Two-Part Inventions (19 page)

Suzanne would be in the care of the formidable Mme. Kabalevsky, who had gazed at her soberly, with an assessing eye, during her audition. Everyone knew her story. She was an older cousin of the well-known Dmitri Kabalevsky, a major figure in the Soviet world as both a composer and a teacher, who eventually joined the Communist Party and held official posts. Marina Kabalevsky, meanwhile, left at the time of the revolution with her family. Before that, though, she won the coveted gold medal at her graduation from the Moscow Conservatory and married a fellow student, a tenor who went on to sing in the Mariinsky Opera. He was the performer while she remained the helpmeet, teaching and of course attending all of his performances. He was most celebrated for the role of Lensky in
Eugene Onegin
. After the Russian Revolution they lived in various European cities and eventually came to New York to join the faculty of Juilliard, then called the Institute of Musical Art. Mme. Kabalevsky continued teaching there after her husband's death in 1950, and shortly gave in to her colleagues' urgings that she play in public, making a spectacular debut
at sixty-nine. Twelve years later, she was still performing and teaching, a tall, regal woman with short gray hair, a composed, determined face, and piercing eyes. Suzanne was terrified.

“You should be flattered that you were assigned to her,” Elena said. “It means they think you have real potential.” This did not make her any less tense when she knocked on Mme. Kabalevsky's door for the first time.

She greeted Suzanne kindly, and with no preliminaries sent her over to the piano. “I remember you from the auditions. You did well on the Chopin, and also the Bach prelude and fugue. So now show me something different. Let me see what else you can do.”

Suzanne, who had not spoken, fumbled with the opening of a simple Mozart sonata, and Mme. Kabalevsky stopped her immediately.

“You can do better than that. I see you're afraid of me. That's the trouble—my reputation follows me and it scares you. You can't play the piano if the fingers are tense—the most essential thing is to relax. The greatest pianists have the most relaxed touch, they caress the keys, they don't batter them. Remember that.” She paused as if for a response, so Suzanne nodded. “Now, we must get one thing straight if we are to stay together: You must not be afraid of me.” She smiled mischievously, aware of the absurdity of issuing such a command, and Suzanne had to smile back despite herself.

“I'll try.” She noted that unlike Elena, Mme. Kabalevsky had made no effort to lose her thick accent. Of course, she was in her thirties when she came here. And it did contribute to her uniqueness.

“Trying isn't enough. Just make up your mind and do it.
Whatever I say to you doesn't matter personally. I like you. I'll like you more and more as time goes on. I get attached to my students, especially the good ones. When I criticize your playing, it's about the music. All right? You will not be afraid? You will relax? Pretend you are in your home, playing for yourself. Or your mother. You have a mother who appreciates your playing?”

She nodded again.

“All right, there's no one home but you and your mother, and she's in the kitchen. You're alone.”

Strangely enough, her command worked. Suzanne willed herself to rout her fear, and very soon she was thriving during the strenuous lessons. Maybe under Mme. Kabalevsky's care, her stage fright, which had grown worse, not better, since childhood, would disappear, like adolescent acne or leg cramps. Maybe Mme. Kabalevsky would work a miracle; there was a touch of the sorceress about her. After a few months, when they knew each other better and Suzanne felt more free to speak, she asked, “How come they didn't assign Elena to you? I would think since you're both Russian, you'd be a good match . . .”

Mme. Kabalevsky didn't answer for a moment, and Suzanne feared she'd gone too far. Then the teacher said, “It would be too easy for her. Too comfortable. We can't make things comfortable. Obstacles are good.”

Elena had been assigned to the stern and unsmiling Mr. Mitchell, who seemed unmoved by her élan and was attempting to restrain her tendencies toward excessive romanticism and the too-liberal use of rubato.

It wasn't long before Suzanne and Elena were best friends.
The perspicacious Mme. Kabalevsky noticed this and took to calling them Snow White and Rose Red, Elena with her blond hair and fair skin and Suzanne darker, more sultry-looking. The famous teacher greeted them in the halls this way, as if they were semimythical creatures out of a story. “Snow White and Rose Red with talent,” Mme. Kabalevsky would say, smiling, and then walk on.

