Appassionata

… See her there, among the perpetual crowd, moving through the routines of check-in, security control, departure lounge. She’s an attractive woman, with her stylishly cropped, reddish-brown hair, her clearly delineated features, and large, nearly transparent green eyes. She cuts her way through the airport’s bland spaces with some impatience, her slim tall figure clad in jeans and short leather jacket, her head bent slightly as if to avoid notice. But there’s something about her that attracts notice nevertheless: perhaps it is a certain concentration of expression, or of being; perhaps it is the pale, light-absorbing eyes. What cannot be seen, as she pauses to buy her bottled water, or look around some insipid airport shop, is that she’s filled with a force of expressive meaning, a power of significant sound that enlarges the space within her to an immeasurable degree. Intimations of Schumann and Beethoven are always just below the surface of her mind and at the tips of her fingers, ready to emerge. She’s trailing a comet’s tail of music, a repertory of beauty and shaped feeling and strenuous human effort. She’s barely conscious of it, this lived history of the soul; but it is always within her reach, almost audible in the stray motifs, rhythms, musical suggestions that inform her movements, and speak to her as eloquently as any sentences.

What she cannot see fully is herself, as she cuts her way through the old-new world, or as that world cuts through her. She does not discern the vectors of power within which she is held, or the currents of strife and change that may pass through her too, for good or ill. After all, the world through which she travels doesn’t yet have a shape, and she is a new kind of creature in it. The forces pressing on her from within blur her own outline to her vision. She doesn’t
yet know what the music inside her is driving her toward; she is on the border of herself; of the present.

She closes the book on her lap, and thinks, this is only a transitional passage. The passage one hardly hears, the neutral arpeggio meant to get you from one theme to the next. She straps herself into her seat, wills herself into a kind of inner immobility. She thinks, only seven hours … The great machine rumbles and churns, and then crescendoes into unnatural speed. Even through the shield of the airplane, something runs down her spine like the uncanny: a power of velocity and sound that could crush her in a mini-second. Then the stunning artifice of lift-off; the swoop above Long Island Sound; and as they leave it behind, the unending expanse of the resistless sky. She stares at it for a while, the vast blue space with no shape or horizon. Somewhere beneath the white noise of the airplane, phrases of Schubert rise up from within, with their lovely, fluent motion. Scraps of music, scraps of thought. To anchor herself, she reaches for her briefcase—the touch of sleek leather is a kind of reassurance; she is, among other things, a person with a sleek leather briefcase—and looks through the folder with her schedule. An anticipatory excitement simmers, the lit-up excitement of the tour ahead. A string of city names extends itself on the page with a still glittering allure: Paris, Sofia, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Budapest, Barcelona … Magical metropolises, her generation’s fantasy of worldliness; of adventure. What is Sofia doing in that awkward place, though, and why didn’t Anders get her Moscow or Rome? She thinks, how strangely arbitrary, and does it mean she is slipping, that the big cities will stop wanting her. That might happen, she knows, through some imperceptible elision, one never knows how or when. She peruses the file for the name of her Paris minder, and notes that it is Rougement. Well, that’s nice. He has been around forever; he
will cushion the first moments. There are some publicity materials in the folder, and she looks at a photo of herself briefly and with some dissatisfaction. It was taken three years ago, and she didn’t like it in the first place, its staged pose or the smooth fake flow of her hair on which the publicity people insisted.

She feels the attention of the man in the next seat turning in her direction. He is corpulent in a forceful, packed way, and he is staring at her quite intently.

“Excuse me,” he finally brings out, with a careful respect. “I just couldn’t help noticing … You’re Isabel Merton, aren’t you? I mean, I know it’s strange to recognize a person from a photo, but I’ve seen you on posters, you see, or maybe in the newspapers.”

She says yes, she is, and smiles politely, though not too encouragingly. She isn’t sure she wants to get into a long conversation. “Well, I can’t tell you how much I’ve admired your recordings. Especially your Schumann, the
Davidsbündlertänze
… So mercurial, so … true. True to the music,” he adds, as if to assure her he doesn’t mean anything trivial. He’s speaking in a diffident rush. “You’ve given me so much pleasure, you see. In fact, I just got you on CD.” His large, not unintelligent eyes look moony. He’s face to face with one of Them, the veiled ones, an Artist.

“Oh, thank you,” she says, and smiles more openly this time, sensing his difficulty, as well as her own. She has emerged from behind the veil, from the impersonal closeness of recorded sound, into this pseudo-intimacy of an airplane seat. It’s undoubtedly disconcerting, this disjunction between her rather tired, embodied self, and the brilliant, disembodied sound by which he has known her.

“Are you going to be playing in Paris?” the man asks. “You see, I’ve listened to you so much, but I’ve never been to one of your concerts.”

“Well, yes, I am scheduled at the Champs-Elysées on Saturday,” she tells him.

“Ah, that’s wonderful,” he says with enthusiasm. “I was going to go to Périgord for the weekend, but I’ll stay to hear you, what a great coincidence.”

“My heavens, that seems rather extreme,” Isabel says, feeling oddly small in the face of such dramatic appreciation. She isn’t sure she wants to be responsible for his change of plans.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he declares with obvious sincerity. “Especially now that I’ve met you.”

But she must have somehow reinstalled the remote look in her eyes, because he looks rebuffed. He says, “It must be very hard, all this touring and airplanes …”

She says yes, sometimes it’s quite hard, and after a few more polite sentences mutters, “Please excuse me, I need to read this before …” and opens Ernst Wolfe’s
Journal of a Summer.
“Oh, I’m sorry, please, don’t let me …” the corpulent man says in a flattened tone, and unfolds his
Financial Times
.

