The Concert Pianist (21 page)

‘We're having a lively debate,' said Oswald, admiring Barry's departure, ‘about the questionable authority and excessive power of music critics.'

Julius chuckled half-heartedly. ‘When they like me, they're right. When they hate me, they're wrong!'

‘That's more like it.'

‘You can't live with us and you can't live without us,' smiled Brian.

Philip came alive violently. They were skating over everything, burying him in banter. ‘You're not taking me seriously.'

Julius looked up.

‘You're not taking me seriously.'

‘I . . .'

‘No you're not. I've been giving concerts for thirty-five years now. I've won a slew of awards. Hundreds of people write to me. Brian, I have credit in the bank, and yet nobody will tell me what is amiss now. I mean, what are we aiming at? Some gold standard held over our heads by dead pianists? Some academic formula of perfection? Some modernist paradigm of interpretative excellence? Show me the path. Don't just scold me.'

‘
Philip . . .'

‘Everybody's talking about Slava. He's had terrible press recently. Five years ago he was God. Has anybody any idea what he's going through?'

‘Think of it as a stock-market correction. His share value had become inflated.'

Philip flinched. ‘What's happened to my share value? Tell me the truth.' He was suddenly pleading. ‘Patrick Peabody said that my performances lacked heart. He said there was a lack of commitment. Have I gone and mislaid something these last few years? It seems I have.'

Brian glanced at Oswald, who was impassively smoking.

Philip looked intently at the side of Brian's head. The pause was unbearable.

‘You'd know it if you had.' Brian turned to face him.

‘Does Slava know it?'

‘You can only answer for yourself.'

Philip wiped his forehead. ‘Perhaps I have. I feel differently these days.'

Brian stared at him. Julius averted his eyes.

‘Even so, I mean . . . I thought that CD . . . I believed in . . .'

Oswald gazed into the reflections of his champagne glass. Brian looked pensively at the rug. Julius maintained a serious, engaged expression, distilling his own reaction to what had been said.

Their silence was mortifying.

Brian brought his fist to his mouth. He coughed lightly. ‘I suppose there are . . . um . . . two perspectives here . . .'

Oswald regarded him coolly.

Philip closed his eyes.

Brian looked around tentatively, as if checking the assent of his audience. He seemed licensed to say something, to engage with Philip seriously. ‘There is the modernist view that if you do what the music says and play with stylistic accuracy the music will speak for itself - that meaning and feeling are programmed into the composition; and there's the contrary view that what makes a performance work is an insight into something not manifest in the score' - he glanced at Philip with scholarly penetration - ‘into the character of a work, its rhetoric or declamation, whatever, and that to perceive that something a performer's emotional and intellectual experience
must
be co-extensive with the composer's. He exhaled with demonstrative force. ‘If a . . .'

‘You're saying I'm an emotional cripple?'

Brian raised his hands. ‘I wouldn't presume to diagnose!'

‘I want diagnosis!'

Brian stared urgently at Philip. ‘I am simply tendering a basis for thinking about the problems you've raised.' He swallowed, aware of the eggshells at his feet stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. ‘Sometimes with Slava's playing . . . one feels that too much is preplanned, that the head has come to distrust the heart. And then one likens music to a horse that's not being ridden properly. Music can be harnessed, but not controlled. A good jockey releases some innate flow and energy in his charge. A bad jockey . . .'

Philip stared into the fireplace.

Oswald frowned into his champagne glass.

‘A bad jockey?' said Philip softly.

Brian shook his head, dismissing the implied slight. ‘Some pianists, for example, are obsessed with surface and use their extraordinary control of the instrument to draw you into a soundworld of minutely inflected expression - Horowitz, for example - these sort of players assuming that the sum of such moments delivers the totality of a piece's meaning. Relish the detail and the whole will look after itself, because structure is written in. There are others, less distracted by sensuousness, who perceive a composition's unity from above, and this type of player seeks coherence in the symbolic structure of the piece, by which music is given a kind of narrative truth. In the first group interpretation is based on nervous sensitivity, which might fade. In the second, on a kind of cognitive insight, which might fail. In my view there is a transitional process that all great artists make between a subjective and objective view of emotion.'

