Not long after the nosebleed, the second semester started up and we started working on a new piece. This one was much more to my liking, and it cut down seriously on the catty remarks among my neighbors in the Bass section.
"My friends, we are going to begin today to study the "German Requiem" of Brahms. It is a great favorite of mine, and it will prove very effective for our Spring Concert. Yes, Mindy, you have a question?"
"Wouldn't a Mass for the dead be better in a Winter concert?"
"Perhaps so, at least the ideas of Death and Winter are linked. But I think that as you learn this work, you will find that its message is of renewal. So we do it for Spring. OK!"
He claps his hands when he wants to begin, or desires more focused attention.
We cracked our scores, fresh from the bookstore, and sailed out onto a sea I've always been a sucker for. Here the slippage on the temporal plane becomes difficult to reckon with. The topic of the piece ("Deutsches Requiem") is the cessation of life and the grieving of those who mourn. As Zoltan noted the overall message is renewal, but there are a pair of moments where the renewal comes like a thunderbolt. "In the blink of an eye, we shall be changed." No shit! The heart stops and the brain rots. It goes out in technicolor, and the last moments are all eternity. "Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?" The moment that is eternity is succor for the departed, and the mystery of the soul is revealed for those that have the "peace of mind" to appreciate that final revelation. For the aggrieved, the consolation is in the thought that the departed has reached a higher plane, a plane of peace. "How beautiful is thy dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts." I am, however a musician and not a theologian. My meditations on the meaning of the Requiem of Brahms have traveled in time, but they are not of the piece of time of which I write. The musician, reading Brahms, notes the repetitions of words and phrases. "Death, where? Grave, where? Where? Where IS thy victory?" This is rhythm, and it has meaning for the musician. "How beautiful, how beautiful, Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord of Hosts. And, of course, it's the German requiem. In German, victory has but one syllable. You can shout it out at a rally and it works. "Sieg!" (Does 'sieg heil' ring a bell? Burn a race? Destroy a nation?)
But of course, we didn't start with the text, either in German or English. Though we performed in German, and I will say more about that in a moment, we learned the music singing Sol Fa. We began at the beginning, and my part, the Bass part, went like this at my first entry: "Fa, fa, fa." Instead of the clusters of the previous semester, I was now surrounded by a glorious motet. This was more like the church music that my family sang and loved. This was more like the music that brought me to music school in the first place. This was the solace of the triad, moving surely from position to position, with passing notes making the lines connect and with the majesty of the Western musical language shining forth all around. We read each movement in turn, rehearsal by rehearsal. In the solfeggio phase, we went quickly, Zoltan establishing the shape of the work in our minds. When we got to the fugue that concludes movement three, the theme of which, in translation suggests 'the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall be no torment to touch them,' my young mind was, as we used to say, blown. God! In the hand of God! I had never been in such an ensemble before, holding forth my part against such strength and magnificence all around me. But the best was yet to come. The fugue that concludes movement six, 'Lord, you are worthy to receive glory and honor and power: for you have made all, and for your pleasure they exist forever in all of time's directions,' (and I translate to suit myself), I was carried away by the craft of the music, especially as we sang it in rehearsal without the orchestra, accompanied by that skinny kid who was brow beaten by Eminescu at every turn.
Zoltan brought in a German tutor to correct our diction. She was a slender creature with the hunched posture of someone always at a desk hitting the books. Her name was Harwat, and she was a nice immigrant German woman. Her slight accent lent her mousy physique a certain sexiness. I found her German pedantic, and she didn't really have any idea how to get the pronunciation to sound. Still, this level of detail in the preparation was a welcome relief from the solfeggio. It meant that we were done with that. We now began to sing the piece as it was meant to be: a Requiem Mass in the German language. I never really understood the high and low of German. I always winced when someone would utter the cliche, that it is 'guttural.' The German of Brahms' 'Requiem' was adapted (by Brahms) from the Holy Scriptures, much as Handel adapted them for "Messiah." He makes a point by his cutting and pasting. He has a sure ear for the melodious turn of phrase ('Wie Lieblich'), or the snap of the neck, crack your back theological rant ('Tod, Wo ist?' ), and certainly the placid, out on the river, down to the shore ending ('Selig sind'). How, exactly, apart from the craft of the music itself, did this piece worm its way into my consciousness and make me fall apart emotionally every time I got within hearing (or later, reading) distance of it?
Perhaps it had to do with this circumstance: I was corresponding with a bloke that had turned up in the last year I worked in the High School summers at a boy's camp. He was an Englishman named Thomas (last name forgotten). He was, to lapse into the cliche, a jovial fellow. He had a no connection with music, and I'm not sure what his interest in me was. He'd been keen to see more of the States. He'd turned up during that week I spent tooling around with Goode and the Davis crowd. He'd rented a car and just driven up. He was a good-looking man, so he rather blended right in. Following this, he went off to Logan and got a flight back across the pond. His letters were at first very funny. He spoke disparagingly of the gay boys, wondering if, no offense, I was a homo myself. I distanced myself in this correspondence from the complexities of my relationship with Goode, although Thomas must have detected its nature. I was happy to have a straight dude without artistic pretense as a correspondent. Eventually, though, the correspondence darkened. Tom's Dad was diagnosed with cancer and it rapidly and fatally ate him up. I read each installment with an unusual empathy. The rehearsals of the Requiem dovetailed with this external narrative. I began to sing the piece for Tom's father, a man I'd never met.
