Two Cellists, One Departed

Had I been unfair? Had my adolescence so colored my judgment that I had completely misread her? Because the one time I attended a master class with the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova, I came away convinced: the woman was a dragon.

She was, certainly, a hell of a cellist. Everybody said the same thing: she played like a man. And she had a technique that few could match, the result of natural talent augmented by six hours of practice every day, starting at the age of six. And she attributed much of her success to what she called “long bowing.”

Professional secret—a string player’s success or failure is 90% due to the bow, and how much control the player has over it. And yes, the left hand flying over the fingerboard is important, but what actually makes the sound? The right hand, forearm, and arm.

So the game she had with her flutist father was to see—who could hold a note the longest? Was her bow longer—figuratively—than his breath? And could she maintain the sound absolutely unbroken? Later, the game got expanded: could she start out at the frog of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the heaviest, with the quietest sound possible, and increase it evenly as she moved to the tip of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the lightest? Then, of course, she reversed it—starting out at the tip playing loudly, and decrescendoing as she moved to the frog.

Right—a picture being worth more, certainly, than the words above, here’s an illustration:

Not quite sure what all that’s about? Well, whether you understood it or not, there was no mistaking it: Nelsova’s playing was titanic. Everybody, she owned one of the best pieces of the 20^th century repertoire, Bloch’s Schelomo; she had studied it with the composer, who invited her to premiere it and then record it.

So she was major, but she was also—to my young eyes—a thorough bitch. Because there are musicians who believe in the musical equivalent of the stress interview, which, if you don’t know it, goes something like this:

Boss (smoking largest cigar possible, ignores job candidate for two minutes, and then shouts): WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT!

Job seeker: Um, ah, well…I’m here to apply…

Boss: WHY THE HELL SHOULD I GIVE YOU A JOB IN MY COMPANY!

Nelsova started out light on the youngest students, and got progressively meaner on the more advanced. Finally she pounced on one hapless grad student, who was to play the Prokofiev Sonata.

“JASON!” she kept on crying, as he struggled to play for more than 10 seconds, only to be interrupted by…

“JASON!”

It went on and on, until it became the musical equivalent of dog training.

“You must listen, listen, listen!” she instructed, when she felt that he was playing too loudly, and that the pianist had the more interesting part. So it was fascinating to see her performance the next day, when she came sweeping in in a majestic gown bedecked by pink ribbon; trailing her was her accompanist from central casting, a small, thin, nervous man who appeared terrified of the figure with whom he shared the stage. He never played louder than a mezzo piano all evening, even when he had one of the most ravishing themes Brahms ever wrote. Nelsova, not to be outshone, plucked out the pizzicato accompaniment at full volume.

She had, in short, an ego on steroids, and she must have felt—and you get a hint of this in the last minutes of the clip below—that her job was to toughen ‘em up, throw a barrage of criticism at the kids, season them before they faced the annealing fire. It was the prevailing attitude of her generation: watch Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the famed soprano of the same era, and you’ll see much the same thing.

You were supposed to be tough, you were supposed to be able to take in the criticism, accept it, and believe in yourself enough to withstand what felt like the Nazis marching through Poland. Because when you left the conservatory? Well, there are very few people wearing kid gloves in the world of classical music.

It took me several decades before I got that, and began at last to face up to one of the particularly challenging tasks for a cellist: stepping in front of an audience with nothing and nobody backing you up, and playing solo; here’s what one critic has to say about it:

Four of the five works on his program were written for unaccompanied cello. It takes a lot of (ahem) pluck to play this kind of music. Every note is sorely exposed. There’s no piano accompaniment to hide behind. It’s the musical equivalent of walking a tightrope without a safety net.    

And who is the critic talking about?

Michael Samis, a wonderful young cellist who stumbled upon an unknown cello concerto by the German composer Carl Reinecke, performed it, and had the dream of recording it. So he started a Kickstarter campaign, got the $8500 that he needed, and embarked on the long process of recording the work on the Delos label.

