An Equal Music

By Vikram Seth

When words fail there is music, the universal language.  This great mystery of human experience gives us the sense of some higher power or greater intelligence at work outside of the known world.  Very few writers dare to describe music's connection to the divine and most of those who do fall short.  Only a virtuosic writer, on a par with the world's greatest composers, should approach this task and even then, very carefully. 

Having read and loved A Suitable Boy, I was prepared to like An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth.  Instead, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the writing because I could hear the music and feel the passion so transcendently described in this novel.  It is a story of love between a man and a woman, of love for music and musicians, between parents and children, husbands and wives, teachers and students, friends and rivals. 

In a taxi in London, Michael Holme -- second violinist in the Maggiore Quartet -- hears the ghost of his great love playing piano in Beethoven's piece for string quintet in C minor, opus 104.  He knows it is Julia on the piano but also knows it cannot be because she has disappeared completely from, his life,  the classical music scene, and the world at large.  And yet, there is something about the touch on the keys and phrasing that is as unique as her fragrance.  Michael scours music libraries and record stores for scores and recordings of the music he has heard and finally, by chance, obtains an obscure eastern European LP.  Coincidentally, on the bus going home with his prize Michael, heading in one direction, locks eyes with a woman who can only be Julia heading in the opposite direction.  He jumps off the bus and catches a taxi, following Julia's bus only to discover that she is not on it.  Worst of all, he has left his Beethoven record in the taxi and knows he will never find another copy.  And then one day, the doorman at his apartment building hands it to him saying a strange woman has dropped it by.

Julia reenters Michael's life as abruptly as he had left hers, but resuming the romance of ten years past is more complicated than he understands it to be.  When they parted ways in Vienna, Michael was in the throes of a psychological breakdown at the hands of his Svengali-like violin teacher Carl Käll who sees in Michael the musician he could never be.  By the time Michael is well enough to face Julia again, she has disappeared and no one in her family will help him find her.  When she suddenly reappears, following a concert given by the Maggiore Quartet, Michael is thunderstruck as if he has been given a chance to save his soul from eternal damnation. 

Julia, however, has moved on.  She is married and mother to a seven-year-old son.  Rekindling her young love for Michael would be a betrayal of everyone and everything she holds dear.  And yet, so much between them is unresolved.  Only the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert comes close to expressing the depth and richness of what they had together.  When Michael left, Julia was as devastated as he was ill but found a way rebuild her broken heart and life.  Michael, for his part, limped along with his borrowed violin until the Maggiore Quartet had an opening for a second violin.  The first violinist and viola player -- Piers and Helen, respectively -- are siblings and Billy, the cellist, might as well be given their often childish interactions.  Michael, with his own emotional baggage, fits beautifully with the Maggiore and the four become a loving if somewhat dysfunctional pseudo family. 

In an interview for Random House, Vikram Seth discusses his use of a string quartet as the framework for Michael's life:

Basically, a quartet is a very odd structure. There are four musicians: two violins (which adds a bit of complexity and competition), a viola player, and a cellist. The music they make has to be cooperative--you can't have a virtuoso sticking out. And yet, though there's cooperation on stage, there may be bitter rivalries, dislikes, intrigues, and conflicts among the four players. They spend more time with each other than with their families--very often on the road and very often under pressure on stage. It's a bit like a platoon under fire or a marriage of four people--with all the complications that a marriage of two people entails multiplied in more combinations than I can calculate. Using a quartet also allowed me to introduce other characters to enrich the background of the novel's main story, the love story between Michael and Julia.

Under pressure from Michael and after much deliberation, Julia agrees to perform with the Maggiore in Vienna and Venice, the cities where she and Michael had loved and lost each other ten years earlier.  Their performances are a brilliant success and the five musicians decide to tackle Bach's "Art of the Fugue", a piece which spiritually bound Michael and Julia together as young musicians and lovers and which pushes the quartet to the breaking point.  As deeply as she still loves him Julia refuses to leave her husband for Michael who suffers another breakdown and resigns from the quartet.  Meanwhile, the owner of the violin Michael has played for his entire career, who was also his first music teacher, begins hinting that her son wants to inherit the violin so he can sell it to finance his children's education.  Michael had always known that the violin might disappear from his life and accepts this coming loss as another devastating heartbreak.  While he dearly wishes that Mrs. Formby would simply give him the violin, he understands that family comes first and does not hold this against her.  He visits her as often as he can and frequently corresponds with her out of appreciation for her lifelong mentorship and genuine affection for her, his oldest friend.  

