The Apartment A Novel(38)

When the recital was finished, I hung around in the hall for a little while. There was a large crowd around the exits, talking, not moving, and I didn’t feel like walking through the congestion. And anyway, it was nice to sit and play some of the music back in my thoughts. When I had been sitting there for five minutes or more, Schmetterling approached and asked me what I thought of the evening. He was a tall, well-built man, with silver hair, obviously gay, and sat down when I said I had really liked the Chaconne. You’ve never heard it before? he asked. Never, I said. Do you know classical music? he asked. A bit, I said, like everybody. And then I realized where I was, and who I was talking to, and said, No, I wouldn’t say I knew much. We chatted for a few minutes about what had brought me to the city, and the things I had seen since arriving. And I spoke a little bit about my past. He had a weird habit of saying the word fascinating in response to almost everything I said, as though I were explaining the solution to a problem that had stumped him for decades. Our conversation stopped for a few moments, and Schmetterling said: Speaking on the Chaconne, the composer Johannes Brahms, the most influential, greatest, and most profoundly visionary composer of the Romantic period, wrote to Clara Schumann – and here Schmetterling lifted his head, exactly the way Saskia does when contemplating – On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. Schmetterling then lowered his head and looked at me. I said that it was very good. He dismissed my comment with a wave. What you have seen this evening is a teenage girl with a little talent play it, he said. The Chaconne, said Schmetterling, which lasts about fifteen minutes, depending on the interpretation, was the supreme artistic achievement of the Baroque era, across all forms, and is without argument the greatest piece of music ever written for the solo violin. He looked around him. The room was almost empty. He seemed to want to express a sadness about the way people came and went. Someone waved at him and he lifted a hand in response and smiled politely. Returning to the Chaconne, he said, It’s not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements across all human endeavour. When a real violinist plays it, the true breathtaking complexity of the piece becomes apparent. Bach was able to achieve a uniquely complex counterpoint – a conversation between multiple instruments – with a single instrument. He could do with many voices of a single instrument what another genius – I am speaking here of geniuses, only geniuses – could never hope to achieve with many instruments. Schmetterling leaned back in his chair, and checked behind him again. There were people standing and chatting at the back, and every few minutes someone would come to shake Schmetterling’s hand and tell him he was a very good teacher. The Chaconne, he said, is technically one of the most difficult pieces of music for a violinist to play, but technically more than a few have mastered it. It is a requirement now for young musicians – in order to win a major competition, it must be in one’s repertoire. In many ways it has become an important technical challenge for teenage violinists, and my students are always boasting about how this will be the year they learn to play it. It required, at the time of composition, every technique known to violin music, and not many techniques have been introduced since. What you have witnessed tonight, as I said, is a young violinist on the verge of competence. Competence, of course, with regard to the Chaconne, is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet a spiritual sympathy with the piece – which is not to say spiritual mastery, because no such thing is possible – is far more rare, and virtually non-existent in violinists under, say, the age of thirty … perhaps forty. Today, there are perhaps three people in the world who can play it well. Schmetterling leaned forward, stood, walked to the music stand and took the music that Moroto had left, perhaps in a nervous rush to get out of the spotlight, or perhaps it was not hers to keep. He sat back down and showed me the cover. This contains, he said, all of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin. He opened it to the Chaconne, which was only seven pages long, and pointed to a line approximately halfway through the piece. Here, he said, in variation number forty, we see one of the most complex moments in the piece. Up to seven separate voices are in conversation here. He waited for me to respond, and when I did not he simply let a bit of silence pass, so that, perhaps, I could imagine the music playing in his thoughts. Then he said, It is really impossible to explain in words exactly how difficult it must have been to conceive this, not only as a line of music in itself but as part of a fifteen-minute musical conversation that is in many ways nothing more than a perfectly finite rearrangement of the constituent parts of this line. And these parts are nothing more – nothing more! – than variations of a single four-note theme that flow seamlessly into each other and are all four measures long. Do you follow? he asked. A little, I said. He nodded. One very interesting thing is the fact that Bach’s theme – or we should say the essence of his theme – is an old four-measure bass line that was around long before he wrote his piece, and is still prevalent today, mostly in pop music. It was from this old and catchy foundation that he built his theme, and from that theme he built the Chaconne. You see, said Schmetterling, Bach was not an innovator. Nothing he wrote, at the most basic level, introduced a new form. In this way he is usually seen as inferior to Mozart, who in many ways was the supreme innovator, the supreme revolutionary. Mozart, at his worst, lacks feeling, but he is never sentimental. Bach, at his worst, is sentimental, grossly sentimental, but at his best he achieves an emotional expression that Mozart, the innovator, never dared allow himself to contemplate. Bach looked out across the landscape of music that had come before him and gathered it all up, every sound and every theme that ever existed, and to him they were bricks and wood and stone and glass, and he refined them into a musical cathedral that was unimaginable to anyone living in his age and unrepeatable to anyone after. The Chaconne, said Schmetterling, at least to me, combines in a single spirit the most extreme ends of a man’s sacred and secular capacities. It is both a celebration of man and a proximity with God, or the story of how that might be possible, compressed into a single violin with many voices. It is a declaration of war on baseness and brutality and scepticism. But it was also written, quite certainly, in memory of his wife – he had been travelling, and returned home to find she had died. So it is a personal statement, I think, rather than a political one. Had it merely been political, said Schmetterling … no, it could not have been achieved. Without her death, I believe, the Partita might well have finished on the fourth movement, on the light and positive Giga. Instead, he plunges us into a profundity and intensity theretofore unknown in music. I also believe that the Chaconne – not alone but by itself, if you understand the distinction – resulted in the ascension of the violin as the most venerated of all Western instruments and, yes, the central cultural object in the West.