Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

I was outside the concert hall, waiting for a taxi, when she called to me from behind. F* was with a woman friend then, a small, slim, beautiful friend. F* herself was rather tall, just a bit shorter than I am.

“I know a nice place just down the street,” she said. “Would you care to go have a glass of wine or something?”

Sounds good, I told her. The night was still young, and I was feeling some lingering frustration over the concert. I felt like having a glass or two of wine and talking with someone about fine music.

The three of us settled down in a small bistro in a nearby side street, ordered wine and some snacks, but her lovely friend soon got up to take a phone call. A family member had called telling her that her cat was sick. So then it was just F* and me. But I wasn’t especially disappointed, since by this time I was starting to be interested in F*. She had excellent taste in clothes and wore an obviously high-end blue silk dress. The jewelry she wore was perfect, too. Simple, but the kind that caught your eye. It was then that I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring.

She and I talked about the concert. We agreed that the violinist hadn’t been at her best. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or had some pain in her fingers, or maybe she wasn’t happy with the hotel room she’d been provided. But no doubt something was wrong. You’re sure to run across those kinds of things when you attend concerts often enough.

We moved on to talking about the kinds of music we liked. We agreed that we both liked piano music the best. Of course we listened to opera, symphonies, and chamber music, but what we liked best was solo piano music. And strangely enough, there was a lot of overlap in our favorite pieces. Neither of us could get too enthusiastic for long about Chopin. At least it wasn’t what we wanted to hear first thing in the morning. Mozart’s piano music was beautiful, and charming, for sure, but frankly we’d grown tired of it. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was amazing, but a bit too long to really focus on. You had to be in good physical shape to properly appreciate it. Beethoven’s piano music sometimes struck us as overly serious, and (we believed) it had been dissected enough already, from every conceivable angle. Brahms’s piano music was lovely to listen to on occasion, but exhausting if heard all the time. Not to mention often boring. And with Debussy and Ravel you had to carefully choose the time and place you heard them in, or else you couldn’t fully appreciate their music.

Without a doubt, we decided, the pinnacle of the piano repertoire was several Schubert sonatas, and the music of Schumann. Of all those, which one would you choose?

JUST ONE?

That’s right, F* said, just one. The one piano piece you would take with you to a desert island.

Not an easy question. I had to give it some serious thought.

Schumann’s Carnaval , I finally declared.

F* narrowed her eyes and gazed at me for a long time. She then rested her hands on the table, laced them together, and loudly cracked the knuckles. Exactly ten times. So loud that people at nearby tables glanced our way. It was a hard sound, like snapping a three-day-old baguette on your knee. There aren’t that many people—men or women—who can crack their knuckles that loudly. I figured it out later, but loudly cracking her knuckles ten times was her habit when she was excited and enthusiastic. I didn’t know that then, however, and wondered if something had upset her. Probably my choice of Carnaval was inappropriate. But there it was. The fact was, I’ve always loved the piece. Even if it made someone so angry that they wanted to punch me, I still wasn’t going to lie about it.

“You’re really going to go with Carnaval ?” She frowned, raised one long finger, making sure of things. “As the one piece out of all piano pieces you’d take with you to a desert island?”

I felt unsure, now that she said this. In order to preserve Schumann’s incoherent piano music, beautiful as a kaleidoscope, and somehow beyond the bounds of human intellect, was I really willing to chuck Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Well-Tempered Clavier ? Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and his brave, and charming, Third Concerto?

A brief, heavy silence followed, while F* pushed her fists together hard a few times, as if checking how her hands were doing.

“You have wonderful taste,” she finally said. “And I admire your courage. I’m with you. Schumann’s Carnaval would be my choice too.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I’ve always loved it. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I hear it.”

We went on for some time discussing the piece. We ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir, and finished it as we talked. We became friends of a sort that evening. Carnaval buddies. Though this relationship only lasted about a half a year.

SO WE MADE OUR OWN kind of two-member-only, private Carnaval Club. There was no reason that it had to be limited to just two, but it never exceeded that number. Since we never ran across anyone else as crazy about the piece as we were.

We listened to numerous records and CDs of performances of Carnaval , and if a pianist was including the piece in his concert, we did everything we could to attend together. According to my notebook (I took copious notes on each and every performance), we went to live performances of Carnaval by three separate pianists, and listened together to forty-two CDs and records of the piece. Afterward we’d cozily exchange opinions on them. Turns out that a lot of pianists, in all times and places, have recorded the piece, which seemed to be a popular part of their repertoire. For all that, we only found a handful of performances acceptable.

A performance could be technically flawless, but if the technique was not completely in sync with the music, Carnaval collapsed into nothing more than a mechanical finger exercise, and its appeal vanished. It was, indeed, very challenging to pull off the expression just right, beyond the abilities of your run-of-the-mill pianist. I won’t name anyone, but not a few major pianists made recordings of fumbled performances, bereft of any charisma. And many other pianists avoided playing it altogether. (At least that’s the only thing I can surmise.) Vladimir Horowitz loved Schumann’s music and performed it throughout his career, but for some reason never made a proper recording of Carnaval . And the same can be said of Sviatoslav Richter. And I can’t be the only person who would one day love to hear Martha Argerich perform the piece.

INCIDENTALLY, almost none of Schumann’s contemporaries understood how wonderful his music was. Mendelssohn and Chopin, for instance, didn’t think much of Schumann’s piano music. Even Schumann’s widow, Clara (one of the top pianists of her time), who devotedly played his music, secretly wished that he had focused on more standard-type operas or symphonies rather than this kind of whimsical composition. Basically, Schumann wasn’t fond of classical forms like the sonata, and occasionally his pieces came across as rambling and starry-eyed. He moved away from the existing classical forms, which resulted in the birth of a new type of music, the Romantic school, but most of his contemporaries thought his work was eccentric, lacking a solid foundation and content. It was this bold eccentricity, however, that propelled the rise of Romantic music.

AT ANY RATE, during those six months the two of us listened to Carnaval every chance we got. That wasn’t all we listened to, of course—Mozart and Brahms were on our menu from time to time—but whenever we met, we’d end up listening to a version of Carnaval and share our reactions to the performance. I was our little club’s secretary, and noted down summaries of our opinions. She came to my house several times, but more often than not I went to hers, as she lived near the center of the city, while I was out in the suburbs. After hearing forty-two recorded versions of the piece, her number one choice was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s recording for Angel Records, and mine was Arthur Rubinstein’s RCA recording. We carefully graded each and every disc we listened to, knowing of course that it really didn’t amount to much. It was just an extra bit of fun thrown in. What was most important to us was talking about the music we loved, the feeling of almost aimlessly sharing something we were passionate about.