When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in the heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach. Erika has taken over the piano part for one of her students, whose nose was bleeding and who had to go lie down. The student rests on a gym mat. Flutes and violins complete the ensemble, lending a rarity value to the concertos. After all, the makeup of the players is always extremely varied. And so are the instruments. Once, a group even used two recorders!
In Erika’s wake, Walter Klemmer has begun a new and serious offensive. He has cordoned off a corner of the gymnasium and settled down. This is his own auditorium, where he listens to the chamber orchestra rehearsing. He pretends to be absorbed in his score, but he is actually staring only at Erika. Not a single one of her movements at the keyboard escapes his notice, not because he wants to learn from them, but because he’d like to unnerve the pianist—a typical male trick. He gazes at the teacher, passively but provokingly. He wants to be one big masculine challenge, something that only the strongest woman and artist can take on. Erika asks him whether he would like to play the piano part himself. He says no, he wouldn’t, and he inserts a meaningful pause between the two phrases, charging the pause with something ineffable. He reacts with significant silence to Erika’s claim that practice makes perfect. Klemmer says hello to a female acquaintance, kissing her hand—a deliberately playful gesture. Then he laughs with a second girl about some nonsense or other.
Erika feels the spiritual vacuum emanating from such girls. A man soon gets bored with them. A pretty face is used up very quickly.
Klemmer, the tragic hero, who is far too young for this role (while Erika is actually too old to be an innocent victim of his attentions), runs his finger correctly along the mute notes in the score. Everyone can tell instantly that Klemmer is a musical victim, not a musical parasite. Klemmer is a performer, who is prevented from playing by unfortunate circumstances. He briefly places his arm around a third girl’s shoulder. She is wearing a miniskirt, which is back in fashion. She seems unburdened by any thoughts. Erika thinks: If Klemmer wants to sink that low, then let him. But I won’t accompany him. Her skin crinkles jealously, like fine crepe paper. Her eyes hurt because she can catch everything only out of their extreme corners. She simply mustn’t turn toward Klemmer. He mustn’t notice her attention no matter what. He jokes with the third girl. The girl writhes under volleys of laughter. She shows her legs almost up to where they end and run into the body. The girl is showered with sunlight. Constant canoeing has painted a healthy color in Klemmer’s cheeks. His head flows into the girl’s head. His blond hair lights up together with the girl’s long hair. When he goes canoeing, Klemmer protects his head with a helmet. He tells the girl a joke, and his eyes flash blue, like taillights. He can sense Erika’s presence constantly. His eyes do not signal a brake maneuver. Why, Klemmer, no doubt, is in the middle of a new advance. Wind, water, rocks, and waves have warmly recommended that the discouraged paddler should keep going. He was about to give up, he was about to pick younger garden flowers than Erika. However, there are signs that his secret beloved will waver and soften. If only he could get her into a canoe just once. It doesn’t have to be a paddle boat, which must be so hard to handle. It can be a motionless boat. There, on a lake, on a river—that would be Klemmer’s element, his most intrinsic one—he could exert sure control over her, because he feels at home in water. He could conduct and coordinate Erika’s hectic movements. Here, on the keyboard, on the trail of notes, Erika is in her element, and the conductor conducts (an exiled Hungarian, who, in a thick accent, foams his rage at the flock of students).
Since Klemmer diagnoses his attachment to Erika as affection, he again decides not to give up. He sits hard, assiduously digging his back legs in. She very nearly got away; or else, discouraged, he would have given up. That would have been terribly wrong. She now strikes him as physically more distinctive, more accessible than last year: picking at the keys, sending nervous side glances at the student, who won’t go, and who also won’t come and talk about the pyre blazing inside him. As for a musical analysis of the performance, he again doesn’t seem all there. But he is here. Is he here for her sake? She plays hard to get, but lets Klemmer know that he is the only one she’s noticed here, from the very start. Aside from Klemmer, the only thing that exists for Erika, the music tamer, is music. A connoisseur, Klemmer does not believe what he thinks he sees in Erika’s face: rejection. He alone is worthy of opening the gate to the pasture, ignoring the No Trespassing sign. Erika shakes the pearl strand of a trill out of her white blouse cuffs; she is loaded with nervous haste. Perhaps the haste is caused by the newly arrived spring, which announced itself long ago with denser bird traffic and inconsiderate drivers everywhere (in winter they spared their cars so as not to damage the piston rods; but now they shoot out, together with the first snowdrops, and, somewhat rusty at the wheel, they cause dreadful accidents). Erika plays the simple piano part mechanically. Her thoughts drift far afield, to a study trip with student Klemmer. Just the two of them: a small hotel room and love.