Once, Elena had the nerve to stop her and ask what the story was. “Oh, it doesn't signify. An old tale of the Grimms'. Two sisters take care of a bear who turns out to be a prince. And then one marries him.”

“Which one?” Elena asked.

“I think Snow White,” and Mme. Kabalevsky went on her way.

“You can have the bear,” Elena said. “I don't plan to marry anyone.”

“And who says I do?” Suzanne retorted.

Elena was the closest friend Suzanne had ever had, apart from Philip. Her confidence and enthusiasm were contagious; everything seemed brighter in her presence, brighter and more manageable. Suzanne never troubled to wonder—as she had with Philip—why Elena had chosen her. She knew. It had to do with each one's tacitly recognizing not only the talent of the other, but the enormous ambition, what the music meant to them and what their success would mean—though they were still too young to make a clear distinction between the two. What Philip's companionship had accomplished in high school, Elena's did at Juilliard: It quickly felt like home. They compared notes on what they were studying, they listened to each other play and gave advice, they played pieces for four
hands, and they agreed they were among the most promising students, although there were a few, like Emanuel Ax or Misha Dichter or Garrick Ohlsson, who might be as good or better. Together they sat in the student lounge and took part in the talk, the endless talk about teachers, technique, and music-world gossip.

The students would gather in clumps in the lounge late in the day, their instrument cases at their feet, scores sticking out of tote bags, the plastic tables covered with cardboard coffee mugs and crumpled napkins, cigarettes burning in ashtrays. Some were recovering after a grueling session with a teacher, others waiting their turn in the practice rooms, which stayed open until ten. They gossiped about the teachers' eccentricities—who used too much aftershave and who needed a complete makeover—and methods: the motherly encouraging ones and the coolly distant, the patient and the impatient, those who praised too much or never, those who might be alcoholic or homosexual, or who were rivals, or the few who came on to students, male or female . . .

The pianists, especially those in their first year, compared the teachers' contradictory demands and instructions. Frank Wallace's teacher was always urging more pedal, he reported: “She says the piano is not naturally a legato instrument. You have to make it sound like one. And don't wear shoes with thick soles—you have to really feel the pedal under your feet.” Frank was the only black student in the class, a southern boy from Georgia with astounding technique, so his comments were given special attention. But according to Steve Henderson, a corn-fed boy from Nebraska who looked more like a football player than a musician, his teacher advised just the opposite: “Too much
pedal blurs the sound and makes it murky. That's his mantra. Try for a clean, crisp sound. Crisp, he snaps his fingers. Use the pedal only when you absolutely must. Learn to stretch your fingers instead.”

Or the teachers differed on the best way to practice. A few demanded their students do scales and arpeggios and chromatics before playing any real music, while Elena's Professor Mitchell said to forget the exercises. “He says we can get all the technique we need from Bach or Chopin or Liszt. Ruth Laredo never practiced an exercise in her life. Or so he claims.” One required that they play each hand slowly and separately before trying them together, while another found that a waste of time. “Just sit down and sight-read it up to speed. Any decent pianist should know how to sight-read. If you can't, then practice it until you can,” said Rose Chen's teacher, Professor Brent. Still another teacher thought that good natural sight-reading—always considered an enviable gift—could be a mixed blessing: “It makes the learning too easy, he says. You're in danger of a superficial interpretation.” Tanya Borowitz's teacher was even against practicing slowly, which they had all been taught to do as children. “He says once we can read it through, we should practice it faster than it's supposed to be, so when you do it at the correct tempo it feels easier.” Some wanted them to read through the score first and analyze it, before even trying it on the piano.

A few insisted that the wrists be held high, with the fingers forming an arc over the keys, while others preferred the hands held lower, but Simon Valenti's teacher, the venerable Adele Marcus, said it didn't matter how they held their hands—whatever
was comfortable, as long as the sound was right. “Look at Glenn Gould, those flat hands. Gould says you don't play the piano with your fingers, but with your mind. And that low chair he uses! You know he cuts several inches off the legs of his chairs? But she said I better not try that here.” And some teachers didn't mind what fingering they used, so long as it was comfortable, while others seemed personally miffed if they ignored the composer's fingering notations—why would he have included them if they weren't important?

