“I didn’t think so. What happens is, you push the top of the key down. Then the back of the key goes up and pushes on a capstan. The capstan pushes on a wippen. The wippen pushes a jack. The jack pushes on the hammer knuckle. When the hammer is halfway to the string, the back of the key starts to lift the damper lever, and just before the hammer strikes the string, the jack toe hits the regulating screw. The jack slips out from under the knuckle so the hammer can keep going. The hammer strikes the string and rebounds. The knuckle lands on the repetition lever and pushes it down. Then the tail of the hammer catches the back check and stays put till the key is released.
“It’s like one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions. You remember Rube Goldberg?”
“You mean like the napkin that opens up when you lift your spoon?”
“Exactly. It’s fastened to strings that are tied to the spoon. When you lift the spoon . . . They’re called Was-passiert-dann machines in German.”
“My father used to like them.”
“All these things have to be regulated. Everything has to work together, like a Rube Goldberg machine. You have to level the keys, regulate the key dip, travel the hammers, align them to the strings, align the wipes to the hammers, regulate the jacks to the knuckles, adjust the hammer height, the hammer drop, the key stop rail, the damper stop rail, the hammer rail lift, the hammer striking line, the repetition spring tension.”
“What’s a wippen?” I asked.
He started to explain—“The wippen transmits the motion or the key to the hammer”—but I couldn’t follow. I was reminded of God’s explanation of baryonic oscillations.
He showed me the wippens in the piano, but they were crowded together so tightly I couldn’t really see the mechanism; but I could see that it had a lot of parts. “It’s another Rube Goldberg machine,” I said, “inside a Rube Goldberg machine!”
“Exactly, and the repetition mechanism is another, and the jack and let-off. Rube Goldberg machines in a Rube Goldberg machine. You’ll be able to see what I mean when I replace the hammers.”
I fixed another pot of espresso while he poked and prodded the piano, like a doctor auscultating a patient.
After coffee he asked me to play something on the electronic Yamaha. I was suddenly self-conscious. I couldn’t think of anything to play, so I played a C-major scale.
“Mrs. Godwin,” he said. “You can do better than that.”
I rushed through the opening of the Bach Fugue in C Minor from the The Well-Tempered Clavier.
“Slow down,” he said. “You’re not trying to catch a train. Bach said that the piano plays itself. All you have to do is find the right notes and press the keys. But the amazing thing is that a good pianist can transmit his own distinct interpretation by the way he strokes the keys.” He had shifted into lecture mode. “Horowitz and Rubenstein were both romantics, they both played Chopin, but totally differently. Horowitz had a clear concept of every piece he played, observing every nuance, every cadence . . . Rubenstein was more impetuous. But in both cases the soul of the pianist entered the body of the piano, if you know what I mean. But you can’t do it on this electronic piano. Just listen,” he said. “Play the top notes.” I played through the top octave. “There’s nothing up at the top. You’re not really hearing notes. There’s no way for the soul to enter the body. You can press the key or strike it, it doesn’t matter electronically. You can try to seduce the piano, or you can try to conquer it; it won’t make any difference. You need the Rube Goldberg machines.”
It was all becoming clear.
“The music of the spheres, though?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “And that’s what’s so amazing.”
Karl—we were now on a first-name basis—took the piano apart while he was waiting for new Swedish steel strings to arrive. He laid everything out on the harvest table. I took pictures. I wanted to document every step of the way. I wanted a record. Wanted to be able to see it. I photographed the pieces of piano—the action, the new hammers, the wippens, the jacks and knuckles, the agraffes (which anchor the strings), and the keys themselves, which were spread out at one end of the table, at the opposite end from the tools. Each one was labeled. They were all different.
I was not allowed near the piano without safety goggles while he was putting on the new strings. “Go read a book,” he said. It was difficult to take photos while wearing safety goggles, but I got some good shots. The living room was full of strange sounds, too, as Karl reamed out new bushings, hammered in tuning pins, tightened strings with a coil winder a little at a time. And it was full of strange smells, especially the animal-hide glue that he heated in a thermostatically controlled electric glue pot, and some piano “dope” that reminded me of the smell of the baby’s diaper in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.
