my amusement (somewhat repressed) at a (deliberately) absurd harmonica conclusion to the Lamento of the Ligeti Piano Concerto. I have more complicated feelings about the composer’s work as a whole … why must our feelings about composers go through phases, like relationships? Indulgent nostalgia: a boiling hot summer in Bloomington, Indiana, in the early 90s, with mornings and afternoons spent ascetically in an ice-cold, over-airconditioned practice cubicle on a totally unsatisfactory piano, trying to pound several of the Etudes into my memory banks. For everyone else, it was barbecues and lake outings, but NO, I had to learn my “Automne a Varsovie.” (Self-pity meter off charts.) And just a year or so ago, I found myself pounding those same notes back into my head: just as beautiful, elusive, shifting and maddening. Man, at least this man, wishes to be machine briefly to execute more perfectly these things, these devised inexplicable contraptions, which then become challenging pleasures for man (how can machines take pleasure from them?). Is it catty to say that many (most) of the existing recordings seem to leave for the realm of machine and don’t make it back, roundtrip, to human-land; that in their quest for perfection and execution they forget the humorous, joyous glint? I did not know him personally; from many accounts, he was not always humorous in person; but the music to me radiates the joy of the intellect combined with just enough (not too much) sensual pleasure, making a perfect cocktail, somewhat astringent, not an “umbrella drink” as so many compositions are these days. I’m still waiting for the recording which feels like a joyous, but mindful release. Let’s not forget first impressions: the 20-year-old Jeremy thought they were “cool.” True: the Etudes shimmer with coolness, both in the sense of restraint and The Hip. And then, they are also outrageous, over the top, demanding of the impossible, and engaging of the dance rhythm to the end of the mind’s range, an orgy of rhythmic complication … Oh I could go on and on. Rest in peace. The angels or demons, or whoever they are where he is now, had better be able to count.

Without comment:

We were circling around an evolving Charleston dinner buffet, clinking glasses and sharing not very deep thoughts when a phone rang. Flutist T ran to the porch for the mysterious phone call, and when she returned she had Big News from the Big City. It was 8:53 PM, more or less.

Her friend, let us call him X, was swept up in a typical freelancer’s night of stress, a slightly too close arrangement of concerts on either side of the Park. A 7:30 work by Tanya Leon on the East Side was to be followed by an 8 pm performance at Symphony Space (just a stone’s throw from my humble home on 91st Street on the West Side). He is caught in a bit of traffic on the way to the West Side, and barely makes it on stage in time; he plays (somehow this part of the story is not so important); and then when the work is over, while he is bowing, perhaps in the rush of having succeeded to make both gigs (I am embroidering here), he gesticulates out to the audience for the composer to come forward. Ignoring some contrary input from his colleagues, and seeing no composer in evidence, he brings his hand to his foreheard to stare out into the audience searchingly. He gestures again; no composer!

He is somehow herded offstage, and only there (but, alas, too late) does he learn that in fact what he has been playing is a memorial concert celebrating her centennial birthday. The composer, being dead, had (how shall we put it?) little desire, or opportunity, or incentive, to come forward.

Gesticulating to a dead composer in the audience at a memorial concert is one of those gaffes you cannot recover from. For me the only option at this point would be to flee the hall, ignominiously, head bowed, disguised if possible. I imagine X slinking out a back door, and down 95th street to West End Ave (Broadway being too dangerous and public, you might come across an enraged relative at the entrance etc.) and grabbing a cab to some dark and dingy bar to escape the view of all humanity, and there spending some days and weeks before coming out again … But that is just my solution. Feel free to suggest your own.

Again I mourn an empty vessel. Sitting in Modica, a gelateria in Charleston, I am staring at the brown incrustations left on the sides of a tiny white cup, clinging traces of a consumed doppio espresso (hearing the racing of my heart and forbearing another) … contemplating that absence, I call up the following lines from Eugenio Montale:

With a howl of loyalty
the spring storm shakes my ark,
oh my lost ones.

(tr. Edith Farnsworth)

You are introduced, the crowd is applauding, the theatre is dark, and you walk onstage, weaving towards the piano; you bow and before you know it you are seated and you are staring at this:

How can you thank a composer sufficiently for giving you something like this to play? It is not one of those delicate, evasive beginnings whose success depends on the pinpoint execution of a number of small details, in the heat of the initial moments. You begin with a few strums, as if trying out the keyboard, and before you know it you are mid-inspiration: in the throes without even trying. It is so generous, it seems to express love but in every possible direction, plurally, democratically, towards the piano, towards the listener, and even towards lowly me the performer. And you just let it fly. There is only one puzzling moment, at the end of the provided example: I have “gotten stuck” here so many times, wondering how to play this descending fourth, G to D; a pothole in the too-perfect road; at this moment, Mozart, instead of spinning out perfect, inevitable melody, seems to be “treading water,” merely filling in the harmony with an unexpressive interval… Do I play the low D as if Mozart is reaching into the underlying harmony, into another voice? Or is it part of the main melody? Luckily, just at this odd, flagging moment, the left hand interjects another strum and this seems to wake up the right hand, which leaps into another (perhaps even more unbelievable) phrase: we are back on top, baby.

I believe this “odd flagging moment” to be an intentional flaw, the one thing to make the magic melody not work. Why would Mozart choose to fail, even for a moment? Because when the violin enters, playing the same melody, and it comes to the same juncture, it “corrects the problem”:

Between the piano’s G-D, and the violin’s A-G, an enormous abyss. The piano’s resolution was non-committal, structural, neutral, a girder at the end of the phrase, holding it (classically, at a distance) in place; while the violin’s resolution is made of flesh, sound, sensuality; the sweetness of the violin’s suspension somehow finally encapsulates, expresses, condenses the generous loving idea which the piano has set forth. In that one aha! moment, the violin shows the piano how it should have been done, and brings the ecstasies of the opening down to earth. But if the piano had played the violin’s resolution earlier, at measure 4, the piece would have been prematurely complete; so the piano “had” to fail. The piano had to look for a second phrase to answer the questions of its first, but the violin makes it clear that the answer was already innate in the opening statement: that we need look no further. Rather than two paired question-answer phrases (the paradigm of classical rhetoric) we have a beautiful symmetrical setup where the initial question becomes the answer.

This resolution (over which I realize I am obsessing), in one of those beautiful paradoxes native to music, brings one motion to an end, and sets the piano on another motion: the aha! moment is the elision of the end of one endless arc, and the beginning of another: the intersection of paradises. Speaking of intersections, yesterday I was playing the “Kegelstatt” Trio, and the page turner and I were having a delightful time, like conspirators back there, because I was excessively drawing her attention to some delicious things that happen in the left hand of the piano in the last movement. You have your thematic moments, you know, when the bass has a kind of purposeful, defining motion (“boring” as such), and then you have these great moments where Mozart slips into a kind of vamp, where the bass just oscillates tonic-dominant or vice versa, and there are these simple little bassline ideas, snippets, making their smiling statements down there…. Mozart draws us into vamp hypnosis, letting us enjoy the wandering, and then–and then–just when are going under, just when the vamp nears vapidity, the theme reappears out of a twist of events, and the bass becomes happily disciplined again, does lovingly its dutiful thing, and those moments at the intersection–in which the theme, a mere thing, appears like revelation–are so wonderful you just want to kiss somebody or something. Unfortunately this is usually not appropriate onstage, and a musical moment is very hard to kiss, except by playing it just so. So it floats on by, the kissed or unkissed moment; you play it the best you can; oh my lost ones.