Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
I mustered the courage to ask, "Did you lose someone in particular?" I didn't have to add, "In the war."
He cleared his throat; I saw his heavy mustache twitch. "We all lost something, didn't we? We lost two thousand years of civilization."
I had heard from other colleagues in musical circles that Elgar, who had been so prolific in his earlier life, had spent most of the time between 1914 to 1918 in a depressed and unproductive state. He talked about his troubles with his health, and said how much he owed his wife, Alice, who made up composition paper for him, marking the ledger lines by hand, saving him hours of drudgery. He did not mention that she was seriously ill. In fact, she would be dead within a month, and he would never compose seriously again.
"But," he added now, "I will share with you something I did manage to accomplish during the war—the one important thing." He brought out the score for his Cello Concerto in E Minor, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra just the year before.
I hadn't yet heard the concerto myself, only heard of it. I knew the premiere had been a disaster. The cellist hadn't had adequate rehearsal time, and the critics had panned the performance. Yet Elgar revealed no lack of confidence in his own work. He felt the concerto would be one of his most-remembered compositions, much finer than his patriotic works, truer to his own reflective and subdued nature, much truer to the state of the modern world.
"Play it for me, if you will," he said.
I looked at the cello part of the score and read the opening measures, a somber solo passage highlighted with four difficult, dramatic chords. I bowed the passage then stopped, amateurishly. The opening had sounded like a desperate cry descending into a low-pitched, agitated sob; I felt I had played it poorly. "That sounds rough to start," I apologized. "I suppose without hearing the orchestration before it..."
"No. There is no orchestration before it. That's how it begins."
Before I could go on, he said, "I chose the cello for a reason. Of all the instruments, it is the one that sounds most like a human voice. I would ask you to play humanly, that's all."
I did not need to ask him for more direction after that. I had never played a piece so fully imagined, in which the cello not only took the lead but competed with the orchestration at times, as if to shake the other musicians by the throats, to make them face injustice and despair. The concerto had lighter movements, too, just as my afternoon with Elgar had lighter moments. He had laughed, during a break from my cello playing, as he told me how he'd once worked as a bandmaster in a lunatic asylum. "I was only a little younger than you are now," he'd said. "You may not feel you are young. Believe me, you are!"
Nevertheless, it was the concerto's dark parts that stayed with me. And the Elgar I still see in my mind is pensive, nodding almost imperceptibly at my interpretation from the piano bench, a companion in sorrow and confusion. Except that he had found a way to give voice to his confusion.
Once my cello was put away and Elgar had set a tea tray between us, I found it harder to make conversation that afternoon. He described the single recording he had made of the concerto in 1919, and said that he wanted to try again soon, in the expectation that acoustic technology had improved. He hoped I would spend some more time in London after my tour was finished, and work with him to record the concerto again.
"I will consider it," I told him.
He set a slightly shaky hand on my shoulder in response to my quick answer. "
Will
you?"
When I didn't respond immediately, he leaned closer, studying me sympathetically. "When you were playing my concerto, something in your face changed. You went away. I interpreted it as a good sign. But when you finished playing, I did not see you come back. Where were you, Mr. Delargo?"
"In my own country," I said honestly. "In Spain."
Elgar did not ask me again that day about recording the concerto. I think he understood that much as I loved it and even though it had moved me—perhaps
because
it had moved me—I wouldn't be in a position to record it that year.
Even in his grief, Elgar had seemed perfectly sure about three things, in descending order: the power of music, the voice of the cello, and me. I respected his creation without reservation. But I was not sure about any of those three things.
"You are a young man," he told me when we parted. "For me, it's all I can do to grieve for a bygone world. Your generation needs to help shape a new one."
Back at the hotel, I expected to find Al-Cerraz fretting about the upcoming concert, or else reclining languorously, thanks to psychiatrictonics. Instead I found him ready to pounce on me as soon as I entered his room.
"I should have tried this ages ago," he enthused.
The visit with Elgar had tired me, and I'd spent the long walk back thinking. I wasn't in the mood for another of Al-Cerraz's foolish enthusiasms. I reclined on his bed and watched him pace and gesture manically.
