Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Then Peter Grau hit upon assigning him the same role. Jonah came to me in a panic. “There is a Supreme Being, Joey. And He’s after my mulatto ass!”

He didn’t have the cash to spare for a second copy of the music. So each week before each lesson, he’d erase every pencil mark given him by the one teacher and replace them with the carefully archived marks of the other, down to the slightest scribble. He was like a plagiarist, constantly tripping up, begging to be caught. The labor was herculean. Every recopying took him the better part of a night.

Each teacher’s “Furtive Tear ” was the other’s opposite. Agnese wanted it wet, wide, and scooping. Grau wanted it dry as the winter Sahara. Agnese told Jonah to wallop the first note of each phrase and swoop down a fifth to nab the rest of the line in his talons. Grau had him clamp on the attack, then swell from nothing. The Italian wanted the sorrow of all mankind. The German wanted a stoic rejection of human absurdity. Jonah just wanted to escape alive.

They had him going like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, the previous year’s multiple-personality Oscar winner. Jonah couldn’t remember who’d ordered what. He got so he could switch interpretations in midnote, given the tiniest tremor in his current teacher’s eyebrow. Then one week, Mr. Grau leaned down to examine my brother’s penciled articulations. “What’s this? Sostenuto, here? Surely I told you no such thing.”

Jonah mumbled something about a friend’s joke, and fell to furious erasing.

“Who would dream of sostenuto at such a moment?”

Jonah shook his head, appalled at such an outrage.

“ Yousurely don’t think that’s the way to do these lines?”

Jonah looked scandalized.

“Well, why not. Go ahead and try it that way.”

Nothing if not limber, my brother did, trying to make it sound as if he hadn’t rehearsed it that way, every other session, for the last three weeks.

“Hmm.” Grau scowled. “Not uninteresting.”

When Agnese stopped him at the same passage and told him — just a crazy whim — to try it staccato, Jonah knew the gigue was up. For a week, both of his teachers raked him with antiphonal silence. My brother apologized to each.

Grau wagged his head. “Whom did you imagine you were fooling?”

Agnese chuckled. “You think this stereophonic ‘Furtive Tear’ was what you Americans call a coincidence?”

My brother didn’t inquire how long they’d seen through his sham. But, as abjectly as possible, he did ask, “Why?”

“Consider it your education in the politics of performance,” Grau said. “Believe us: From here on out, such things will cause you far more tears than any passage in Donizetti.”

So ended my brother’s attempt to two-time the school’s finest. Jonah’s escapade briefly made him the conservatory’s Brando. Outside the school, the cranked-up youth uprising geared up to break open the world. But inside our soundproof practice rooms, tempo violations were still the worst imaginable crime. We simply had no idea where we lived. The Sammy’s crowd traded murky tales of reefer and horse, potent substances that by all accounts made Village jazz musicians schizophrenic and turned the Harlem underclass into killers. They worried the question for hours. “Say it made you play better for a while, and then it killed you. Would you take it, for your art?”

Sex was the much closer transgression. Rumors of hand jobs, even mouth jobs performed in darkened practice rooms for standing-room-only recipients abounded. One slim blond ingenue flutist — everyone’s fetish — had to leave school under circumstances ripe with inventive explanation. The hint of vice filled the halls, a broken scent bottle no amount of ammonia could scrub out. My brother’s friends argued forever about which female vocal students, with their various techniques, would best serve their needs — the fast, high passage-workers, the deep embouchures… We were such children as this country will never produce again. Long past the age when our old Hamilton Heights torturers were being sent off to their first prison terms, Jonah and I held on to a naïveté we mistook for sin. But when the time for real sinning finally came, we had all the advantage of the late starter.

With the settling of his voice, Jonah landed most of the plum parts he set himself after. Two years into the bachelor’s, he was singing with graduate productions. If the part called for weightless precision, all pretense of democratic auditions broke down. He had a flair for the comic — the eighteenth-century page boy whose ditsiness is surpassed only by his heartbreaking zeal. He sang a Bach Evangelist that had half the agnostics in the house ready to convert, at least for an evening. He learned how to act. By nineteen, he’d mastered that devastating sucker punch, the one that lulled audiences into thinking they were watching some other poor bastard’s life, only to zap them at the flick of an invisible switch into realizing just whose story this was.

He performed hungrily. He’d sing anything written since the war. He had his pick of premieres, as few other students wanted to kill themselves learning new, extended techniques for a one-shot deal. But he’d also sing little bits of French fluff he could have ripped through at age six. Up on Claremont, he sang everything from Celtic folk songs to Russian liturgical monody, with Sturm und Drang, buffa, and High Renaissance hankie flirtations littered along the way. He couldn’t distinguish between a funeral mass and a flippant encore. He sang every tune as if it were his swan song. He could make stones weep and guiltless animals die of shame: the Orpheus that Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Krenek, and Auric had in mind.

In life’s opening few years, everything you hear, you hear for the first time. After a while, the ear fills in, and hearing turns back from the future and into the past. What you’ve yet to hear is outstripped by what you already have. The beauty of Jonah’s voice lay in its running backward. With every new phrase that came out of him, old notes lifted off of his listeners and they grew younger.

People actually turned up to hear his degree recital. He insisted I accompany him. We worked for weeks on the pieces, mostly mainstream nineteenth-century German lieder. He mocked the melodramatic crowd-pleasers we had to do: “Aural Novocain.” At our dress rehearsal, we scrambled to put the last desperate touches to the “Will-o’-the-Wisp” from Schubert’s Winterreise. I was halfway into the second verse, the almost nihilistic

Bin gewohnt das Irregehen,

’s fürhrt ja jeder Weg zum Ziel:

Uns’re Freuden, uns’re Leiden,

Alles eines Irrlichts Spiel!

All our joys and sorrows a will-o’-the-wisp, when I heard Jonah singing:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot-ta,

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot-ta,

Pepsi-Cola’s the drink for you!

I slammed down the lid and shouted over the last words. “Damn it, Jonah. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He saw my face, and couldn’t stop cackling. “Joey, it’s a fucking school recital. We can’t let them bust our nuts with it.”

I was sure he’d repeat the stunt in recital, if not deliberately, then by practiced accident. But he sang the words as written, an old man twice Da’s age, who knew from bitter experience that every path leads to the same sea and every urgent joy and sorrow are just phantom lights on the far side of an uncrossable channel. He passed the recital, with honors.

The Sammy’s crowd threw him a little bash a few days after our performance. My brother still hung with that crowd, for whatever sense of freedom they gave him. I’d fallen away, out of disgust. I preferred running through the coda of my current Beethoven sonata another thousand times to hearing my competitors evaluated even once more.