Regulating a piano turns out to be like regulating the universe. You have to get the fundamental forces just right (the action, the repetition spring tension, the agraffes, the regulating screws), and you have to tinker with the constants: octaves, fifths, and thirds. These intervals are themselves stable, but they don’t fit together as neatly as you’d expect. A series of perfect fifths and perfect thirds will not fit perfectly into a series of perfect octaves. You have to make compromises. That’s why the sound of the early universe, the sound that God produced in the back of Saint Clement’s, sounded so indeterminate. The early universe needed to be tuned, like a piano, and according to Karl, there were lots of different ways you could do this—Pythagorean, just intonation, mean-tone temperament, equal tuning . . .
“I get the idea,” I said.
What Karl proposed was a system of tuning based on a series of loops that Bach had sketched on the title page of the 1722 edition of The Well-Tempered Clavier. He showed me a photocopy of the title page. The loops looked to me like something someone might doodle during a boring lecture, but they had attracted a lot of attention in recent years.
“I tuned Magnus’s piano this way when he was playing Bach and Chopin and Mozart. It was different, of course, when he was playing a concerto, Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky. Then you have to tune to the orchestra. You have to make bigger compromises.”
The point of using Bach’s system, if it was a system, was to minimize the compromises that made “well” tempered sound just a little dull, and also to avoid the “wolf” tones of earlier “mean” tuning systems. Each key would be distinct, would have its own distinct character. I agreed to try it.
I couldn’t follow Karl very far. I had no idea what he meant by subtracting one beat per second every time there was an empty loop in Bach’s diagram, no idea what he meant by a one-sixth- and one-twelfth-comma layout derived from the loops. But I understood something, understood it deep in my whole being, when I sat down to play.
“Good and Bad Times,” I started to play in C, just picking out the melody with the right hand and adding a few simple chords with the left. I could hear Paul’s voice in the back of my skull, singing along. I forgot how to modulate to G and had to stop for a minute to figure it out. I went to the dominant seventh of G, which is D. Then from D to G. Once I got the idea, I could manage, though I wasn’t comfortable with all the keys. I climbed up the circle of fifths to E. The high notes sounded as clear as bells. Then, when I couldn’t climb any higher, I started at the bottom F-sharp. The low notes resonated like thunder, like timpani. And then I climbed back up to C, completing the circle. Every key was slightly different. “Different overtones,” Karl explained, but that’s true in any tuning system. “The main difference in this system is in the relationships between the fifths and the thirds.” I wasn’t sure I understood. In fact, I was quite sure I didn’t understand. But I could hear the differences, could hear each key telling me the same story over and over again, in slightly different ways.
17
The Recital (November–December 2006)
Overflowing with strong feelings that demanded to be expressed, I decided to give a recital, despite uneasy memories of
recitals when I was a girl. I had once played “Flight of the Bumblebee” an octave too high. That was in Mrs. King’s living room on her Baldwin baby grand. I became more confident as a student at Knox, but the truth is I was not really a clutch player whose adrenaline flow enables him, or her, to perform miracles under pressure. I was always nervous when I played in front of an audience, and I was nervous now. Just thinking about it. But it was something I wanted to do.
Karl came back once a week to tweak the piano, which had to “settle.” Inspired by the sound of the piano, and by dread at the prospect of the recital, I started on a regime of serious practicing. Two hours every morning. An hour every afternoon. I shut down my computer and took the telephone off the hook. It was difficult at first, but after two weeks, practicing became a kind of meditation. Pieces I’d played first in high school and then in college came back to life. Pieces I loved but had never mastered—Bach’s Fugue in C Minor and Chopin’s Étude in C Minor—started to fall under my fingers, though the Chopin étude was probably too difficult. That’s what my music teacher at Knox, Murray Hendricks, had said when I told him I wanted to play it. But then he’d called a couple of days later and told me to go ahead. Why not? I wasn’t going to be a concert pianist, after all.
