Extraordinary Renditions (21 page)

Harkályi’s opera presented few real challenges, but the score did require half of the violinists, including Melanie, to tune their instruments a quarter tone lower. The resulting dissonance could be startling both for an uninitiated audience and for those in the orchestra. Keeping up required a lot more concentration than did their usual repertoire. She suspected that this stylistic device derived subconsciously from his time at Terezín. During the formative stages of his development as a composer, he must have grown accustomed to the tones of rickety instruments and so he based much of his subsequent work on some uniquely personal timbral system emanating from his inner ear. She wasn’t positive that was what had happened, but the theory went a long way toward her understanding
of Harkályi’s artistic voice. Maybe that was one reason she didn’t hate this piece quite as much as she thought she would. And one section in particular, in the opera’s waning minutes, truly excited her. At the conclusion of every concert there existed that brief moment when the music had stopped yet the conductor maintained a beat or two of silence before dropping his shoulders or in some way motioning to the audience that they could applaud. Nothing in Harkályi’s oeuvre better lived up to the famous dictum about accounting for the “space between the notes,” or in this case,
after
the notes. Instead of resolving with the big dominant-to-tonic chords loved so well by the Beethovens and Brahmses of this world, the entire orchestra and the four voices performed
around
the themes woven in during the first few acts. Those melodies existed, but only as negative space in the music. They were what was absent. Harkályi required his musicians to play in long, glassy circles of harmony, with the occasional quarter-tone flourish appearing underneath the veneer like cracks in a frozen pond.

At the end of the final scene, the instruments, and eventually the singers, would drop out one by one over the span of twelve minutes, until only a timpani and a traditional string quartet remained, just a hair out of tune, to saw over a folk-influenced section that vacillated between a funeral march and a spirited danse macabre, then close with a gentle lullaby. The opera didn’t end as much as slowly, painfully die.

Melanie’s violin, hidden in the rear of the section, would be the second-to-last thing the audience heard before the drums petered out into oblivion and presumably left the crowd enraptured and uncertain. She had been made to understand that she was chosen for the part not due to her abilities, but because her expensive Austrian violin possessed the perfect tone the part required. But so what? That breathless instant of tranquility right before the applause came would justify the endless rehearsals, the harassment and belittlement at the hands of that
Napoleon-complexed conductor. Even Melanie had to give Harkályi some credit—the effect was numbing in its gracefulness. At least that was how it had sounded at rehearsal.

The taxi crossed Margit Bridge into Buda but couldn’t get anywhere near Batthyány Square. The speakers immediately behind Melanie’s head rattled with a warped cassette of frenetic Gypsy music, puking up tones no violin should ever be forced to make. The driver pulled to a stop at a makeshift police barricade and lit a cigarette. The stink competed with three pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror. Melanie felt vaguely queasy again. Two bored motorcycle cops in jackets of blue and white leather redirected traffic. The taxi driver rolled down his window for an explanation and a blast of cold air. More resigned than satisfied, the driver punched the meter and turned around with a ticket for 2,500 forints. Melanie handed him a five-thousand, but he shook his head. “No change,” he said. He opened his leather accordion wallet to demonstrate the vast empty vistas contained therein—a common enough ploy among Budapest cabbies. At one time she would’ve let him take the fiver. Instead, she fished out a half dozen hundred-forint coins and handed them over. “Köszönöm szépen,” she said sweetly, and stepped out into the cold. She half-expected him to get out and chase her down, but the bleating music faded behind her.

Her breath looked like cigar smoke, which was also approximately how her clothes smelled. She was five blocks from the concert site and already running late. Wooden, blue-painted barriers blocked the streets, strangely free of the parked cars that typically clogged the sidewalks. A precaution, she surmised, intended to protect the political dignitaries who would be attending the opera. The police had shut down the entire neighborhood, and pairs of patrolmen stood around smoking and cursing on every corner.
They never asked for her papírok. Unlike the majority of the expats she knew, Melanie’s documents were both legit and legal.