An Equal Music could have gone in a very conventional direction, but Vikram Seth is not a conventional writer.  He speaks a number of languages, has lived all over the world, and considers himself bisexual.  He was born in Calcutta, India, was educated in England, and worked as an economist until writing began taking up too much of his working time.  His best-selling  A Suitable Boy, an epic novel of Indian family, cultural, and social life is a masterwork which took him ten years to write.  After that, he had to take a long break before he could pick up a pen.  It was a few years later, while walking and people-watching in a park in London, that the story of a heartsick musician took root. 

Interviewers frequently ask Mr. Seth if he is a musician and the answer is not.  In order to write An Equal Music he had to spend countless hours studying music and musicians in order to bring Michael to life and to describe the emotional experience of listening to the pieces played by the quartet.  Most striking is how, even without knowing the pieces, one hears music playing throughout this beautiful story.  It reminds me of how choreographer George Balanchine famously spoke of "seeing the music" and how composer Igor Stravinsky likewise "heard the dancing" in their collaborations.  Only a great artist could express him or herself so perfectly.

Where composers paint pictures with music and great artists compose music with paint brushes, great writers capture beauty and spiritual experience with words.  The title of this lovely book comes from "Our Last Awakening", a prayer by John Donne (1571-1631):

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity: in the habitations of thy majesty and glory, world without end. Amen.

After leaving him again and forever, Julia sends Michael a message through music that is an answer to this prayer.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

 

Body & Soul

Body & Soul by Frank Conroy

Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2009

For the coming season of gifts, I recommend this beautiful, uplifting, and moving novel about music, New York City, genius, and love. The preface to Body and Soul is a line from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” Keep this quote in mind as you follow the life of Claude Rawlings from his humble and mysterious origins to celebrity concert pianist.

The story takes place in New York City in the 1940s – 1960s, and as Claude grows from a toddler to a child to an adolescent to an adult, the city changes profoundly as well. In an early chapter the author, Frank Conroy, pays homage to Alfred Eisenstadt’s famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, giving us a time stamp for Claude’s childhood. The crowds of soldiers and sailors returning home to celebrate the end of the second world war reminded Claude to ask his mother about his father, who was, she said, a soldier. Claude sensed that his mother had a story she didn’t want to tell, because she refused to give him any information, other than to say he was probably dead. Unlike some fatherless sons, Claude was not ashamed of who he was or where he came from, but throughout his life he did wonder about his absent father.

Claude Rawlings’ mother was a troubled alcoholic, often too drunk to care for him properly, so Claude became self-sufficient at a very young age. When sober, Emma Rawlings drove a taxi cab and occasionally made Claude ride along with her during the earliest hours of morning when she would take mysterious passengers to shady destinations. By having Claude in the cab, Emma could keep her meter running and refuse passengers while she waited for her clandestine clients to return. This plot line explores how easily innocent people became entangled in the culture of suspicion and fear that threatened the American way of life in the era following the end of World War II.

Meanwhile, Claude discovered music in the form of a small, sixty-six key piano stuffed into a corner of the storage room where he slept. With nothing to do and no one to talk to, Claude became fascinated with the white and black keys and how each was a precise half-tone different from the ones next to it. While his mother drove her taxi, Claude had nothing but time and soon discovered that he had a gift for music. That discovery also led him into a deep and abiding friendship with Mr. Weisfeld, the owner of a music store on 3rd Avenue, hidden under the shadow of an elevated train track, in New York’s upper east side.

Mr. Conroy, in describing Claude’s discovery of the piano and his intuitive understanding of musical sound, provides a concise tutorial on the Western twelve-tone chromatic scale. If you remember “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do” from The Sound of Music then you know what a musical scale in a major key sounds like. On a piano, the C-major and A-minor scales use only white keys. All the other major and minor scales – D, E, F, G, A, and B – use one or more black keys. Within an octave, moving left to right, there are twelve tones: c, c-sharp, d, d-sharp, e, f , f-sharp, g, g-sharp, a, a-sharp, and b. Moving right to left, the tones are called c, b, b-flat, a, a-flat, g, g-flat, f, e, e-flat, d, d-flat. Each key has a discrete sound wave frequency which pleases the human ear and can be identified by those rare people with perfect pitch, of whom Claude was one. Claude, a young child, figured all of this out without the benefit of knowing what any of the keys were called, to the amazement of Mr. Weisfeld.