I had pledged some money, and then had waited, checking in periodically on Michael via Facebook. Nor was I surprised when Michael’s dream took longer than—seemingly—expected, because dreams do. Mine had, and at last I had had my book in my hands; a couple weeks ago, I had Michael’s dream in my hands. A CD, you see, is sometimes something more than a piece of plastic enclosed in other pieces of plastic.

The concerto was everything the excerpt had promised: lyrical, virtuosic, and lush. And then we came to a remarkable piece for solo cello: the Bloch Prelude Number One. Michael was treading on Nelsova’s turf, but why not? She had died a decade before, in New York City, where she had taught at Juilliard up until her death: somebody has to carry on the baton….

And curiously, Michael seems to be the guy to do it—the technique is there, but so is the big, beautiful, lush tone, and the temperament to be unabashedly romantic. It’s curiously refreshing, in an age of increasingly safe, correct performance practice, to hear somebody with a musical personality.

So the verdict is definitely in on Michael. But Nelsova?

…still not sure.

Cynara, Come Home!

“She can never do this again,” said Montalvo, “and our big mistake? We should have gotten that padlock at the hardware store, and locked the gate of her apartment house. Nobody goes in or out—especially out—with suitcases!”

“I totally agree,” I said, “Imagine, just upping herself off to France, on the flimsy excuse that her husband is whole-French and her daughter is half-French. Remember how they told you, in grade school, that they hoped you’d brought enough for the whole class—when they caught you eating candy? Well, it’s the same thing: she can’t go anywhere—especially for a month—unless she takes everybody with her…”

It’s been a long month without Lady, the owner of the café, who generally mothers or sisters us as needed. Oh, and in the case of Mary Anne, her 70-something-year old neighbor, Lady even daughters her. So all of the creative verbdom, which she does so well, has left us bereft, in her absence. And we’ve been chafing without her, and now that she’s set to return, will we be reft again?  

“It was an unexcused absence, and that can’t be allowed to pass without consequences,” I tell Montalvo. “She should never be allowed to do this again.”

“And you know,” I continued, “if she were really going to be all French about it, she’d close all the businesses and we’d ALL be on vacation.” So we total it all up, and discover that it’s easily twelve people who would be trailing along with her—rather, being her distinguished guests—in France.

“It might slightly defeat the purpose of a vacation,” I told Montalvo, “to be bumping into all the people you’ve been bumping around with for the last two years, which is why I think it’s imperative—she has to rent a chateau.”

“Marc?”

OK—time for a bit of architectural enrichment. Google comes through with this:

“You gonna put fifteen people in that?” I ask him. “Remember when I told you, ‘less is more’ and you didn’t believe me? Well, in this case you were definitely right….”

So now we’re on the track of the perfect French chateau, which of course reminds me of Dorothy Parker’s perfect red rose; we take a little detour through poetry:

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.


All tenderly his messenger he chose;


Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -


One perfect rose.



I knew the language of the floweret;


'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'


Love long has taken for his amulet


One perfect rose.



Why is it no one ever sent me yet


One perfect limousine, do you suppose?


Ah no, it's always just my luck to get


One perfect rose.

“More iambic fucking pentameter,” remarked Montalvo, “except for the last line in all the stanzas…”

“You are not as you were under the reign of the good Cynara,” I tell him, needing to elevate things a bit from Dorothy Parker. So I derail that line by telling him that Parker had such fulminant writer’s block that her husband took to putting a human hair on the keyboard of her typewriter. As I remember it, it could be there, undisturbed, for months, though Parker swore that the nightly martinis were just recompense for a day slapping away at the keyboard….

Right, time to return to our French lodgings….

Montalvo proposes this:

“Still rather modest,” I told him. “The point, after all, is that you want volitional, not involitional, bumping into people. Try this….”

“Motherfuck,” he says, “they let Niggahs in there?”

“Lady will tell them,” I say. “Hey, and imagine drinking sherry before dinner here….”