‘Yes, but where does greatness come from?'

Brian was nonplussed.

‘A coherence that you can formulate is completely ersatz and superficial.'

‘Reviewing is a descriptive . . .'

‘You have no idea what it is to fall from grace. No idea what it means to attain grace.'

‘
I didn't . . .'

‘You presume to discern, to calibrate, to compare, but this is all beside the point, because no one knows where this state of grace comes from. You can't source it.'

Brian was alarmed and baffled in equal parts. ‘I'm trying to share . . .'

‘And no one can explain the provenance of the sublime in music.'

‘I don't disagree.'

‘The only thing that matters, the only significant thing is how the fuck does one do it? The answer is beyond everyone. Even the performer.'

Brian glanced guardedly at Oswald and Julius to see if anyone else wanted to come in on the argument.

Julius remained thoughtful behind steepled fingers. He knew better than to venture opinions from a mood of relative complacence. Even so, he looked stimulated to speak and was cagily computing how to enter the fray without annoying Philip.

‘We're led to a religious terminology,' said Brian.

‘Yes, and modern criticism has no concept of the soul.'

‘Well, I . . .'

‘We are guardians of the immortal soul in music. Yes! This is what we have to be. And who can tell us how to be it? Who can say through what purgatories we must pass to reach this state of grace? That's why I need understanding, Brian, if I've lost the way.'

Brian sympathetically nodded.

‘Because you can't fault me on detail. Dynamics, line, colour, perspective. I need to do more. Suffer harder for my art. Some sort of crisis or breakdown, which I'm already having . . .'

‘Or sabbatical.'

‘Or a sabbatical white-water rafting and eating pulses and soya derivatives and reading the classics . . .'

‘Philip . . .'

‘To recover the essence of great music, which Konstantine has at his fingertips every morning he rolls out of bed!'

‘Hang on!'

‘Don't you see? I need support! I'm an endangered species!'

‘I . . .'

‘You guys already have Solomon, Gieseking, Kempff, Cortot. They had the historic sensibility, the unbroken tradition, the
sympathy
of an era. To reach their levels I have to live outside history, turning my back on contemporary culture. I have to screen out all the titillating data, the mass-media barrage of fornicating celebrities and Royal Family tat. The middle-class House and Garden fantasia. Become a bloody monk. Then I have to reclaim the emotional hypersensitivity of a consumptive Chopin or a schizoid Robert Schumann to do justice to music originating from a pitch of human experience that modern culture does not generate and can only appreciate passively. I have to go through agonies of preparation for a super-critical audience that barely exists any more. What I'm seeking with such difficulty, what I'm trying to keep alive, hardly matters to most people.'

‘I don't know about that.'

‘We're a historical leftover.'

‘What classical music lacks in breadth of appeal' - Brian was roused - ‘it gains in depth of impact.'

‘Yeah, but when I lose the plot, it doesn't give me strength to think my life's work means nothing to most people.'

‘In the history of the world high culture was only ever a minority affair,' said Oswald.

‘The minority isn't helping me. Especially this minority.'

There was a pause.

Philip gazed in strained amazement at the floor. It came to him glancingly - the sum of their reactions - so obvious: that he was mediocre. That was what they thought of him and had done for years. He was long past his best.