The story of Claude’s musical education is a fascinating glimpse into the rarified world of a child prodigy. Some critics of this book feel that Claude’s character is too one-dimensional. I disagree. Gifted people are often clumsy in social situations and many have difficulty with intimacy. Even as a tiny child, Claude was unusual and moved through life as if he were an omniscient observer. As he began exploring the world around the small apartment he shared with his mother, Claude made friends with a maintenance man at a large and beautiful apartment building. This man, Al, put the boy in a potentially threatening position but ultimately redeemed himself by becoming an important figure in Claude’s life. It was Mr. Weisfeld, however, who served to guide Claude through life both as a prodigy and as a boy growing up in the Jazz Age. When Claude shows Mr. Weisfeld, at the music store, where he would begin his musical education, how well he completed his first lesson in the beginner piano book it is, to borrow a phrase from “Casablanca,” the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And yet, as close as Claude and Mr. Weisfeld become across the years, while the boy grows into an adult, there is much about himself that the older man never shares. It is only at the end of the book that Claude discovers the truth about his best friend, mentor, and surrogate father.

Fatherhood is an important theme in Body & Soul. The mystery of Claude’s biological father slowly reveals itself, as Emma Rawlings learns to live without alcohol, and is a surprising and poignant coda to the book. Mr. Weisfeld, Al, and a series of music maestros who help shape Claude into a man as well as a great artist, serve as father figures. Claude tries and fails to father a child, himself, and this failure breaks the heart of his wife and college sweetheart. It is through his father-in-law that Claude learns another side of fatherhood: that fathers have the power to destroy their children through cruelty, abuse, and humiliation. Claude’s birth father, unable to have a role in his son’s life, does no harm, in the Hippocratic sense. When they finally meet for the first and only time, it is as if they had always been together; and in a way, they had.

Meanwhile, in the economic boom following the Great Depression, New York City changes from a place built and populated by immigrants into an economic Mecca. Skyscrapers replace three and four-storey walk-ups, tenement houses give way to high-rise apartment towers, and unsightly elevated train tracks yield to construction cranes. Developers and speculators ride the irresistible force that changes the face of Manhattan and eventually meets with the immovable object that is Mr. Weisfeld and his music store. It is an ancient story of how greed and corruption run rampant while taking advantage of free markets, of how easily the powerless are swept aside, and of how difficult it is to resist the powerful forces of progress.

Today, the population of Manhattan houses roughly 71,000 people per square mile. On New York’s Upper East Side, the median income approaches $100,000. In contrast, residents of crowded and decaying housing projects and slums barely get by and live in constant fear of criminals. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, it is the best of times and the worst of times, depending on your address.

If Claude were born today to a single mother in a rough inner-city neighborhood, would he ever venture beyond his door? Would he transcend his circumstances or join a gang and cycle in and out of prison? Would he survive into adulthood? It makes me wonder how many tremendously gifted children, geniuses, or potentially great leaders are hidden away, too afraid to leave home, numbed by hours of mindless television, and nourished by cheese puffs and soda. I also wonder whether there is a goldmine of human potential rotting in the juvenile justice system, children who will never have the opportunity to realize their potential, or even to live without fear of being caught by a stray bullet. Mr. Conroy’s novel is not meant to be a social commentary, but these are some of the questions that occurred to me after reading Body & Soul.

Body & Soul is a celebration of music, the universal language. It is also a rich, many-layered and very American story about uniquely American music. To some listeners, jazz is a formless mish-mash of musicians playing whatever they want with no coherence. Mr. Conroy’s book explains that jazz is a very complex musical form which builds on chord structures from classical music while borrowing rhythms from other cultures. Jazz musicians don’t work off of sheet music, for the most part; each ensemble functions as a team, improvising around a particular key and rhythm. Jazz and blues use selected notes from a given key rather than the entire octave which gives these genres their unique tonal qualities. Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and the other great composers of western music gave the world a body of work which reveal the beauty of the human soul at a time when humanity was actively reaching for divinity through great art and architecture. Beethoven, Italian architect Brunelleschi, and artist Michelangelo came very close. Classical music provided a foundation and a rich trove a material for future musicians to mine in the creation of new musical forms. While much of today’s popular music is cranked out of digital studios, there remain great musicians creating pieces which we will listen to for the next one hundred years. Mr. Conroy, in Body & Soul, provides a basic understanding of how symphonic music continues to evolve in its complexity and its ability to describe, musically, our collective psyche.

Read Body & Soul and end 2009 on a high note.