Then a truck loads up all her thoughts and dumps them out again in the small room for two. Shortly before the day ends, Erika’s thoughts have to be back in the small hamper that her mother has lovingly lined with pillows and freshly covered, so that youth can snuggle in with old age.
Herr Nemeth taps his baton again. The violins weren’t mellow enough for him. Once again from the fifth measure, please. Now the nose bleeder returns, fortified, and requests her place at the piano as well as her rights as a soloist, a privilege she has arduously won against all the competition. She is a favorite pupil of Professor Kohut because she too has a mother who adopted an ambition as her own child.
The girl takes Erika’s place. Walter Klemmer winks encouragingly at the girl and checks to see what Erika thinks of his wink. Before Herr Nemeth can even pick up his baton, Erika whooshes out of the room. Klemmer, profoundly grateful to her and renowned far and wide as a fast starter in both art and love, gets into gear: he wants to sniff the trail. But the conductor’s glare pushes Klemmer, the spectator, back into his seat. The student has to decide whether he wants in or out. Once he decides, he’ll have to abide by his decision.
The string section heaves its right arms into the bows and scrapes away mightily. The piano trots proudly into the arena, twists its hips, prances loosely, performs an exquisite feat from the haute école—a trick that is not in the score; devised through long nights, and now illuminated in pink, it struts gracefully around the semicircular curve. Herr Klemmer has to stay seated and wait until the next time the conductor breaks off. This time, the maestro wants to make it to the end or bust, assuming that no one busts out. But not to worry: these music makers are adults. The children’s orchestra and the singing-school groups, a variegated jigsaw of all the existing vocal schools, already rehearsed at four o’clock: a composition by the recorder teacher, with vocal solos by the singing-school teachers gathered from all the music-school branches. A bold opus, alternating between even and odd beats, that turned some of the kids into bedwetters.
The future pros are indulging themselves musically, here and now. Tomorrow’s members of the Lower Austrian Orchestra, the provincial opera houses, and the Austrian Radio Network Symphony Orchestra. Even the Philharmonic, in case a male relative of the student is already playing in it.
Klemmer sits and broods about Bach, but like a brood hen that is somewhat neglecting her egg. Will Erika come back again soon? Or is she washing her hands? He doesn’t know his way around here. But he can’t help exchanging winks with pretty students. He wants to live up to his reputation as a womanizer. Today the rehearsal had to take refuge in this surrogate space. All the large rooms in the Conservatory are needed for an urgent full-scale rehearsal of the opera class: an ambitious suicide mission, Mozart’s Figaro. An elementa
ry school has lent out its gymnasium for the Bach rehearsal. The gym apparatuses have retreated up against the walls; physical culture has yielded to high culture for once. The school, located in Schubert’s old neighborhood, houses the local music school on its top floors, but this space is far too small for a rehearsal.
Today, the students of this musical subsidiary are permitted to attend the rehearsal of the famous Conservatory Orchestra. Few of the students avail themselves of the privilege. It is meant to facilitate their choice of a future career. They can see that hands can not only ride roughshod but also caress delicately. Their vocational goals—carpenter or university professor—vanish into the distance. The students sit raptly on chairs and exercise mats, lending their ears. None of them has parents who would expect their child to study carpentry.
