Powers, Richard: Orfeo

The choice feels a little maudlin. It’s not as though a human has died. Not Sara, the three a.m. call he can’t even imagine well enough to dread. Not Paul or Maddy or a former student. Not Richard. Only a pet, who had no clue what was happening. Only an old dog, who gave him unconditional joy and loyalty for no good reason.

He and Fidelio often attended imaginary musical funerals — preemptive memorials of pure sound. Nothing was more invigorating than dark music, the pleasure of a practice run, the chance to make imagination the equal of death. But tonight is no rehearsal. He has lost the one listening partner who could return to the same old pieces and hear them afresh each night, for the first time. A little lamp has gone out in my tent. Hail to the joyous light of the world .

The recording sits on his shelf, a prophecy from a hundred years ago. These five songs first taught Els how music might work. In the half century since, he has gone back to them through every sonic revolution. No music would ever again be as mysterious as this music was, the day he discovered it. But tonight he can listen one more time, take in their wild noise the way an animal might.

He fumbles the disc out of its jewel box while doing the math: an eight-year-old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started writing music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last. The accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of smash-up.

By the time Peter first heard Mahler’s songs, his own childhood had long since died. It ended with his father’s heart attack, the raft uprising. For a long time, nothing softened Peter’s guilt about that day more than listening to the best of his father’s records: the Jupiter , the Eroica , the Unfinished. Once or twice, the music reopened that purer world, just alongside his own. Then his mother got rid of all his father’s records, all his clothes, every possession that gave memory any power over the present. Without even asking her children, she donated the music to Goodwill.

Way too fast, Carrie Els got remarried, to a casualty actuary who’d worked with Peter’s father. Ronnie Halverson, a big, friendly man whose Bennett Cerf puns and quid pro quo morality were as inexorable as death, took gentle possession of the Els home. He filled the house with big bands on Saturday mornings while he fried up hash browns and omelets for all, and he never understood why his gifted stepson refused to hear, in the sweet, swinging liberty of Woody Herman and Artie Shaw, how the clarinet ought in fact to be handled. Peter made peace with the intruder, did his homework, delivered his newspapers, practiced, played in the local youth symphony, smiled at adults whenever they smiled at him, and scribbled down furious, revengeful tutti passages for enraged full orchestra, which he hid in a spiral-bound music notebook between his mattress and bed slats.

At fifteen, he fell in love with chemistry. The pattern language of atoms and orbitals made sense in a way that little else but music did. Balancing chemical equations felt like solving a Chinese puzzle box. The symmetries hidden in the columns of the periodic table had something of the Jupiter ’s grandeur. And a person might even make a living with the stuff.

Then, on the first day of senior year, from across a packed homeroom, Els spotted Clara Reston and recognized her as coming from a planet even more remote than his. He’d watched her with pained lust across the bowl of the high school orchestra the year before, primped up behind her cello in muslin skirts and thin-ribbed pullovers that the school should have banned, drawing her bow across her instrument with an all-denying smile. Slim-framed, her posture like a bookend, and with four feet of hair that fell below her knees, she looked like a Tolkien elf. And she could play the silliest arrangement of the state song as if it were the first tune ever to spring from Apollo’s lyre.

He gazed on Clara across the classroom in a stupor of admiration. As if he willed it, she lifted her eyes to intercept his and tilted her fine head, knowing everything. Her look said: Took you long enough. And in that glance, the morning of his life changed into blustery noon.

Two days later she came up to Peter in the hall and stepped on his right foot with the tip of hers. Hey, s he said. What do you think of the Zemlinsky Clarinet Trio ?

He’d never heard of Zemlinsky. She appraised him with a smile that hinted at a very long list of things he’d never heard of.

The next week, she had parts for them to sight-read. They spent two hours working through the Andante. Just the pair of them: the school had no pianist who could handle the piece. The movement started with an extended solo piano passage that Peter figured they’d skip. But Clara insisted they sit and count their measures of shared tacet. She could hear the ghostly keyboard as clearly as if it were there, playing alongside them. And soon enough, so could he.

They read through a dozen pieces that way — trios, quartets, quintets — their two lines sailing out over the hush of the missing instruments. Once they read a piece, they followed up by listening to a recording.

Listening alongside her, he began to make out the muted message that he’d always suspected lay underneath the surface of sounds. And watching Clara listen, he saw that she possessed a key that he did not.

Sometimes , she told him, when I listen? I’m everywhere .

Soon they were listening together two or three evenings a week. And before long, listening turned to another kind of playing.

In November, when Clara decided he was ready, she gave him the Kindertotenlieder . Els knew Mahler’s name, but had shunned the music. He’d accepted the prevailing opinion about the man: too long-winded, too banal, too neurotic, too twisted up in marches and ländlers and pub songs. How teenaged Clara came to love the still-little-heard composer, Peter never knew. Truth was, once she dropped the needle down on the first track of those five blighted songs, he had more urgent questions.

They listened in Clara’s room, with the door cracked open wide enough for propriety, while her parents prepared dinner a floor below. A night in November 1959: Earth’s first artificial moons threaded the black sky above them. The phonograph spun, the song began its chromatic wanderings, and Peter Els never heard music the same way again.

As the songs played, Clara hovered over him. Her four feet of hair, which hadn’t been touched by a scissors since she was six because of the pain she claimed to feel, draped him like a tent in the wilderness. Flushed and confused, her face a little cloudy, she undid the buttons of her pink seersucker blouse and placed his hand inside. And they sat stock-still, blood pounding, tangled in each other, listening to the muted reds and russets of dying children.

The story would stay with Peter better than the details of his own childhood: How in the first year of the new century, Mahler the wanderer, three times homeless — a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew throughout the world — collapsed from a massive hemorrhage brought on by overwork. Only hasty surgery saved his life. During his forced convalescence, he fixed on a collection by Friedrich Rückert of more than four hundred poems to his two young children, who died of scarlet fever within two weeks of each other.