The Black Piano (A Story in The Echo of Schubert’s Sonata in B Flat Major)

I Molto Moderato

Sitting there luminous, distant, ephemeral.

By some strange impulse she had to wear the brilliant sapphire blue dress she’d worn exactly two years ago when she had given her last solo performance in front of a privileged audience. The unpopular final recital, according to vulgar critics who whispered amongst themselves, was suffused with anguish, irony and “excessive subjectivism.” The repertoire—Modest Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Schubert’s Moment Musical in C, Impromptus in E flat and A flat, Chopin’s Etude in E, Liszt’s Valse Oublièe Nos. 1 and 2 and a couple of Etudes d'Execution Transcendante—Transcendante—the critics said was like an exhibition of modern abstract paintings which vibrated with a mixture of agony and beauty that the audience, who believed they were intellectually superior to comprehend and judge music according to their educated taste, went home bewildered and dissatisfied.

Since then she disappeared from the sight of the demanding public and cut ties with the music industry. Not a word from and trace of her until a mysterious impulse had led her into this corner, surrounded by phantasmagoric people, brimming with cold indifference, ignorant of her longing, her beauty, her mortality, unmindful of the diminishing artist that sat amongst them.

For some time, she had perversely desired this distance, the gratifying apathy of the world, the absence of applause and of enthusiastic voices screaming in the swell of darkness: “Brava! Brava!” It is complete bliss and satisfaction to be sitting here alone in the little glow.

A dark immemorial silence stirred within her as she lost her sense of immediate reality; she felt naked, defenseless, unaware of her magnificent blue dress; the noise and preoccupations of the world outside became a faded echo. She needed no eyes to see, she saw feelingly the darkness around her like ominous storm clouds singling her out. She was a blind ship in the middle of the tempestuous sea. Her long, slender fingers weakened by time; beauty and death trembled like silk as each finger dwelled on each maddening softness of the note. Her body, the body of a dying woman, did not lose its sensuality, there was still lust triumphing over ecstasy: but not the frenzy over physical intimacy, rather lust for the Absolute. A secret fetish for the Infinite. A desire of death.

Lightness and relief had gathered beneath her feet; she felt herself being lifted off the ground to the welcoming darkness. Gravity suddenly was meaningless. Everything was adrift, painfully separate from each other: people, trees, animals, clouds, houses, trains, shops, joys, skies, stars, fears, stones, hands, hopes, tears, flowers, eyes… no link, no divine chain that tied them together! Time itself was sliding down into nothingness; the rapturous state of separation swept her away outside of time. But for how long? How can one express one’s self unconditionally without succumbing to the illusion of time?

By embodying my death, I will truly be myself.

Did she know herself? Was she not occupying only a tiny corner in this vast single field of reality? But one must reclaim one’s self before diving into splendid isolation. She must reclaim herself. She must descend and go back. Where? The past was too vast to be subdivided and cataloged, to arrange it would be like asking God to recreate Creation. And the future was an immense grimace of oblivion, only shadows had an idea of the future, and she wasn’t a shadow: she was a tangible moment, a tinkling of a bell in the void. She was leaving.

Memory…

II Andante Sostenuto

… that memory of when her father took her to a piano concert by the Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter was always alive in her. The desolate sensation of the dark hall, the audience’s air of educated pride, the ecstatic loneliness of the pianist and the terrifying presence of the black piano inflamed her imagination. She was nine years old. The sheer sight of the black monster had the little girl swept forward headlong in the tide of terrifying wonder. Until the monster sang.

As the fingertips of the Soviet genius threaded the first four bars of Schubert’s magnificent sonata in B flat major, the little girl lapsed into a sudden motionless state of timelessness. She heard. She listened with every sinew of her innocent little body as if her bones, flesh and blood had secret ears of their own. A cosmic sense of weightlessness possessed her, she felt as if some essence had been stolen from her, violently. Innocence was extinguished too soon. Passion was kindled too early.

Through her tiny ears the notes confessed themselves, revealed their nature, expressed their nakedness to her soul. It was a dark communion of Sound and Flesh. A perverse encounter between Identity and Destiny. Life and Death. Was it an epiphany of the self? It was as if she had touched on some malicious secret, broken a taboo, yet felt satisfied, complete. She experienced, for the first time, the nature of joy and fear both at the same time. It was a moment that brought on a shiver.