I typed up a program on my MacBook Pro, trying out fancy fonts and settling on one called Harrington.
I had six weeks to prepare. Three of these pieces—the Chopin Prelude in A and the Brahms waltzes in G-sharp and E minor—are technically simple, within the grasp of a beginning student, though they have to be performed with great care if the soul of the performer, as Karl put it, is to enter the body of the piano. The remaining preludes and waltzes are just the right difficulty for me—not overwhelming, but challenging enough to require total concentration—and after three weeks I could play through them like a person walking confidently on firm ground. The Bach fugue and the Chopin étude were probably too difficult for me. Especially the Chopin.
The only new piece was “C. C. Rider,” which Paul used to play in the style of Dr. John, and in fact I learned it from Paul’s Dr. John Songbook. The notes were challenging, though nothing I couldn’t handle, but the rhythm was impossible, the sort of blues rhythm that doesn’t lend itself to standard notation. Karl helped me count it out loud and after a while it began to fall into place and I started to hear Paul playing it in my head and singing to me: “If I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea, if I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea, I’d have all you women diving after me.”
The common thread, of course, was what I’ve been calling the casta diva experience. But the hard work of concentrated practicing brought me to a new understanding of this experience, and of beauty itself. My inclination had always been to listen through the notes, to listen for something beyond, for the music of the spheres. But I was learning to listen to the notes themselves. You’ve probably heard the Zen riff on mountains and waters. For the novice, mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Then after you gain some real insight, mountains are no longer just mountains, and waters are no longer just waters. And then, when you reach the abode of rest, mountains are just mountains again, and waters are just waters. Well, it was like that. When I was first learning to play, taking lessons from Mrs. King on Academy Street, the notes were just notes, always getting in my way, or jumping out of my way when I needed them. And then when I began to get some insight into the music, the notes were no longer just notes; they were signs, arrows pointing me toward another realm, something beyond this world. I won’t claim to have reached the “abode of rest,” but after six weeks of concentrated practicing, the notes had become notes again. Not signs pointing toward a more real reality, but reality itself. And the ache I felt was not Augustine’s longing for our true home but—and I’m expressing this badly—more like the ache you feel after a good day’s work in the garden and you’re looking forward to a glass of beer. I wasn’t homesick, I wasn’t longing for my true home. I was home. I was where I belonged.
Something like this, I realized now, had happened while I was working every night on Catullus Redivivus. After translating “Multas per gentes”—Catullus’s farewell to his brother—a hundred different ways, the magic of the poem seemed to fade into the light of common day, but then a new appreciation, a new kind of appreciation, grew up in its place. The poem itself, like the notes, is not a sign pointing at another reality. It is the reality. It is what it is. Just as the stars are what they are, and 3C 273 is what it is. And Rembrandt’s Side of Beef, and first love, too. Even first love.
I wasn’t planning to touch the piano on the day of the recital. Just a few warm-ups before the performance. I was nervous. I watched a Seinfeld. I looked at YouTube performances of the Chopin Étude in C Minor. There were a lot of clunky performances, but Horowitz, of course, was astonishing, and so was a skinny little ten-year-old African-American boy. Ten years old. How was it possible?
In the afternoon I went to Saint Clement’s. I’d been back since I’d called God a “son of a bitch” and he’d made fun of my Latin. Now I sat in my old spot in the back where I could keep an eye on the confessional line, where I could watch for the little girl who’d always brought up the end of the line, though she would be ten years older now, off in college. I suppose I’d come to say good-bye, and I was glad to hear God’s unmistakable voice, glad to hear him mangle my name. Father Viglietti’s, too.
“Bene, Frankeska, Pater Wig-li-etti vere iecit nobis curveball.” Well, Father Viglietti really threw us a curveball.