‘I support Philip,' said Julius, bunching forward on the sofa. ‘For a modern pianist it's so hard to connect what you do to the wider world. One's expertise or artistry, if you will, is of such an esoteric nature, geared to the past always, meaningful within a tradition that takes a lot of knowledge and appreciation to penetrate. Truly, we are playing against the age, not for it; and when you're performing in some outback hall rented by a music society, some place with a killer piano and Arctic draughts, and no hot water in the changing room, paint peeling on the walls, a spam sandwich and leaded tea for your rehearsal break, plus when you get on stage, it's spot-the-audience time, just a few old people sprinkled around, who'll snore off in your concert and die the next day before they can tell friends and build your reputa
tion,
plus some attention-deficit kid front row flapping his programme through your most difficult passage, you do think: Should I get a desk job? Afterwards it gets worse. Backstage they start to roll in, these old folk, and you shake and smile and hope they don't croak right there, and in comes some controlling housewife with a cross-eyed son, just taken Grade One and amazed by your fingers - ‘They were like lost in a blur of speed, weren't they, Johnny?' or ‘I don't know how you keep all those notes in your head!' - and you do kind of wonder was this manicured interpretation that cost a thousand hours of practice really worth it? Even with professionals in the audience you can play like an angel and get the worst reviews. Or play like a bum and get buried in fucking Interflora. Bottom line here, Philip, is we can never know the effect we have on individual listeners, even when they tell us they liked it, because you don't know what that means, and you just have to believe it's good for people to hear a Beethoven sonata played live, or an étude by Stuttgart-Martier-Berenson.'

‘Who?' said Brian.

‘You haven't heard of Stuttgart-Martier-Berenson?'

‘Julius, you're prodigious!'

‘He wrote a suite called the Political Etudes.'

‘That should resonate with a wider public,' said Oswald drily.

‘It resonates all right. It's kind of Takemitsu meets Kapustin meets Pink Floyd. Smorgasbord modernism. Real fun.'

Philip looked askance. Even among friends and colleagues he was alone. He felt an ache around the eye, tension in his neck. He was so deeply berthed in his chair that he had lost all power to oppose. He was just a swivelling head, disagreeably regarding other people as they tried to talk around him. How mediocre he felt. How undignified! He was allowed to communicate musically, but as soon as he tried to express ideas no one was interested.

‘What you can't face,' said Oswald, looking over Philip's head in haughty summary, and in a tone of voice that was mock-provocative, ‘is that you might be an ordinary mortal, not some pianistic god. You can't stomach bad reviews, and don't like to be in thrall to a musical public who may exercise their own judgements. You resent the fact that applause validates your efforts and that others, not you, are the arbiters of your reputation. That's why you
cancelled,
in my opinion. To get one up on the audience. To show them who's boss: the mighty artist. To put them in their place before they did the same to you. But lo, if the audience aren't cheering and the critics aren't on their bellies in prostration, who is there to applaud your noble dedication? The larger world is not bothered by this anguished little tragedy. Only you, by an act of will, can validate yourself. Alas, somewhere along the way, you've lost the ability to do that. But that, my dear fellow, is the only reason why any musician has an audience. Because he is prepared to take infinite pains, to soldier on, to commit more than ordinary people, to suffer whatever Christ-like ravages and tribulations are necessary to understand the great works, and to keep on keeping on. That slavish devotion, plus the humble knowledge that he serves only the music, that alone justifies the elevated status of the artist; and if the artist cannot survive his own doubts he must get off the stage and join us in the stalls. The whys and wherefores of his quest are no concern of ours, as we are not competent to judge beyond the results. It's all down to you. And if you've lost the plot there isn't much we can do except wish you well and ask for our money back.'

Philip looked at his hands and scowled. He felt an inner sliding or collapse, as if Oswald had delivered the
coup de grâce.
Unhappiness was now in a fixed position, attached to its cause, something one could look at and away from, and still find there in half an hour. He had flaunted his angst at intelligent men who all did their best, but whose moderate reactions and prevarications could make things neither better nor worse for him. He realised only that time was running out. Whichever path he might choose, he still had to survive the time it took to adjust, correct, recover, and time might be short. He had lost all sense of an imperative course. Without the sense of a future, the threads of a life seemed tattered and incomplete. This, perhaps, was the hidden curse of childlessness. Everything else fell away when one stopped doing it, whereas having a child carried one into the future, regardless of success or failure. The best part of his life, he realised, belonged to the past. He understood now. He saw it more clearly.