Schubert, the divine creator of Songs, the Soviet genius who did not like himself, and her father who sat gloomily beside her had all dissolved in the state of timelessness. Only she had survived, firm and whole at the center. It was this isolation that made sense, to which everything was absorbed.

What did the whole being of a nine-year-old girl hear in that dark miraculous encounter? Not the mere bellow of the monster–the tender notes like wild hyacinths sprouting from the wasteland–but a higher reality beyond the surface beauty of sound. She listens. Trying to dip her finger into the depth that evaded her innocent sensibility. She listens. She knew there must be a living, palpitating ghost behind the ghostly reflection of sound. She listens. Existence only makes sense if one knows how to listen. What makes music transcendental, sublime? The reconciliation of the sacred and the profane; for unto what would Sublimity project itself? No Schubert, no depressed genius here, only the Sublime!

She had seen its eyes through the veil of innocence. Time, love, and eventually, death would reveal to her its face.

From Andante… to Grave

Oh! If only the tedious critics were present to hear her audacious sabotage of the second part! The critics who love to wallow in their “moral” preconceptions of how music should be performed and communicated. These Judases of musicology have concocted for themselves various notions and prejudices of musical interpretation, which, instead of widening and enriching musical understanding, vulgarize and enslave creative possibilities. The greatest virtue an authentic music critic must attend to, is to listen—listen without preconceptions.

The second part: the most delicate, most controversial part of the arresting B flat major sonata. The precarious interpretation of which is what determines whether the musician is an artist or not. But how does a musician interpret a piece of music? In a mechanical, quantified, objective application as the critics suggest?

Listen how she defies the conventional tempo!

Isn’t interpretation an act of intimacy (a miraculous balance between intellect and emotion) rather than a justification (a monolithic function of logic)? It is a most impersonal and personal approach to communicating music: the musician’s unified perception of the world and what significance this world has in relation to life, as a means by which the ultimate expression of the music can be achieved through—and only through—the self. But wouldn’t it mean compromising the intention of the composer, Schubert, say? Music doesn’t concern itself with resurrecting the dead, music’s only concern is to find poetic expression

of Eternity, the Absolute, the Sublime. Therefore, yes! It would mean compromising the intention of the composer, the rules and figures in the score, everything, just so to achieve the highest degree of poetic expression. All interpretation is indefinite. Authenticity lies in the moment of expression—the moment of expression is the revelation of the self.

If you ask why she played it that way, she might answer you, “Inside me, there is death.”

III Scherzo, Allegro Vivace Con Delicatezza

Life and music. The former is the complete revelation of ambiguity, the latter the ultimate mystery. Both are bodies of expression. Both inextricably involved with feeling, thinking and sensing. Both have moods, personality and character. Both necessarily submit to harmony and dissonance. Life is the enduring force between hurt and bliss. Music is the outcome of the struggle between intellect and emotion.

In life as in music there are rhythms, colours, harmonies and textures. Life’s overflowing instantaneity of experiences is the counterpart of music’s unfathomable depth. If one examines life under the microscope of sound, one discovers the richness of life, a total symphonic structure.

This is Life: the inclusion of thought and emotion, logic and intuition, victory and tragedy within a single realm of sound existence called Music.

This is Music: every atomic moment of hurt, bliss, and silence is a relic of a note sequence called Life.

Lifetime. The making of one’s self. The piano had stolen her naked self and dressed it with great disconcerting passion that led her to solitude. The pursuit of identity—that madness: the frustrating years of patient practice and isolation, the joys and agonies, the small victories and great disappointments. It was the frantic desire to be—to design one’s self with the help of fate’s capricious hand. And “to be” had meant, sometimes, betrayal of the people one loved.

It was the intimacy with the dead composers—a constant love-hate relationship, the incessant yielding of one and the resistance of the other—the conduit through which she communicated her language and gestures with the living world. She was inaudible to some and not all understood her. It frustrated her.