The rehearsals with the orchestra, which, according to the schedule scrawled in my score, took place April 23rd and 25th, 1974. They were especially long, each lasting three hours, from 3:00 PM to 6. The shock came when we got to that first fugue. For reasons that only Brahms can know, he composed the fugue with all of its modulations, twists and turns over a pedal point in the orchestra. I took points off. Why, Johannes? Why? But "Herr, bist du wurdig" was unsullied and tremendous with the full band. By the time the performance came, I was afloat and committed. I gave it all I had. I ended up all sung out. I ended up in tears on the risers, maybe fighting off a fever, but certainly falling in love with Brahms. The women came and went, but I never stopped hanging out with Johannes.
I was also hanging out down at the Boston Public Library, hanging out with the New England Transcendentalists. I started with "Walden" because, as it turned out, Mara was a big fan. Somehow or other, I had gotten obsessed with a minor character, William Ellery Channing Junior. I read his poetry assiduously and sought out his grave down the hill from his more famous neighbors. I may have seen myself as such a minor character by the close of my Freshman year; certainly I'd seen enough to know that I had no chance of being on the bill in Symphony Hall. I had yet to even learn to write a string quartet! The return of the warm weather, the gradual greening of the Fens, the buds and blossoms reminded me of my failures as a hetero and a homo. I still had a car. I took Mara up to Walden. She'd never said a peep about "Adonis," but I'd been haunting the dance concerts and had seen her in enough that I felt I had some few conversational gambits, including my ace in the hole, Ellery Channing.
"Mara, it's still cold!"
She's peeling off her jeans and sweater to reveal, to my surprise and horror, a one piece bathing suit.
"Oh, this is a rite of Spring."
Out of her pack comes a bathing cap.
"I'll need you to hold the pack. Meet me on that side," she says, pointing at yonder shore, over by the tracks. In she goes, with soundless ease. I watch her head as it works steadily, athletically, across the frigid pond. It's not a small pond. It's "the eye" of Walden. She's at the widest point, taking the whole thing on. I walk, keeping an eye out. I'm the one that's sinking. I have no way of keeping up with her. Yes, I can walk the perimeter, and I'll meet up with her soon after she's ashore. I mean, I can't swim this distance. I don't have the joi de vivre. My male ego is taking a savage beating, and even aligning myself with Ellery Channing and his sinking bark, is clearly an admission of inferiority. I'll, as Thoreau writes, "keep to my own track then." A train thunders along the railway, not so many yards from the pond. It's been doing that since Thoreau was out here, going in to town for dinner at the Emersons'. At the same time I'm losing face, I'm longing to, once again, be in her arms. She has, in her exquisite absence, gotten under my skin. I've been missing from the arms of Linda Litman also, but her distance has not made me ache as has the distance from the mystic, dark dancer. I reach the other shore ("If my bark sinks, it's to another shore.") just in time to watch Mara scramble up the bank, shivering, and I hold out the pack. My timing, at least, is good.
"Oooo! That's cold!"
"Yes, as I predicted."
She skips the towel off (no towel), and she dresses. Then we walk for the site of the cairn, not saying much. It's not awkward between us, not yet. I'm steering clear of what's in my mind. I want to take a hand, steal a kiss, find a bed (backseat of shit box?), relearn the woman's contours, relive the scent, or, failing any of that, talk about how we might be together as a couple, how we might make art together, how we might end up, not alone, together. None of that will emerge from my mouth.
"Hey. Cal. Cat got your tongue?"
"The 'I' of Walden has my tongue. I'm just thinking about how nice it feels out here, how quiet. Except for the trains."
"Yeah. In the water, that train was intense. I could feel it all the way to my center."
"I hear a lot about the center from Rodney and Xenia."
"We hear a lot about the center from Ray and everybody else. But when the train is pounding your full bladder, you know where your center lies."
"I loved that Harrison piece, by the way."
"Yeah, they were in it, but I wasn't."
"Still, you saw it."
"Yeah. Ives, Plath. What a combo."
"'This is how I want to die.'"
"'Even the moon bulges in its orange irons...'"
"What's with the arms?"
"Oh. God. A truly egregious cliche."
"As I say, I gotta pee. Don't look."
"Okay. Wouldn't dream of it."
"Yes. You would."
"OK, but I won't."
"Give a girl a little privacy."
I'm ahead on the path. We're all alone out here. It's a school day. But after some dawdling and stopping to look at green shoots under a loose rock, she's all zipped up and caught up. She now takes my hand and rubs up close like a cat.
"Mmmm."
"I want to thank you for coming to the shows."
"I love watching you dance, certainly. But also, I just am learning to love the art form."
"Yes. It's quite the art form."
"Did you ever get to hear my ostinato piece?"
"Of course. We talked about it before, I thought."
"We did?"
"Maybe not. I don't know. It's been one hell of a term."
"What's up for Summer?"
"Back home. Do some summer theater. You?"
"Back home. My teacher, John Goode, he's doing a recital. I'll play the ostinato piece, maybe add a few more movements."
"We'll write. Write me long, beautiful letters. Tell me all about it."
She drops her grip and squints at me in the late afternoon sun.
"We're going to be famous, aren't we?"
"We're already famous."
"Right. Didn't I see you on Carson last night?"
"You did! Wasn't I great?"
"You were a phenomenon."
Much giggling at this fantasy. (By the time we got to television, Carson was retired.)
"Cal, I need to be getting back."
"I'll take you back, then."
So easy, so laid back. The tantric zen of youthful timidity.
