Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Afterward, after the Schubert encore, when it seems we have more than survived, we join hands onstage and walk off to wild applause, two brothers, split at the fork in what, until today, was our identical past.

To my ear, his laugh at fourteen had no bitter highlights yet. I’d swear he was still happy up in Boston, in the walled courtyard of our music school. Happy, or at least busy, proving he could get people of any hue to fall in love with him. And needing to seduce János Reményi before anyone. The Hungarian’s approval meant more to Jonah during high school than even Da’s or Mama’s. And my brother must have meant a good deal to Reményi, as well. Once Jonah’s voice broke, it became János’s chief pastime in life to turn the virginal soprano into a sterling tenor.

Most adolescent males pass through months when their voices go off on spontaneous excursions, flopping like a fireman’s hose with no one strong enough to hold it steady. Jonah entered this vocal purgatory. He struggled to settle into his new register and win back control over his hormone-thickened vocal cords. But in remarkably short order, one could hear the light sparkle of boyish ore coming through the cauldron of adolescence smelted down to a bright lump of gold.

Reményi’s own career was now a relic, except for the occasional nostalgic gala. Throughout the thirties, he’d been a Bayreuth regular, doing the three consecutive evenings of Wotan without a waver. He was a celebrated CEO of Valhalla and tyrannical abuser of oppressed dwarves. But after the Sudetenland crisis, he stopped traveling to Germany. Later, he always refused direct questions about that decision, and the musical press inferred a self-sacrificing choice. In truth, 1938 was way late for acts of political courage.

Throughout the war, Reményi worked in Budapest, singing roles in safe pieces like Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk Bán and Dohnányi’s Tower of the Voivod. When the country’s concert houses were bombed, he turned to teaching. He tried to return to opera, traveling through a decimated Italy, but his temperament — too stolid for bel canto and too brooding for buffa — got him molested in the Neapolitan and Milanese press. He stayed in Central Europe long enough to see Allied infantrymen of all races parading through Bayreuth in pillaged Valkyrie helmets and Brunhild gowns, even draped in his old Wotan costumes. Arranging a hasty evacuation to the States in the tidal wave of the late forties, he launched Boylston Academy, scoring points with wealthy Americans by playing on their cultural inferiority. His banquet speeches raised thousands of dollars for the school by suggesting that, in the world’s cultural Olympics, vocal music was an event where the USA couldn’t even take home a bronze.

At Boylston, Reményi was in his element, Wotan all over again. The students all fixed on him: János asked me to audition for the spring chamber choir. János complimented me today on my C major scale. None of us would have dared call the man anything but sir to his face. But in the safety of cafeteria talk, we were all on a first-name basis.

He gave lessons in the most opulent studio, tucked away in the recesses of the second story. He covered his floors with silk carpets from Tabriz and hung the walls with Anatolian kilims, to make sure that no student could count on any free resonance. Throughout lessons, he sat behind a Biedermeier desk in a wing-backed chair. If he needed to make a musical point, he strode over to the corner where two Bechsteins curled up in each other’s curves.

During my lessons, he shuffled papers and signed forms. I’d finish an étude, and he’d work on for a few minutes before noticing. Coming up for air, he’d command, “Go on, go on,” as if I’d stopped out of truculence. He cared only for those whose voices might lead to careers. I did not interest him except as the key to my brother’s well-being. Perhaps he saw in me a clinical riddle: How could the same genes produce both brilliance and mere adequacy? He’d wonder for a moment, wave me on, and return to his paperwork.

Jonah’s were the only lessons with Reményi to exceed the alloted fifty minutes. My brother would disappear into Reményi’s lair and not come out for hours. I’d go nuts with worry. Reményi’s studio had a pane of metal-threaded glass cut into the door, a school policy since an incident involving an ex — faculty member and a fifteen-year-old early bloomer. On my toes at the right distance down the hall, I could make out a thin slice of proceedings without being detected.

The teacher on the other side of that wire-meshed glass was no one I recognized. János, up on his feet, hands cupped, arms waving, mouth working on a stream of staccato triplets, was conducting the entire Met pit orchestra. Jonah imitated him, his chest out like a war hero. Through the glass, I looked in on a life-sized puppet-theater staging of Papageno and Papagena’s duet.

Ecstatic János coached my brother’s voice down into its new range. He showed the teenager how to open up his instrument and let that new power take up residence. Everything Jonah lost in pitch, he stood to gain many times over in color and sweep. The break was like one of those chance renovations, where crumbling plaster reveals glorious marble beneath it. The crushing innocence of his old high notes, the ones that made listeners want to take their own lives in shame, gave way to the richer highlights of adult awakening.

There would be years of sweat and woodshedding. But of all János’s maturing students, Jonah, he said, had the least to unlearn. The Hungarian claimed he’d caught the boy while music was in him, before anyone could trample him. The truth is: We and music are not unified. Nothing in our animal past calls for anything so gratuitous as song. We must put it on, wrap it around us like the dark, cold firmament. Some part of Jonah’s sonority came from his great lungs, the softness of his larynx, the fluting of his vocal cords, his skull’s chambered resonance. But the heart of his gift was learned. And only one violating couple could have taught him so deeply as they did.

Jonah might have flourished under almost any teacher. Once away from our family’s charmed evenings of motets, he became a sponge, using people for whatever he could steal from them while reserving, even in happy compliance, the right to second-guess anything anyone fed him. Jonah stole the best of everyone — Reményi’s experience, Kimberly Monera’s precocity, Thad’s and Earl’s hipster avant-gardism, my feel for harmony — until all of these became his own annexed domain. But in the story he invented for himself, Jonah made this journey alone, whoever his passing sponsors might have been.

The teenager’s voice stepped out from the boy’s wreckage. Within months, János could hear the hint of adult wonders to come. This boy’s raw material — shaped by early immersion — pointed toward places beyond those Reményi himself had reached. The only question was how far beyond his own ability any teacher could teach. So long as Jonah stayed dutiful, all was well. His lessons with Reményi progressed, the master’s one hand flinging my brother outward, the other, unconsciously, holding him back.

Jonah humored his teacher’s enthusiasms and even returned them. I’d hop past the room on my toes, catching glimpses of them in arcane training rituals, exercises coming out of a teacher I never saw do anything more vigorous than shuffle papers. There was János, dropping to his knees to pantomime the falling larynx, turning his hands in precision catcher’s mitts for Jonah’s pitches to hit, shaping his arms into tubes through which Jonah threaded his thirty-second-long pianissimi.

The Boylston master was a monster about tone. Only Jonah had any idea what the man meant by the word. Once, during social studies class, fifty yards down the hall from where my brother worked in Reményi’s lair, I heard the man bellow, “For God’s sake! Let the tone ride upon your breath like a ball on a fountain of water.” More curse than command. My fellow social studies students turned to me in sympathy, their heads hung, as if Jonah’s fall chastened us all. Then we heard a sustained high forte such as no teenager had ever produced. The Hungarian bellowed, even louder, “Yes! That’s it!”