Once, while sight-reading Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 2 in B flat major, she was heard screaming: “Brahms, you’re trying too hard! But all is chaos!”; as if Brahms were one of her obstinate students that needed admonishing. On one occasion, during a rehearsal of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, she was heard talking to herself: “Bach and only Bach knows the deepest silence of God.” Lately she had loved the broken beauty and fragmented landscapes of Schoenberg and Bartòk, and the nervous harmony of Ravel. Their music, she said, seemed to accurately mirror the comic anxiety and ironic tragedy of modern existence.

It was through these subtle conversations she had with the dead more than with any living relation, that she was able to approach and comprehend realities by supplementing them with their corresponding musical colors. The affinity with the dead was the tunnel to the emotional and spiritual conditions of life. It was the only passage she knew that would lead her to coming to terms with herself, and, albeit standoffishly, with the world, too.

La Vita è Come Un Grande Scherzo

One ordinary afternoon: the radiance of the sun was spilling through the window panes onto the floor of the luxurious living-room, she on her black Steinway piano improvising on a Mozart concerto, the husband sitting comfortably on a Venetian chair reading a book, and the little child skillfully solving a Wizard of Oz puzzle. The unity of their silences and the great stillness of the shimmering afternoon held them together like the sand inside an hourglass.

“Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 27,” she uttered with piercing indifference.

“What?” asked the quiet sufferer of a husband.

  “The music you will play for my funeral: Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 27.”

  She knew how to break a silence.

IV Allegro Ma Non Troppo

In a moment of great clarity and revelation, the distinction between Life and Music is obliterated.

Music, that which nourished her inside her mothers’ womb; Music that which breathed in her the pulse and cut her mother’s breath; Music that which sang her to sleep in nights of motherlessness; Music that which send her into girlhood when the first trickles of warm blood gushed out of her body; Music that which trembled in her lips and blinded her eyes in ecstasy when she received her first kiss; Music that which melted her bones when her lover caressed her nipples; Music that which moaned with pain and satisfaction from the depths of her brokenness when she lost her virginity under the moonlight; Music that which revealed to her the blind dark passions of men; Music that which grieved of inexplicable irony when her father died a week before her first ever grand solo recital; Music that which completed her womanhood when she married the man she loved; Music that which gave new meaning and beauty to her world as she gave birth to her first and only child; Music that which tormented her mad during those years of practice and isolation; Music that which painted her identity with decors of greatness: money and fame; Music that which drowned everything when she was in performance; Music that which shrank in utter solitude when the doctor announced her dying of cancer; Music that which sobbed bitterly as she wept each passing day inside herself; Music that which drew her most of the time to moments of great stillness; Music that which erupted in tremendous silence as she contemplated the possibility of her demise.

Death is the indestructible identity.

This is the time to grieve for your death.

Her lips quivered as if chanting; the notes fluttering aimlessly like blind butterflies. There was a sense of childish dignity and stubborn desire in the execution of the fourth movement: as if what was once defiance suddenly became liberation. Her blue dress reflected the sky: brimming with possibilities, unknown. Her face was like the moon meeting the sun at sunset: a vision of astonishing clarity like death. A refreshing pain clutched at her pale hands, groping for the unknown fulfillment. The battle between sublime life and sublime death must be fought on equal footing. The memory of death became a prayer, the vision of life became a grace. Ah! The labyrinth will yield, too! It will show its exit. Her bony fingers ran like wistful waves, like a multitude of bliss. Her hands pursued each other, falling and rising. Endlessly. If there was a picture of eternity it would be those hands. Her heart, flesh and blood, fire and spirit, pulsed with utter confirmation—love might be found again. Maybe not in this place, maybe in some far-away refuge. It would be found.

Neither genius nor memory: she finally ceased to be a master of music. Time fused with life, life strengthened by death. Solitude was now her master. Her mouth was quiet, seething with chilling stillness, as if contemplating the final kiss it had received. This is the time to grieve for your death.

Her feet were on the ground again, the state of timelessness ended. She was aware of the passing of things.

Encore

Sitting there, alone, amidst curious eyes and noise.

No, it wasn’t a performance on a prestigious stage before an adoring audience; it just happened on her way home; she passed by a shopping mall, saw the black piano on display in the hallway of the mall, sat down and played.