On the other hand, the child should not assume that a musician’s life is a piece of cake. The child has to sacrifice his or her leisure to constant practice. For quite a while now, Walter Klemmer has been depressed by the unfamiliar school surroundings; he again feels like a child in front of Erika. Their pupil/teacher relationship is solidly cemented, their lover relationship seems further away than ever. Klemmer doesn’t even dare use his elbows to jostle his way to the exit. Erika fled, closing the door without waiting for him. The ensemble fiddles, scrapes, grumbles, and bangs the keys. The performers strain hard, because one always strains hard in front of ignorant listeners—they still appreciate worshipful faces and concentrated expressions. Thus the orchestra takes its playing more seriously than normal. The wall of sound closes up in front of Klemmer; he doesn’t dare try to break through, he’s too worried about his career. He doesn’t want Herr Nemeth to reject him as soloist for the big final concert of the semester. Klemmer’s been nominated. A Mozart recital.
Walter Klemmer spends his time in this gymnasium measuring female dimensions, squaring the curves off against one another, which isn’t too difficult for a technician. Meanwhile, his piano teacher is irresolutely rummaging through the dressing room. Today, the room is crammed with instrument cases, covers, coats, caps, scarves, and gloves. The wind players keep their heads warm, the pianists and string players their hands—it all depends on which part of the body conjures up the sounds. Countless pairs of shoes are standing about, because you can enter a gymnasium only in sneakers. Some people forgot their sneakers, and so they sit around in socks or stockings, catching cold.
From far away, the thunder of a noisy Bach cataract reaches the ears of Erika the piano player. She is standing on a floor that prepares people for average athletic achievements. She doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she scooted out of the rehearsal room. Did Klemmer drive her out? It’s unbearable, the way he tossed about those young girls on the rummage counter in the gourmet-food department. If asked, he would excuse himself by saying he has a connoisseur’s appreciation of female beauty in every age and category. It is an insult to the teacher, who took the trouble to flee a feeling.
Music has often comforted Erika in times of distress. But today, the music grinds into sensitive nerve endings exposed by the man named Klemmer. Erika has landed in a dusty, unheated restaurant. She wants to rejoin the others, but she can’t leave, she’s stopped by a muscle-bound waiter, who advises the gracious lady to make up her mind, the kitchen is closing. Vegetable or liver-dumpling soup? Feelings are always ridiculous, especially when unauthorized people get their hands on them. Erika strides through the smelly room, a bizarre spindle-shanked bird in the zoo of secret needs. She forces herself to walk very slowly, hoping someone will come and stop her. Or hoping someone will keep her from carrying out the misdeed she is planning and for which she will have to endure horrible consequences: a tunnel bristling with sharp, scary apparatuses and utter darkness through which she will have to dash quickly. No shimmer of light at the other end. And where is the light switch for the niches in which the emergency personnel are concealed?
All she knows is that at the other end she’ll find the arena, lit white-hot, where further feats of dressage and demonstrations of accomplishment await her. An amphitheater of ascending stone benches, releasing a shower upon her: peanut shells, popcorn bags, soda bottles with bent straws, rolls of toilet paper. This would be her real audience. From the gymnasium comes Herr Nemeth’s hazy shriek. He’s yelling at the students to play louder: Forte! More sound!
The sink is made of porcelain and veined with cracks. There’s a mirror above it. Under the mirror, a glass shelf rests on metal brackets. A tumbler stands on the shelf. The tumbler wasn’t placed there cautiously or caringly; the person was heedless about a lifeless object. The tumbler stands where it stands. An isolated drop of water is still dangling from the bottom of the tumbler, relaxing before it evaporates. Some student probably took a drink from the tumbler. Erika combs through the pockets of coats and jackets, looking for a handkerchief, which she soon finds. A product of the flu and head-cold season. Erika takes hold of the tumbler in the handkerchief, bedding the glass in the cloth. The glass, with innumerable fingerprints left by clumsy juvenile hands, is all wrapped up. Erika places the cloaked tumbler on the floor and smashes her heel into it. The glass, muffled, splinters. The injured tumbler is then stamped on several times more, until it is turned into a splintery but not shapeless gruel. The splinters mustn’t be too small! They should be nice and sharp! Erika picks up the handkerchief with its jagged contents and carefully lets the splinters slide into a coat pocket. The cheap, thin glass has left very sharp, nasty fragments. Its whirring whimper of pain was deadened by the cloth.