“Us?”
“Yes. I allow myself to be surprised from time to time.”
“So, you weren’t expecting that?”
“Not at all. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
“Really?”
“Not literally.”
“Now what?”
“Frankeska, I’m tired.”
“Too many things to regulate? Hammers, wippens, jacks . . .”
“I see you’ve learned something from Mr. Holm.” He laughed. “No, Frankeska. I don’t have any trouble keeping the universe in tune. It’s the people. Did you know that every single individual is more trouble than all the galaxies put together?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I might take a vacation.”
“Where would you go?”
“I’m thinking about Ethiopia. That’s where the Homeric gods used to go when they needed a vacation—Zeus, Hera, Poseidon—the old-timers.”
“What will happen to the rest of us?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You won’t even know that I’m gone.”
“Will you come back?”
“Eventually.”
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What’s going to happen to the universe? I mean after billions and billions of years? Is gravity finally going to pull everything back together, back to a point, and then there’ll be another Big Bang?”
“The ‘Big Crunch’ theory.”
“Or are things just going to keep expanding till everything gives way?”
“The ‘Heat-Death’ theory. You’ve been reading about this in the Sunday supplement of the Register-Mail, haven’t you.”
“Yes. The article said that the ‘Heat-Death’ theory was gaining ground. Everything will burn out. We’ll wind up with dead stars and quasars expanding on and on, forever and ever.” I gave a shudder.
“You’d rather have a big crunch, then.”
“Definitely.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “I don’t know whether it’s worth it, starting all over again.”
“It’s worth it,” I said. “Don’t just let everything burn out. Just tweak gravity a little. Make it a little stronger, keep everything from pulling apart. You said you could do it.”
“It’s not that simple, Frankeska, but I’ll think about it. Now you need to take the dog out before your recital and then take a little nap. But don
’t drink anything. No grappa. It might calm your nerves, but it won’t help your performance.”
“Ave atque vale,” I said.
At five o’clock I took Camilla out again, singing the elevator song when the elevator door opened. I didn’t care if I got caught again. When we came back I started warming up with some scales and arpeggios. I touched the keys lightly, as if they might be hot. The piano cut through the sound of the humidifier.
At five thirty I ate a few crackers and prepared the meal. I opened some red wine—I wanted people to start drinking before I began to play—set out two loaves of bread and several bowls of spiced olives, organized the meat on a serving platter, which I covered and put in the refrigerator. Took the white bean salad out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter.
At six o’clock I turned off the humidifier, adjusted the lights, and arranged the chairs. Three people could sit on the couch, two on Windsor chairs. There were six straight-back chairs at the harvest table. That was eleven. How many people were coming? I always had trouble counting: Stella and Ruthy, and Tommy; Lois and her husband, Jack; Karl, the piano tech. Anna Connolly, who’d moved into Lois’s apartment, and Ed Barnes, one of Paul’s old colleagues, retired now. That made eight. Maybe someone else would show up. Walk-ins.
I arranged glasses, plates, and cloth napkins on the table.
Karl came early. “This is what I used to say to Magnus,” he said,“ before a performance: ‘Remember, no matter what happens tonight, we’ll have something good to eat afterward and we’ll drink some wine.’” Karl held up the bottle he’d brought. “‘It’s not like you’re a pilot, when if you make a mistake everyone dies!’”
“Open the bottle now,” I said. “Make sure everyone has at least one glass of wine before I start playing, maybe two.”
I took a shower while he tweaked the piano.
I didn’t have a proper evening dress. I was tempted to wear one of the half dozen spaghetti-strap dresses that Paul had given me, but decided against it. I put on the same outfit I’d worn to Norma—a light cashmere sweater over a black skirt that hugged my butt, but not too tightly, and then flared out a little. I heard the dog bark. I put on a little makeup, and when I came out, Stella and Ruthy and Tommy were talking to Karl. Or listening to Karl, who was showing off the piano.