She tries to read, but is still too restless, too distracted. Images skivvy through her mind in no particular sequence. A lesson with Wolfe all those years ago … This morning’s hurried preparations, the long room of her downtown loft, covering up the Steinway against the sun, and Peter, picking her up to take her to the airport, from his apartment, from their old home. She can envision him exactly, waking up in the high-ceilinged, dusky bedroom, with its fraying Turkish carpet. Still, by now she doesn’t know: was he alone before he came to collect her, and would she mind if he wasn’t … Sotto voce, she admits she would, even though she has no right to, none at all … She couldn’t ask, of course, it would have been too unfair … As it wasn’t entirely fair to accept the endless ride to Kennedy this morning. Ahead, the aleatory sequence of the cities, and the absolute glow of the music. A hard life, the man said … It’s a formulation, a view. Though how can her life be hard, by what possible standards? She does what she most loves. She’s free, free as a woman has ever
been. Freedom is the element through which she moves, and she peers into it as into a milky fog, trying to discern what she is moving toward, what she so restlessly, so keenly desires. And yet maybe the man is right, maybe there’s something hard about her life, in its deluxe late-capitalist way. She thinks of the stages she will have to cross before reaching the piano, the interviews she’ll have to give, the dinners she’s promised to attend. Bourgeois heroism is what Peter calls it, the acrobatics of being in so many places practically at once, and doing so many amazing things in one day, and then conversing over dinner with unflagging energy. She’ll have to be on the qui vive, it is expected. You must never be tired. You Must Love Your Life.

The carefully calibrated one-third of a Valium is beginning to take its effect, and Isabel submits to it gratefully. She’ll figure it out another time … She takes a measure of her encapsulation, and adjusts the seat for a simulacrum of comfort. A vague thought drifts through her mind that the man next to her might be disillusioned to see her asleep; then she dozes off.

She sleeps through dinner and a movie, and is woken by the pilot’s voice announcing landing. Familiar aridity, discomfort of squeezed bones. Her left wrist is hurting, and she massages it deftly, working out the strain; fortunately, nothing is badly cramped. The man next to her clears his throat tactfully to warn her of his presence, and says he’s been thinking about it and will definitely stay in Paris for her concert. Could he come and see her backstage afterward? She says yes, of course, and he hands her his card, “just so you know who I am—it’s only fair, no?” She looks at it briefly, noting that his name is Louis McElvoy, and that he apparently works at the State Department, though she can’t immediately make out what he does there. They sit silently through the physical tension of the landing and lose track of each other shortly after getting off the plane.

Neither East nor West, nor North nor South. The eerily quiet
corridors of Charles de Gaulle pulse softly with fluorescent images, emanating from no visible source. A liminal space, a traveler’s limbo, and as in limbo, she lets herself be conveyed along passively, an item to be processed.

She thinks, just another hour, it’s all right. Outside, the mid-morning gray, the minute, precise drizzle (staccato, moderato), immediately recognizable as Paris. She steps into a taxi, falls into a doze again through the long approach to the city; comes awake to the city itself. Ah. The archetypal city still. “St. Regis,” she says again, in case the driver has forgotten. He nods impassively. The hotel is on a quiet street not far from the Champs-Elysées. That’s good, she can walk to the concert hall in the morning. She pays the driver, notes the white-canopied balconies on the hotel’s upper floors, the after-rain glisten of the street. On automatic still, she lets the concierge take her suitcase up to her room; manages, with some effort, to hang up her concert gowns; then curls up on the bed and falls asleep.

Paris

She takes a few minutes to reorient herself when she wakes up, registers the low gleam of the digital clock on the side table, the long white drapes. She used to be thrown by these moments, before she could place herself in yet another anonymous room or even figure out how her body was stretched on the bed. Now she has rituals for such transitions. She draws the curtains open and looks out into the full, and now sunny afternoon. That’s better. She takes a few more things out of her suitcase, and turns on the gilded tap to run herself a bath. She stretches in the hot water and sponges herself vigorously. Fragments of the Schubert keep rising up in her mind; she’s almost ready to receive them. The
internal cells are rearranging themselves in the hot water, as if by some crystallizing process. After an interval, she gets out of the bath, feeling something like coherence, a calm.

She takes out Wolfe’s
Journal
, contemplates the cover. The white trunks of birches in a pristine West Virginia setting; against them, his tall, gaunt figure, his sensitive, highly etched face. Published posthumously. She wonders if he would have wished it. He would have said no, of course, as he said no to anything that threatened the absolute purity of his privacy, and his dedication. But perhaps there was another side, other desires. Who doesn’t want to be known, as completely as possible, precisely in the most private places … She knew Wolfe only through the music. That is, she knew him perhaps in the most essential way; but not in any of the other ways that also count. She feels some suspense as she begins to read.

Roanoke, West Virginia
July 2, 1982

Last night, a dream—a nightmare—of a sound. Nothing more than a sound, and yet it had all awe, all terror in it. It was not so much loud, as super-heavy, super-condensed. Heavy water, plutonium. A kind of absolute sound, its mass expressing something of the cosmos. Its weight threatened to crush me and everything in its path. But it had a kind of beauty in it, the beauty of the ineffable which cannot be grasped. Even if the ineffable is composed of pure menace.

Perhaps my composition should be just that sound. Infinitely extended and minimally wavering within. A condensed black hole of sonic matter, within which the particles and waves of former life can still be obscurely sensed.

It is twelve years to the day since I began the Requiem. Perhaps that is why I had the dream. Twelve years of labor condensed into one, all-encompassing sound. That would be a kind of triumph. Reduce. Distil. That is what our age demands. After all the excesses, after everything which happened. We come after, that is what I must never forget. We come after. Therefore, distil absolutely. Distil to an absolute.