Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

A moment before, he had played two wrong notes, but the relief made him forget that, and now came the dramatic, technically difficult passage. He no longer had any time to be afraid of it, and suddenly it exploded in his hands, and he played the passage all the way through without a mistake as if he had been practising it only that morning. A massive feeling of relief, almost of arrogance, took hold of him. The pain in his fingers was unimportant now, and as he played the piece to the end he was suddenly sure of it: then I’ll do the Polonaise as well.

But before he did that he needed time to gather himself. The best thing for that was the third, technically easy piece from Opus 15, which was also easy on the fingers. He wasn’t quite on top of things. He had started to become agitated. So the first third was a flat, lackluster sequence of notes. But then came the ‘Debussy passages’, as Szabo had called them when they were going through the piece. The melodic structure became weaker, the notes seemed to flow aimlessly, and developed an irresolute, hesitant, almost random quality. Perlmann , Szabo used to say with an irritated sigh, you can’t play that as if it’s Debussy. There’s still a clear melody, a clear logic in it. It sounds almost as if you are advocating a melancholy of dissolution. Gloom, fair enough. But Chopin! Perlmann made the notes sound as vague as possible. To hell with Szabo . It was a declaration of war on Millar and his obsession with structure, and Perlmann had to struggle against the temptation to look across at him. He felt something in him breaking free. He was asserting himself against this man Brian Millar, and standing up for himself in front of everyone else. And now he did something he would have considered unthinkable during his public performance: later in the work he repeated two of the passages in which this self-liberation seemed most successful. He had needed a jolt to get beyond Szabo’s internal presence, and now defiance and a bad conscience held each other in balance.

To plunge straight into the A flat major Polonaise – no, that was too risky. First he needed something more technically demanding than what he had done so far. Because of his self-confidence. He wasn’t entirely sure. The A flat major Waltz from Opus 34. A piece that he had played on many solemn occasions, almost ad nauseam. Now, once again, it would have to be impeccable. It contained some chord runs like the ones in the Polonaise. And after that he would be attuned to the key.

At first he made two pedal errors, and once he played one key too many. But otherwise it was impeccable. When it started thundering again and the storm seemed to be approaching once more, he effortlessly stayed in time. He started shivering slightly, but now it wasn’t, as it had been so often over the past few days, an expression of anxiety, but of tense expectation. He could play the Polonaise. He would play it. His arms and hands, which felt very safe and strong, told him that.

He hadn’t given a thought to the scar, when a needle-sharp pain ran through him. He had to leave out three notes with his left ring finger, lost his concentration and messed up the next run of chords in his right hand. He did regain his equilibrium, but his confidence had gone. The mighty chords of the Polonaise, on which everything depended, loomed up in front of him like enormous hurdles, and now the sore fingers of his right hand were stinging much more than before. The sharp pains had gone, but his playing was hesitant now, with a ritardando that the waltz couldn’t take. It’s impossible. I’ll stop after this one. When the end of the piece came within sight, he speeded up again. The twinge that came now wasn’t quite as keen as it had been a moment before, but it was enough to spoil the closing run completely, so that he merely slid into the final chord.

It was shaming, having to stop like that, and Perlmann was full of rage with himself when he reflected that with his murder plan, completely unnecessary as it was, he had also ruined this attempt at self-assertion. Nonetheless, he would have got up and walked over to his armchair had Millar not at that point started waving the cash from the bet. As the rain lashed the windows, he held them up to Leskov with a smile, undeterred by the fact that Leskov irritably waved them away, and by the equally irritable faces of the others. First his attempt to disturb Perlmann’s playing a few moments ago, and now this. It was too much. Amidst the beginning applause Perlmann started in on Opus 53, the A flat major Polonaise that Chopin had called the ‘Heroic’.

From the first bar he could hear the frightening passage. But there were still almost seven minutes before he got there. Even the first chords and runs required much more pressure than anything that had gone before, and Perlmann bit his lips with pain. But soon the pain could touch him no longer. As ever, he was overwhelmed by this music; it enfolded him and gave him the feeling that he could effortlessly keep the world at a distance. After half a minute the run-up began for the big theme, dressed up in powerful chords that came cascading down from above. The last bars before the first of these expansive chords had to be played at a slightly slower tempo to provide a proper setting for the beginning of the theme. Szabo himself had acknowledged that. But Perlmann – and this had been his constant reproach – overdid it to an unjustifiable extent. He was inclined to delay the entry of the topmost chord by more than a second. That, he found, was what made the tension properly palpable, and intensified the subsequent liberation. And that liberation was what truly counted – the idea that for the moment when one touched the keys with both hands and with one’s full strength, one was master of things. You abuse these passages , Szabo had said. You’re supposed to be playing Chopin, not yourself. Take Alfred Cortot as your model.

Szabo fell silent, and Perlmann played himself into a genuine state of intoxication. With a sure touch, he hammered the redeeming chords into the keys, rising from his chair with ever greater frequency to launch his attack. Unrestrainedly, he slowed down the introductory beats so that each chord had the significance – more than ever – of a liberation from chains. Then, when the storm broke out again, it fitted what he was doing perfectly. Because right now – three minutes in – came the first of the two passages in which the same dark chord was to be played seven times in a row. Never before, it seemed to him, had he played chords with such force. Trampling over what little remained of his restraint, Perlmann thundered all of his fury into the keys, his fury with Millar and all the others who beleaguered him; his fury with Szabo; his fury with the storm that he had to drown out; and above all his impotent fury with himself, with his insecurity, fear and mendacity, which had driven him into the murderous silence of the tunnel.

Afterwards, his sore fingers hurt so much it brought tears to his eyes. The thought came to him that if he brought his finger down on the keys the scar on his finger would burst, the blood would run over the white keys and seep into the gaps, and his fingers would lose their hold in the red smear. But the image was too fleeting to survive and, during the next, fourth minute, Perlmann devoted himself entirely to the effort of playing so seamlessly and compellingly as he had at the Conservatoire, when he had reaped such praise. His left hand mostly contributed to the climaxes, and he was glad that the intense pain in his finger had now become something constant that he could adjust to, something that no longer appeared in the form of unpredictable episodes. The whole passage flowed once again into a thundering repeat of a single chord. Then the same thing was repeated once again, but this time it was followed by a surprising dissolve into a sequence of bright, blithe bars. They made way for a lyrical passage, which, as Perlmann played it, was intended to remind the audience of the dreamlike mood of the Nocturnes.