Batthyány Square was a small city block-sized park across the Danube from the parliament building. Bums and drunks typically overran the benches and the subterranean red line metro station, secured for the afternoon, and would do so again once the camera crews and suits dispersed back up to the hills. Canapé tents and banks of lights filled the square, around which a fleet of shiny black Mercedes formed a double-parked ring. Many boasted diplomatic plates and ambassadorial flags.

On the southern end of the square stood a Baroque-era church, freshly painted for the occasion. Some accounts said that Beethoven personally conducted the premiere of his König Stephen overture in there, which, according to one historian, explained how the building survived two World Wars and the Soviet occupation. Melanie was in awe, nervous as all hell, again, at the prospect of personally meeting the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven. And Mahler had once conducted for a season in the opera house, and that enlivened for her, at least slightly, even the most tedious reruns of yet another Erkel opera. She would sit in the pit and watch their little bastard of a conductor swirl his baton around and try to imagine old Gustav in the same position. Did his musicians, like they did nowadays, roll their eyes and make monkey ears behind his back? She imagined so. But Beethoven! The anticipation of performing in a church in which Beethoven himself brought to life those otherworldly notes and rests felt akin to walking in the footsteps of some true messiah. The promise of literal inspiration compelled her to get inside, to get in tune—and then correctly out of tune again. Because the recording engineers and the Hungarian secret service had occupied the church for the past week, the orchestra was never given the opportunity to rehearse there. She didn’t know what to expect from the acoustics, from the aura.

A red carpet ran from the small fountain at the center of the square, across a street that was usually blocked by a line of pollution-spewing BKV buses, and down three steps into the church. The blinding-white exterior jumped out in extreme contrast to the dingy Angelika kávéház next door and, to the right of the square, the decaying redbrick railway station now owned by an Austrian supermarket conglomerate. A few soldiers milled around, guns drawn, sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee, or something stronger. Portable outdoor heaters contributed to the overall merriment of the event.

According to the gossip filtering through the pit during rehearsals, the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest had offered the orchestra the use of this church only after a three-part exposé in
HVG
elaborated the extent to which the Hungarian Catholic Church had collaborated with the Nazis. His eminence was expected to attend the premiere and, from the look of the security arrangements, so were the prime minister and perhaps even the president. Given the Hebraic flavor of Harkályi’s oeuvre, no one of authority had seriously considered the national cathedral up on Castle Hill or even Saint Stephen’s Basilica for the event.

Melanie’s security clearance was going to depend upon her ability to find the orchestra’s stage manager. That the party outside continued unabated provided a reason to stop worrying about being late. The sight of the freely flowing alcohol brought flashbacks to the night before, to the taste of the vodka no doubt continuing its path through her bloodstream. She was sweating under her collar when she heard someone call her name: “Melanie, hey!”

Woozy and distracted as she was, it actually came as an incredible relief to see Nanette, who gave her a sloppy public kiss. “You’re here?”

“The prime minister’s here, or coming here, so I got sent over. You didn’t think I’d really miss your television debut? I wanted to surprise you. Here, I got it all scoped out.” She was visibly drunk. She took
Melanie by the hand and led her through the celebrating throngs. “Sign in and you get an ID card. The security’s tight.”

“I didn’t get my haircut.”

“I fucking knew you wouldn’t, but I’m glad.”

“You’re not going to give me grief about it?”

Nanette squeezed her hand. “I might, but not today. You can’t take your phone backstage. I can drop it in my bag. If those metal detectors fuck up my film, I’m gonna kill someone. I guess I shouldn’t say that so loud around here.”

Poised between the intense Hungarian winter and the artificial suns alighting the square, between her childhood and her adult life, between her unrequited wanderlust and her blossoming desire to get back to Boston, Melanie remembered why she once loved Nanette so much, however briefly.