"Hypnosis," he explained, before I could ask. "The composer's cure!" He reminded me that hypnosis had allowed Rachmaninov to break through a dry spell and produce his second piano concerto. He beamed, "Dr. Key explained why I love to swim so much."
Thinking of Freud and wanting to humor my friend, I said, "Because the ocean reminds you of your mother's womb?"
That stopped Al-Cerraz in mid-stride, finger extended, considering. "Good thinking. But what he said was this: The ocean is silent." He paused, with a smug expression on his face, like a doorman waiting for a tip.
"Yes?"
"So that's it. I am seeking silence. I am trying to escape from music."
"Trying to escape. That's why you insist on touring about three hundred days a year."
"Well," Al-Cerraz paused, "I am like an addict, both attracted and repulsed."
"I can see that. I've felt that way toward people."
He didn't catch my insinuation. "The doctor said I need to get it out. I need a cassis."
"No, that's a liqueur, from currants. He must have said 'catharsis.'"
Eso es.
"But what kind of catharsis?"
"One of composition, my sublimated passion."
Sublimated
—that was not an Al-Cerraz word, either.
"I think when one sublimates," I ventured, "one takes a coarse desire—for food or sex or something else biological—and redirects it toward something loftier. You've done the opposite. You've spent the last ten years channeling your artistic drive into coarseness."
"Regardless," he said, "Dr. Key said I should compose a great work."
"That's what you've been saying for years. So you finally get to work on the
Don Quixote.
"
Al-Cerraz evaded my glance. "Actually, we had a stimulating session. I began to tell him about how I missed Spain; he has never been, but he mentioned the Alhambra. Next thing, I am telling him that this is what I've always longed to write—a masterpiece about the great Moorish fortresses of Andalucía."
"I hope you weren't just trying to please him."
"What do you mean?"
"By reflecting back his own interests—his own perceptions. It's only a suggestion."
"But why would I try to please him?"
"Because he was an audience."
"Hardly—"
"An audience of one. It is sufficient."
Al-Cerraz changed the subject. "Next—you will be proud of me—I met with my patron."
"With Brenan? Already?"
"He came right here. You are sitting just where I told him."
I looked around for signs of struggle: broken bottles, shredded letters, fistfuls of hair.
"I told him about my self-discovery. And he is also interested in a symphonic work about the Alhambra. He understands that I need to pursue my own inspirations, as soon as possible."
"That's wonderful, Justo. You are finally free."
"Eso es."
He had been pacing the entire time with such heavy footfalls that I expected a maid to come knocking on the door with a complaint from the room below. Finally, he took a seat next to me, on the bed.
"It certainly buys me time," he said, looking suddenly winded. "That is the important thing."
"How so?"
"The Alhambra work, due in two years.
Quixote,
two years after that—and I don't even have to use Brenan's libretto, if it doesn't inspire me." He looked away, saving me the trouble of hiding my incredulous expression. "It's perfectly fair, considering the support he has given me."
"So," I said, choosing my words carefully, "now it's double or nothing."
He repeated the phrase aloud, and I winced to see it sink in. "Of course, you will come home with me," he added.
I was touched that he'd called Spain "home." If our needs hadn't coincided, perhaps we would have parted ways then. And perhaps it would have worked out better that way, in the long run. But fate and friendship had run an intersecting course.
"After our London concerts," I answered him. "Then we'll go home, Justo. You'll find your Alhambra. I hope we both will."
At the main plaza in Granada, two buskers were strumming guitars and shouting "
Allah!
" in the old, uncorrupted style. Farther up the street, outside a teahouse, hookah-smoking customers were listening to a dark-skinned man playing a rebec—a kind of pear-shaped Renaissance fiddle. I saw Al-Cerraz tilt his head toward the sound, then look around impatiently, waiting for me to catch up. The day's heat was building; there was no time to lose.
We had played a concert of Bach and Haydn that morning—marble music in a city of carved wood and flowing water. But that had been only a prelude to Al-Cerraz's real mission here, which was to visit the Alhambra, the fortified Moorish palace that rose from Granada's north flank, just beyond the city's hilly edge.
