Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

This ancient combination presents itself as a threat once again in the post-Romantic age, the source of a scandal that might blow up at any moment. The raw element of virtuosity, born of the gutter, the dirt, and the dust, stooping at nothing, in the hands of the “foreign” — Jews, gypsies, mediums — is balanced by the presence of standards, the flowering of complete ordinariness that knows its boundaries and is pleased with this knowledge. The cheerful little Parisian art studios are pleasurable forays into the life of a Bohemian. With the same cozy pleasure the novel’s heroes perform Romantic and realist roles, drawing toreadors and coal miners. Painting in Du Maurier’s novel belongs to the decent world — but music is to be avoided at all cost.

George du Maurier himself drew cartoons for Punch for several decades, caricaturing modern aesthetics, the emancipation of women, the mass enthusiasm for china. He was especially excited by the comic potential in technological progress: “ Please look a little pleasant, Miss. I know it’s hard; but it’s only for a moment !” says a photographer to a young woman. Elderly parents sit by an enormous plasma screen, called the “telephonoscope,” and watch their offspring play lawn tennis. A housewife gaily operates dozens of levers: pull one and you hear an opera transmission from Bayreuth, turn another and it’s from St. James’s Hall. One hundred and fifty years later the jokes aren’t so very funny, the problems they face are pint-size (“doll-like, puppetlike” as the poet Elena Shvarts writes), but one of the drawings from 1878, a year after the phonograph was invented, is incredibly touching.

A woman in a housecoat and a man in a jacket and hat stand studying the contents of a wine cellar. They have already chosen a few bottles and they are intently looking round at the shelves, but the bottles contain voices, and not wine. The long caption (all Du Maurier’s captions are long) reads:

By the telephone sound is converted into electricity, and then, by completing the circuit, back into sound again. Jones converts all the pretty music he hears during the season into electricity, bottles it, and puts it away into bins for his winter parties. All he has to do, when his guests arrive, is to select, uncork, and then complete the circuit; and there you are!

On the wine cellar’s shelves are Rubinstein, Tosti, all the musical hits of the period, long since scattered and vanished; opera stars whose voices we have been told about but will never hear. Perhaps only Adelina Patti, recorded later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, can still be heard, although it’s a strange sensation, the voice barely emerges from the bottle throat, and the 1904 coloratura sends shivers down the spine, as if a ghost were tickling you. The other inhabitants of the wine cellar were not so lucky. The more famous ones look down at us from old photographs: garlanded, bright-eyed, monochrome. One or two didn’t even have this honor, just a name, a few mentions: “never made gramophone recordings of her voice”; date of death unknown. Sometimes the picture ripples, there is the flicker of an anecdote: St. Petersburg students once lay in the February snow so Christina Nilsson could walk across them to her coach. In another story she’s taking aim in a damp, cold wood and firing — and the bear drops down to the ground, flat as a bearskin rug. Here’s another: the graduates of West Point each cut a golden button from their dress coat and make from the buttons a heavy golden wreath to lay on the singer’s shoulders as a souvenir of her audience. The aria swells, but we can’t hear a single note. The “great Trebelli,” as Joyce called her, putting on her men’s clothes to play the role of Gounod’s Siébel: white stockings, ruffled sleeves, and a white feather. Another diva signed her name on the wall of a London restaurant where they served borscht on a Sunday: blue curtains, light-blue wallpaper, and the autographs of the habitués preserved under a piece of glass.

Somewhere in the lowest drawers of my parents’ polished cabinet were deposits of sheet music. There was no one with any musical skill left in the family to sort through the scores. When we moved to a new apartment in 1974, the piano that had stood for seventy years in the old apartment was on the list of essentials , what needed to be taken up into the new life. The millipede-like dining table that could seat twenty, the huge carved sideboard that looked like a house, the rocking chair and the chandelier with its serried rows of crystals — all remained in the old life. But the “musical instrument,” like the portrait of a half-forgotten relative, took up its position against the wall and stood patiently, putting up with my reluctant scales, studies, and Old French chansons until they dried up of their own accord.

The pages of music were a different matter. The jumbled sheets were marked with little blackberry stains of sound I couldn’t decipher, but they were interesting for other reasons: their names written in a spidery script, running from beat to beat, syllable to syllable, with my finger following. These had nothing in common with the everyday Soviet world: “Lit-tle-black-boy-Tom, in-Alger-ia-born, where none-fear-death and love-is-strong.” Sometimes a piece of music would be illustrated. I have a dim memory of the cover of “The Salon Waltz: A Dream of Love after the Ball,” cherubs teeming under the sleeping debutante, the silky puff of her gown, her tiny slippers on the carpet. All this seemed ancient, and not because of its remoteness in time — at that point, the 1920s felt like yesterday. Then and now were completely irreconcilable. We had our own intimate pleasures, but they were from an entirely different songbook with different lyrics: the wooden seats on the train to the dacha and the noisy blue-tinged counters at the grocery shop, with their alkaline tang and sour-cream smell. Next door in the hardware store the wooden drawers held oily mounds of nails of differing sizes and shapes; at the market black-eared rabbits were sold alongside poorly gilded wooden angels; farther on, a line for liters of fermented kvas stretched as far as the telephone box.

The music my relatives bought over the years was not complicated, it was meant to be played at family gatherings: waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos to dance to at home; Tchaikovsky romances, “We will be silent, you and I”; and a Technicolor range of hit parade numbers for singsongs. On the back of the sheets the names of other songs were pressed together in a list, a hundred or more on each sheet. The sight of them gave me to understand the volume of sound that had been lost and gone underground, pushed out beyond the periphery of the known world.

None of this can be reproduced, least of all the kinds of feelings brought on by “Romances and Songs from Gypsy Life”: the endless sweet friends , the stars and the sunsets, the misty morns and gray dawns, dark nights and sleigh bells, the perfumed white acacia and the roses, the “sweet scent of you”; when the lilac blossoms, and countless “I want to love!” and “I don’t want to forget!” It’s hard to imagine all this being sung, murmured, and squawked by a million voices all at once: voices in tenements and rented rooms, in offices and on dacha verandas, over keyboards and to gramophone records. It poured from open windows like water from a watering can until it had flooded all Russia. Even when it began to disappear it still buzzed like a spinning top as it soaked into the ground. The simple quantity of music held in the airwaves back then, a time still unused to other joys, was enormous: it swelled in vast rainclouds, forever promising rain.

Du Maurier’s cartoon advised bottling what had already been conserved, wound onto black shellac records. When sound was first recorded, the many imitators of Adelina Patti, pouring their own more modest voices into the romances and arias of Glinka, were out of a job. Caruso and Chaliapin now strode into the family parlor. In the new century people didn’t sing, they sang along and they knew the music not from the page, but from the voice, the raw and irresistible original. Fewer people now played music, and more listened to it; music imperceptibly ceased being a domestic affair at about the same time as domesticity itself began to reveal its ephemeral quality. Pillowcase-size, light as a feather, it could be folded into a traveling case. Music, like much else, became an instance of deferring to authority, his master’s voice . Listeners gathered around the communal radio, they swapped gramophone records, they rushed to the cinema to hear the jazz recordings played before the feature.