“The staff will have to be sent away on paid vacations,“ I said, “since Mr. Fernández will insist on an English staff. And of course, you’ll have to know the service names of all the staff….”

“Hunh?”

“What do we call the chauffeur?”

“His name?”

“Wrong—the chauffeur is always ‘James.’”

“Hey, you can’t do that!”

“Oh, they love it,” I tell him. “And the upstairs maid?”

“No clue….”

“Daisy,” I tell him, “and the downstairs maid?”

“No idea,” he says.

“Exactly—no one cares about the downstairs maid, so she has no name!”

“But that’s terrible,” cries Montalvo. “You can’t be changing around the names of people!”

Reality sets in—how many cups of coffee will we have to sell to get a chateau for a month? We set aside the idea for a moment, and consider other plans….

“Maybe we should move everything around,” said Montalvo. “We’ll put the coffee shop in the gift shop, and vice versa. Then, when she comes back, we’ll act like nothing happened, and look at her funny, and say, ‘well of course it’s always been here. I mean, if you hadn’t been away so long….’”

“Too much work,” I told him. “And besides, she’s coming back today. Hey, what if we closed all the stores, put the hurricane shutter up, and posted big notices—OUT OF BUSINESS, LIQUIDATION!”

“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

“On the gift shop, we put “REPOSSESSED!”

“Right, and on the café, we put ‘CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!’”

“And of course,” I mused, “We could write one of those notices to our devoted customers, thanking them for their patronage—that is, all the moolah they dropped over the years—and saying that we’ll never forget them….”

“Better yet, we go out and get one of those big black ribbons—very much in the Spanish style—and put it on the door, with the sign below it: Marc Newhouse, 1956-2014. Hah! She’ll be sorry then!”

“Don’t tempt providence,” I tell him. And that’s when I tell him…

…“We are not as we were under the reign of the good Cynara!”  
 

   Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae

LAST night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine


There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed


Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;


And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 



All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,


Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;


Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 


When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: 


I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion. 



I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 


Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,


Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, all the time, because the dance was long; 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, 


But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 


Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;


And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 


Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



Ernest Dowson

Montalvo and the Big S

It’s easy to forget, because we do it all the time and it’s normal for us, so it was nice of Joshua to drop around and remind me.

He was one of many people who—obviously—I was supposed to remember, and that was clear when he sat down and peered nervously at me; in situations like this, what choice do you have?

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you,” I finally said. And he went on to tell me that I had intruded myself on a group of his fellow high-school students who were being coached on their poems for the Poetry Out Loud contest last year.

Here’s my version: I had held back as much as I could, since some of the kids were struggling even to understand their poems, some were consistently mispronouncing words, most were speaking either too quickly or too softly or…something. And the coach? She was murmuring—sorry, make that cooing—the gentlest words of encouragement on them.

And that’s nice, because discouragement? Who needs it? Isn’t being a Latino kid reciting English poetry enough of a challenge?

But there was this thing: if one of these kids was going to go to Washington, DC, to face native speakers from the fifty states, shouldn’t they have a decent shot of it? So there I was, writing and wincing in the corner, and then my father, Jack, dead these two decades, cleared his throat up there in heaven and fixed his gaze down though the clouds at me. His eye is as the eagle….

So I had gently taken over the group, after assuring the coach that she was doing an excellent job, and that I had little, nothing really, to say.

Now for Montalvo’s version:

“Man, you fuckin’ blew those kids outta the water. They didn’t know what the fuh had hit ‘em. Most of those kids didn’t even know what they were saying! You blasted them off the planet, man.”

Well, Montalvo is a youth who measures poetic success with the grade of “PANTIES OFF, LADIES” at the top, so my own performance?

“Jockstraps off, team!”

This, however, was after Montalvo had settled down a bit, because I had made my umpteenth parental blunder by answering truthfully to his question: “did you like my poem?”

When am I gonna learn?

“No,” I told him, and look, you don’t have to be adolescent to hear that as less a word than a slamming door.

