Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He wanted to perform Bach’s six motets — just us and a couple of ringers to pad out the eight-part extravaganza, Singet den Herrn ein neues Lied. The others — Hans in particular — opposed the idea. The music was a full century younger than the latest piece we’d ever sung. It lay way outside the idiom we’d perfected. Our caution maddened Jonah. “Come on, you bastards. A world masterpiece that hasn’t been sung properly in all its two hundred and fifty years. I want to hear these things once before I die, when they’re not a Sherman tank with one tread falling off.”

“It’s Bach,” Hans objected. “Other people already own this. People know these pieces, forward and retrograde.”

“They only think they know them. Like they thought they knew Rembrandt, until the grime came off. Come on. ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song.’ Johnny Bach, heard for the first time.”

That became the project’s slogan, the one EMI promoted our recording with. Whatever the legitimacy of the performances, our agility justified them. The thing about Bach is, he never wrote for the human voice. He had some less plodding medium in mind to carry his memo into space. His lines are completely independent. His part-writing combs out some extra dimension between its harmonies. Most performances go for majesty and end up mud. Voces Antiquae went for lightness and wound up in orbit. The group’s turning radius, even at highway speeds, was uncanny. We brought out counterpoint in the works that even Hans had never heard. Every note was audible, even the ones buried alive in that thicket of invention. We goosed the giddiness and laid into the passing dissonances. We brought those motets back to their medieval roots and pushed them forward to their radical Romantic children. By the time we finished, no one could say what century they came from.

Our disc was notorious from its day of release. It started a pitched battle, venomous in proportion to how little was at stake and how few people cared. I don’t mean Le sacre du printemps or anything. But there was flack. The new had lost its capacity to shock; only the old could still rattle people. We were derided for emasculating Bach and praised for sandblasting a monument that hadn’t been hosed down in a long time. Jonah never read a single review. He felt we’d acquitted ourselves well, maybe even superlatively. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He’d wanted to make that music give up its secrets. But that was something it wasn’t going to do until long after we were all dead.

We toured with the motets but returned, after a while, to our roots. We revived the Renaissance in every burg in Germany. We sang in Cologne, Essen, Göttingen, Vienna — every city Da had ever mentioned to us. But no relatives ever came out of the audience after any of our concerts to claim us. We sang in King’s College Chapel, a homecoming for Peter Chance and a stunned first for the Strom brothers. Jonah craned up at the fan vault, which no photo can even be wrong about. His eyes dampened and his lips curled bitterly. “Birthplace of the Anglican hoot.” He was coming home to a place that would never be his.

We spent five days in Israel. I imagined that our Counter-Reformation Masses and courtier chansons would have to sound absurd in this permanently embattled world. But the halls wouldn’t release us without several encores. Memory was resourceful. It could reclaim any windblown trinket and weave it into the nest. In Jerusalem, on the tour’s last concert, we sang in a futuristic wood-lined auditorium that might have been in Rome, Tokyo, or New York. The audience was unreadable: two sexes, three faiths, four races, a dozen nationalities, and as many motives for listening to the chant of death as there were seats in the house.

From my spot on the stage lip, I keyed on a woman in the second row, her body stenciled with sixty-year-old state messages, her face an inventory of collective efficiencies. Four chords into our opening Machaut Kyrie, it hit me: my aunt. My father’s sister, Hannah, the only one of his family whose wartime death had never been certain. She and Vihar, her Bulgarian husband, had gone underground before my birth, and there the trail ended. My father, the empiricist, could never bring himself to declare her dead. Hannah was, compared to the size of history, a particle so small, her path could not be measured. The Holocaust had annihilated all addresses. Yet here Aunt Hannah was, returned by our performance. She must have seen the posters announcing our tour. She’d seen the name, her name, two men the right age and origin… She’d come to the concert, purchased a seat up close so she could study our faces for any trace of bloodline. Her resemblance to Da was uncanny. Time, place, even the nightmare gap between their paths: Nothing could erase the kinship. She looked so much like Da, I knew Jonah had to see it, as well. But his face throughout our concert’s first half showed no sign of any audience at all. Between this familiar stranger scrutinizing me and my brother refusing to catch my eye, it took a lifetime’s practice to go on singing.

I cornered Jonah at intermission. “You didn’t notice anything?”

“I noticed your focus flying around like some high-wire—”

“You didn’t see her? The gray-haired, heavy woman in the second row?”

“Joseph. They’re all gray-haired, heavy women in the second row.”

“Your aunt.” If I’d lost my mind, I wanted my brother to know.

“ Myaunt?” He put his fingers to his chest, running the calculations. “Impossible. You are aware, aren’t you?”

“Jonah. Everything’s impossible. Look at us.”

He laughed. “There is that.”

We went back on. At our first shared tacet measure, I caught him looking. He flashed me a quick peripheral glance. If anyone in the world is our aunt, it’s her. She, for her part, gazed into us like surgery. She took her eyes off me only to look at Jonah. During the curtain call, she fixed me with a look that scorned all forgetting: Strom, boychik. Did you think I would never find you?

The reception lines that night were endless. Scores of people, still savoring the frozen hour they’d just inhabited, tried, by standing next to us and shaking our hands, to postpone, a little longer, their relapse into motion. I couldn’t focus on the compliments. I darted through the crowd, about to find a family, however small and distant. Excitement was just terror that hadn’t yet imagined its own end.

The crowd thinned out, and I saw her. She was holding back, waiting for a lull. I grabbed Jonah and pulled him with me toward our flesh and blood, using him like a shield. She smiled as we closed on her, a thrill that looked around for a place to bolt.

“Tante Hannah? Ist es möglich?”

She answered in Russian. In a broken pidgin of languages, we three worked it out. She knew the name Strom only from our recordings. She closed her eyes when we told our half of the story, said who we thought she was. Hers were my father’s closed eyes.

“This aunt of yours. I knew thousands of your aunts. I was with them.” She breathed in and opened her eyes again. “But now I am here. Here to tell you so.”

Every muscle in her face was ours. We couldn’t stop pushing for some proof of kinship: town names, what we knew of our grandmother’s Russian roots, anything to find the connection. She smiled and shook her head. The shake was Da’s. And in that one tremor, I knew him. Jewish grief. Grief so great, he never had an answer for kinship but to keep it from us.

Her English was weak, and she shuddered at German. What little Russian we had came from Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But her words were clear as silence: You are one of us, always. Not by law, but the law is a technicality. You could convert. Rejoin. Relearn, even for the first time. “You know,” she told us, by way of good-bye, “if you want family? You are sharing family with half this audience.”