How were they to figure all this out? Suzanne, who dropped in to see Richard whenever she could find time, asked him about the confusing advice. He agreed with Adele Marcus that any technique was fine as long as the music sounded beautiful and faithful. As they all grew more experienced, they would naturally find the methods that suited them best. Meanwhile, he said, they should do what their teachers asked.

Given the degree of talent and the magnitude of the burgeoning egos assembled in one building, the atmosphere at school was less rawly competitive than might be expected. Perhaps the love of music, such a benign passion, tempered the sharp edges of rivalry. But after the gossip and complaints and talk of the music itself, much of the chatter in the lounge was about what became known jokingly as “the tree falling in the forest,” code words for their own yearnings and doubts and ambitions. “The tree falling in the forest” meant, if it turned out that you spent your life accompanying singers and teaching students, or, even more extreme, as a stockbroker or a travel agent (not unheard of among the graduates), playing alone evenings and weekends in your living room, what did your
devotion to music mean then? What reality did your playing have if no one ever heard it, like the tree falling in the forest? Could you still call yourself a musician?

“Of course you can,” said Simon Valenti, a strapping boy from the Bronx with Italian immigrant parents. “That's not even a valid question. It's not the audience that matters. It's the music, the feeling it gives you, the sound you strive for. For yourself, for the composer. That's enough.”

“You say so now,” said Elena. “But would you still think that if you kept trying and no one wanted to hear you? Would you still be so idealistic?”

“Sure. There'd always be someone who wanted to hear. My family. My students,” said Simon. “I'm not saying I wouldn't enjoy playing in Carnegie Hall—maybe even the same season as you, Elena. But if I couldn't, I'd still be happy to have a life with music. I just want to be with the piano, to feel it and touch it. It's almost like a love relationship—I miss it if I don't stroke it every day.”

“I feel exactly that way,” Suzanne broke in. She loved the instrument itself, she said, beyond the music she could coax from it. She loved the look and the feel of it; it was a friend, even a lover. When she said “lover,” a giggle rippled through the group—it wasn't a word they used or heard very often.

Despite the purity of Simon's argument, and however modest the students appeared, almost all of them privately nursed fantasies of standing onstage in a few years, taking their bows to rousing applause. Only a few honestly felt otherwise. Tanya Borowitz, the timid freckled redhead from New Hampshire, who had memorized the Goldberg Variations when she was still in high school, said at the outset, “I'm going to teach. I
can't go out there onstage. They were always making me do it in high school, and each time I almost passed out from fright. It was no fun at all. The rewards aren't worth the stress.” The others nodded sympathetically—it made for that much less competition.

Only a few were bold enough to openly claim their future. Elena was one. “I plan to succeed, and I don't see why most of us shouldn't make it. We're here, after all. If we're good enough and work hard and cultivate the right connections, plus a little bit of luck . . .”

They started laughing as her list grew longer. “Is that all?” Rose Chen asked. “Would there be enough stages to accommodate all of us?”

Though Elena never flaunted her connections, everyone knew she wouldn't hesitate to use them. Who would? Not that she isn't really good, they whispered among themselves, but it can't hurt to have Horowitz and Serkin—yes, the very Rudolf Serkin Suzanne had heard at her first real concert—coming over for dinner every now and then.

Suzanne listened intently to these conversations, and when she spoke it was with a fervor that she regretted immediately. It embarrassed her to show how ambitious she was, like confessing to some shameful flaw. Yet she was glad to know she wasn't the only one driven by relentless need. In Brooklyn, from earliest childhood, she'd been regarded as the prodigy. She was used to moving through the neighborhood with her reputation on her sleeve, like an insignia by which people could recognize her. But her classmates here had been hometown wonders, too. The collective fervor in the room was like a cloud that sustained them on a magic carpet.