The problem? The stuff that seems so obvious to everybody else around me, as they read their poems to each other, I just don’t get. So Montalvo read the poem to me, and then asked: what was it about? My answer, of course, was completely wrong.

“How can you not understand my poetry,” he demanded, “it’s perfectly clear,” and then proceeded to recite the poem again. It’s sort of the equivalent of all the tourists encountering non-English speaking people. What do they do? Raise their voices!

The problem—as I, and only I, see it—is that a lot of the poets are sort of commentators on their emotional fields, as it were. Think talking heads given a news analysis from the wars of feeling. Want an example? Well, I’ve just moved up and looked at one poem, and came upon this:

Our unspoken reason has led me

To understand the world we live in.

OK—looks like poetry, but is it?

So I’ve been telling Montalvo, don’t, please, report in. Instead, break out your verbal paint box, set your brush to work and set my eye and soul ablaze with the colors of metaphors, similes, images, adjectives, verbs that stab the eye. And I had suggested that he might do one short poem, but using an extended metaphor. And since of course—of course!—I hadn’t explained what I wanted, much less shown him an example of one, he had failed. Oh, and then I had panned the result.

There is sadism in teaching. Or rather, there is a time for plain words and honesty. There’s also a lot of bad teachers blaming their students for the bad teaching. So it was time to apologize, and then ask—since the Calvary had come over the hill—if he had read Sonnet 18, by the big S.

“Look, would you just assume that I haven’t read all this stuff,” he snapped, “because it makes me feel like a fuckin’ retard to have to say that I haven’t.”

Right. And so upset is he that he wants me to read it, not him. Is he afraid of encountering a word he doesn’t know?

So I start in:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?


Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,


And summer's lease hath all too short a date:


Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,


And often is his gold complexion dimmed,


And every fair from fair sometime declines,


By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:


But thy eternal summer shall not fade,


Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,


Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,


When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   

   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

So we tackle it, and, the first question?

“Since when can you drop all the ‘e’s’’

“Since forever, I tell him, “though, in fact, nobody in the last hundred years or so has done it.”

“Can I?”

Time to throw a bone!

Well, if he’s going to write a sonnet, why shouldn’t he drop some ‘e’s just to give it a nice archaic effect? That done, we go line by line, until we arrive at the moment I just love:

“Motherfucker,” he breathes.

That, along with “what a Niggah!” is Montalvo’s Presidential Freedom Medal / Purple Heart / Nobel Prize (you choose) tag line. And what poet is not going to be attracted to the idea of, ‘my words, baby, are gonna blast you into eternity? Panties off!’?

So then it’s time to look and see: what has Shakespeare done? How did he use the metaphor through all fourteen lines of the sonnet? How did he extend it, morph it, tweak it? And isn’t it interesting that the poem works, paradoxically, by at once diminishing the summer day, which can be too hot, the winds too rough, the sun clouded, and anyway, it’s all too fleeting? Yet somehow Shakespeare still suggests all this and makes you feel both the wonder of the summer’s day, and that the object is even more wonderful.

A Niggah indeed.

Well, he’s just called now, since it’s raining torrentially and he’s not coming today; he’s on a motorcycle now, and doesn’t want to get the computer wet. This, I tell him, is a good plan, so we agree, he’ll stay at home, where he doesn’t want to be, instead of at the café, where he does. I go back to writing this, and then remember Joshua—the high school kid who remembered me though I didn’t remember him.

“You really helped us a lot,” he said, and went on to tell me that he’s in the university now, studying computer science, but he wants to get back involved with Poetry Out Loud, because that had been the coolest moment of his high school years. Then he looked at me, and I remembered that feeling that day: the kids had looked at me with all the trust and admiration with which my cats had looked at me, in those terrible moments when they had been asking me to help them to their death. When those moments happen, or when Montalvo breathes in that he’s understood a sonnet by Shakespeare?

That’s when I remember…

…teachers make a difference.