We hadn't come directly from England. I had spent some time at the university in Salamanca, teaching several master classes while expanding my social and political connections beyond the world of music, as my meeting with Elgar had inspired me to do. Al-Cerraz, still enthusiastic about his visit with the hypnotist, had lodged in a lady friend's villa in M´laga, composing. He had instructed Biber to book a concert in Granada—but only one. He was finished with relentless town-to-town touring, he said. Additionally, he'd heard his mother wasn't well and wanted to visit her directly after our trip.
Our morning concert had gone well enough. As an encore, we played a repetitive Spanish folk tune, one of those beautiful picture postcards, and this was applauded with great sincerity by half the audience and hardly at all by the other half. I understood the latter group's reaction. It was a catchy tune, but so musically undemanding that I caught myself yawning in the middle of it.
"You see? Some love those trifles, but that's all they are," Al-Cerraz said now as we climbed a narrow road beyond the city center, in the direction of our hillside hotel. "For years, nationalist composers have relied on folkloric dances as a base, but without tapping the real spirit—and worse, without moving forward, without true synthesis or innovation. Manuel de Falla knows. Consider
Nights in the Gardens of Spain.
He doesn't quote every folkloric element, he simply distills the local essence. The Andalucían spirit. He'll fill our ears with theory, no doubt."
"Fill our ears?"
"When we meet him."
"Is he expecting us?"
"No. But his house will be a convenient stop on the way to the Alhambra—the place I must finally see, if my intuitions are correct."
"Wait. You've never visited the Alhambra?" Al-Cerraz had spoken of it so often, with its fabled rooms lined in
azulejo
tiles, its domed halls and elaborate arched doorways, its gardens and fountains, I thought he knew it well.
"No need to lecture," he said.
When we approached our hotel, I veered toward it.
"You're not coming with me?" Al-Cerraz asked. "To the maestro's house, and up—what is it, a kilometer to the Alhambra gate?"
"Maybe only a half kilometer, but it's vertical."
"Feliu," he scowled. "This is research. This is
history.
" He lowered his voice. "I don't want to boast prematurely, but I've been experimenting with Andalucían rhythms—I can't promise you won't hear a little flamenco in what I've done—but ... I'm saying too much." He looked up the street, to the unseen Alhambra screened by stony walls and lush foliage. "Please come with me."
When I still didn't answer, he tucked his chin down into his neck. "I would have come with you, had you asked."
I groaned. But I agreed to accompany him after I had dropped off my cello.
Back outside, I found Al-Cerraz waiting at the curb, a hand on his hamstring. "These streets are so steep, it's paining my legs just to stand."
"You asked for it," I said. "
Adelante.
"
An hour later, Manuel de Falla answered his own front door. The formal white suit he was wearing gave the appearance of a man expecting company—but not our company, as Al-Cerraz's profuse and bumbling apologies made clear.
The venerable composer held silver dumbbells the size of baby rattles in each hand. They had been made with springs in the split handles, so that he could squeeze and execute small curling motions at the same time. Al-Cerraz sprang forward to hug and kiss him. With his hands occupied, Falla couldn't defend himself, though his grimace made it clear he didn't appreciate the attentions. We discovered later he had a horror of germs and any manner of physical contact.
Falla was pale and skeletal, each contour of his skull visible beneath the taut skin of his face. His only remaining hair, a rim of light gray stubble just above each ear, contrasted with his bushy black eyebrows and his black bow-tie, a sort of third eyebrow. His eyes were small and dark, with sleepy lines etched beneath them. A mechanical smile made the small, snaking veins at his temple bulge, and brought out the apples of his cheeks, but only briefly.
Through the force of Al-Cerraz's personality, we earned entrance to the courtyard, where we sat stiffly on white metal patio chairs. Falla sat down next to Al-Cerraz, crossed one leg over the other, picked anxiously at his own pant leg, stood again, and went inside. While he was away, a woman entered the courtyard, bearing a tray. "You interrupted him during his routine," she said. As she bent to push a drink into my hand, the heavy black cross around her neck knocked against my cheek. "It takes him three hours. He had an hour left."