Nan brought her around the church and down Fő Street, which was also devoid of motor traffic and emptied of parked cars. A tree of intensely bright lights blocked the road and shone upon the modest, recently Windexed stained glass. Beyond the church they found a kind of truck trailer with a ticket window built into the side. A well-dressed will-call line snaked down the block, but Melanie stepped up to the window marked “Zenészek” and showed them her papers. A man in an Eskimo hood and mittens checked his clipboarded list and reluctantly handed her a photo ID badge to wear around her neck with instructions to remove it only once she got seated onstage. It was a terrible, living-dead picture, one of four taken in a Nyugati Station photo booth. He also gave her a ribbon of red, white, and green and ordered her to pin it over her heart.

Fucking foreigner, his eyes said to her.

“I should go,” she said. Nanette gave her another drunken hug and Melanie joined the security line forming in the alley behind the church,
where most of the brass section and even the woodwinds, whose instruments were in danger of cracking from the cold air, were required to prostrate their cases on the frigid cobblestones. They took apart and reassembled trumpets and flutes, played stray notes here and there for the benefit of the humorless secret service agents and mustachioed policemen. They ran her violin through a portable X-ray machine, then, cleared, she stepped through what passed for a stage door leading to a foyer behind the altar. Another sentry eyed her badge and without warning patted her forehead, cheeks, and nose with makeup powder intended, she supposed, to make her less shiny for the cameras. A card table along one wall had cups of mineral water and cold black coffee. Teenaged altar boys carried the musicians’ coats and pocketbooks and instrument cases somewhere into the pit of the rectory and issued claim tickets that, instead of numbers, featured biblical verses. Melanie got one that said, “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”

They used a cramped hallway as a kind of green room, from which she poked her head out into the church to get a feel for the space—far larger than it appeared from the outside—and to see about channeling the blessèd spirit of Beethoven. She strolled the perimeter of the room, climbed the conductor’s riser. She felt disoriented, overwhelmed, anxious to get started.

There was no stage, no curtain. The altar had been carted off and their music stands and the rigid folding chairs sat splayed across the sanctuary, along with a dozen superfluous chairs that would go unused. The score to Harkályi’s Symphony No. 4 included instructions for the orchestra to place extra, empty chairs amid the musicians on stage in order to “honor those souls freed from the earthly bonds of Auschwitz,” and now organizers did the same thing at every concert of his music, whatever the composition. The stage crew today had placed empty chairs on the stage
even though
The Golden Lotus
had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. Quite a gimmick, but audiences loved it. Even with that extra spacing, the musicians would be playing right on top of each other. She pitied the bassoons, soon to be seated in front of the long-armed trombonists, until realizing that she might not have access to her bowing arm’s full range of motion. When the production moved to the opera house, it was conceivable that the musicians would have to contend with empty chairs in the pit, even though no one else could see them, as if it wasn’t claustrophobic enough down there.

The lights set up in the street outside amplified the colors of the stained glass, which shone directly onto the thirty or so rows of pews in which dozens of musicians sat adjusting reeds, head joints, and pegs while the party continued out on Batthyány Square. The clarinetists made quacking noises that rose up to a balcony, where the photographers and cameramen battled for position.

A few of her fellow orchestra members had recording contracts with Hungaroton and many others released their own homemade CDs of standard-repertoire chamber music. Some were very good players technically, one or two better than Melanie, but for the most part they lacked
feel
. The orchestra consisted of the least musical musicians with which she ever had the displeasure of performing. A band of castoffs, has-beens, and never-willbe’s. The other, big orchestra in Budapest recorded for a London-based label and biannually toured the United States or Asia. When someone like a Schiff or a Solti returned to Hungary, he worked with that ensemble over at the Liszt Academy. For guest musicians, the Opera Orchestra got second-rate pop stars and novelty acts. They performed on heavy metal ballads by Edda and other aging Hungarian rockers. Perhaps it was their status as second fiddle that caused the general malaise she sensed even while they prepared for what was arguably the biggest concert in the orchestra’s history. Or maybe growing up in a culture with such a rich musical legacy led to the
blasé, unimpressed attitude about Beethoven’s presence in the very same building. Either way, no one else appeared to revel in the musical spirit clinging to every pillar and pew. “Ludwig Beethoven stood right here!” she wanted to shout. “Don’t you people get it?”