Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Then what would you have me do?

It’s not about what I’d have you do, it’s what I’d have your neighbor do. It wasn’t always like this. Think of Gluck, what the reception at the premiere of Iphigenia must have been like. These people were barbarians . I don’t even think they had seats back then. The guy behind you slopping his mead onto your shoulder, fist-fights, if you had to piss you did it in the corner. Do you think they clapped politely if they didn’t particularly like what they heard?

You’re thinking of Elizabethan theater. Gluck was Vienna, the Enlightenment. Your average Hans didn’t go to the opera. It was strictly the powdered-wig crowd.

Then Monteverdi, Orpheus , if you want Elizabethan times. Fine, or a more recent example, Le Sacre du Printemps .

May 1913. Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Stravinsky’s savage rhythms and Nijinsky’s flat-footed rendition of the pagan rites of rural Russia provoke catcalls from the audience. Fellow composer in attendance Camille Saint-Saëns storms out. Supporters shout for the catcallers to sit down, and the catcallers tell the supporters to shut the hell up, and soon enough a punch is thrown, followed by an aisle brawl. The scene, astonishingly, degenerates into a full-scale riot. Stravinsky slips out the back door just as the Paris police are arriving to restore order.

That’s real, Arthur said. That’s honest. A standing ovation from that crowd would be something to be proud of. But these days, a standing ovation is meaningless. It’s gotten so an ovation is expected of any performance that doesn’t go horribly awry. How absurd is that? Go see Sacre at the City Ballet today, and I guarantee you five out of five performances get a standing ovation. Why? Have the performances gotten that much better? Or the music itself? Has our intrepid composition teacher given a private ear stretching to each audience member so she can appreciate Stravinsky better? Hardly. They’re standing and clapping because it’s expected. You say it’s all one big dare game with modern music, that composers are alienating their audiences at a time when we should be cultivating them, but this code of manners, this politeness, is smothering art, and composers are just trying to fight for their survival. That’s why we’re pushing pianos off stages, why we prefer the riot to the ovation. The riot has become the ovation of the twentieth century. At least it’s honest.

You’re telling me that if you win this competition, when you get up there on that stage and perform, you don’t want people to clap?

I want people to be honest. Anyway, they’d be clapping for my performance, not for Mozart.

What about your cadenza, I ask. (That moment in a concerto where the orchestra stops playing, and the soloist, freed from the baton’s constraints — freed even from the composer’s constraints — is given space to let loose, to show his stuff. It’s an open hole in the score, to be filled by the performer. Way back when, it had been an improvised flourish less than a minute long, though throughout the ages this practice has devolved into lengthy, shameless displays of virtuosity. Rarely improvised anymore, these spots that composers once left blank have been filled in by transcriptions of legacy performances — Paganini, Heifetz, Kreisler — included in modern editions; and, although marked “optional” most often they were performed verbatim.)

I said, I assume you’re not planning on performing one of those store-bought cadenzas, are you?

I wasn’t planning to, he said. No.

So you’re telling me that when writing your own cadenza, you’re going to go for the riot and not the ovation ?

Maybe I should, he said.

Mozart’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, K271a. Odd choice for someone counting on winning this competition. Of the dozen violinists on the roster, half are playing Mozart violin concertos. Arthur is one of three this year auditioning with the Seventh; and both of the others study in the same studio with Arthur. He isn’t exactly making himself heard with his choice of repertoire.

But the moment Arthur’s bow touches string, it is clear why he’s chosen the piece all the other violinists are playing: he’s encouraging comparison. The difference is so clear, so sharp, as to surprise one into a new awareness about the nature of greatness. Arthur’s control is astonishing. His pianissimi a throaty whisper, his fortissimos a roar. His sound is a personality all to itself, a presence that seems to hover somewhere between the top of his head and the grand, twinkling chandelier. Whereas with the previous player each gesture was a reminder of a technique perfectly mastered, Arthur’s playing is somehow beyond technique and manages that contradictory illusion of making the impossible seem effortless. It is as though Arthur is displaying some essential mystery of music’s unalterable truth, a truth the other player’s fastidious attention to technique all but obscured.

Holy moly, Pei-Yee whispers, crouched in her seat, this guy’s good!

By the end of the first movement, there isn’t a single person in that concert hall not held rapt by his sound. If I am any measure of what the rest of the contestants are feeling right then, Arthur won to a collective capitulation.

When he is done, there is a moment of awestruck silence. I’m thinking of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind , when the mother ship lands and everyone watches this perfect glowing being emerge, ending once and for all any doubts any of them still might have had. That is who we have in our midst. Or maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe before us is the only real native of a land in which the rest of us — including the judges — are aliens. The only one among us who can speak the language fluently.

I tell Pei-Yee that I have to use the bathroom (Wait, I think you’re next!) and go to my practice room and gather my things. My mother is surprised to see me home so early but is glad for the extra hand and enlists me in helping her with dinner.

And dare I ask how the contest went?

The best man won, I say. Unfortunately, that man turned out not to be me.

The previous year mourned the fluke loss of the ASO’s entire cello section: six of its most advanced players to graduation, the principal to our more prestigious Midtown rival, and Mischa — who’d been doubling his shot at a college scholarship as his school’s star forward on the basketball court — to a broken forefinger, out for the season. This has meant a begrudging promotion of most of our rank from the intermediate orchestra, at least until the school could recruit some better cellists. I used to sit in the back row and fake my way through silently, timing my bow movements with the fellows in front of me. Here, in the advanced orchestra, this strategy has failed.

Mr. Strasser was a ferocious little man who refused to suffer our inferior cello section quietly. Hold it! He’d call, then turning to address the empty seats in the auditorium: Is there a veterinarian in the house? Hello? Quick, we have a dying moose over here! To each of us in turn he’d point. From your entrance, if you’d be so kind. Rooting out each foul note with the tip of his baton.

Darling, your sound. How shall I put it? Your sound could give my deaf grandmother a stroke. And she’s been dead thirty years !

In retrospect, I see that his cruelties were not baseless; on the contrary, they were particularly effective in whipping me into shape. For the first time I began practicing my part, and with better discipline than I practiced the piano. I worked over tricky passages until I had them down, memorized even, careful to keep my fingering consistent, bowings as marked. Anything to avoid the humiliation of being called out to saw away in front of a roomful of glaring musicians. I began listening to my fellow cellists and picking out the lightest touch of the baton in our direction. By the night of the Spring Concert we are actually carrying our weight, more or less. Gone is the sneer on Mr. Strasser’s face when looking in our direction. We have improved. We have passed his test. All right darlings, he says to us by way of pep talk. Put on your best underwear and play like that next Saturday and we’ll have a show!