What is for you will not pass you by.
In 1985, I went to hear the great Austrian pianist, Rudolph Serkin play Beethoven at Carnegie Hall. Serkin was 82 years old. I was thirty. To close the program Serkin played Beethoven’s opus 81, the sonata aptly called Les Adieux, the goodbye. He had likely been playing that piece for close to 75 years. What could he possibly have left to say with that piece?
This post is about inevitabilities- things that don’t let go of us. Mysterious things that come into our lives in the most surprising and persistent ways.
I was first drawn to play when I was 10 years old, listening at the top of the stairs to my sister’s piano lessons. Adriann responded to my ‘teach me to play’ request by writing the names of the notes in pencil on the keys, placing a book of popular tunes with accompanying chord symbols on the music rack and leaving me alone.
The piano became my secret, a clandestine love affair that blossomed at night when I turned the lights off and improvised sounds that delighted me.
I wouldn’t take lessons- I was afraid the magic would be spoiled, and it was contrary to my youthful identity as an athlete. But in the Spring of my Sophomore year in college, I had a mystical visitation and the voice from the beyond the veil asked me, ‘if you could do anything in this world, no ifs and buts, but just your pure desire, what would that be’, I surprisingly, and immediately replied, ‘I would be a pianist’.
I left college and began piano lessons, studying with Michael Cannon, who lived with his partner Paul Fish, in an elegant and sophisticated duplex apartment on the upper West Side. Paul was complex and a bundle of angst, and fittingly, a phenomenal interpreter of Beethoven. Michael, was a born performer with a natural technique and in his teaching studio, which had side by side grand pianos, he blew my mind at our very first lesson, explaining how to produce tone through relaxed weight that flowed from the spine, right down into the fingers. I hadn’t given it any thought up to that point.
I studied with Michael for 19 months before being accepted to Manhattan School of Music.
My first teacher at MSM was Raymond Lewenthal, a towering figure and an impressively dynamic performer from Hollywood who fashioned himself an inheritor of the Romantic tradition – think Byron and Goethe; think virtuosic, pre-rock star, Franz Liszt. He even taught in a 19th century style master class, eschewing the more customary private lessons given in other teacher’s studios, so that we could learn from each other’s playing. It’s a grand and creative idea, and really everything about Raymond was grand and creative- his programming of concerts, his playing, his writings- he was something. But he wasn’t the right teacher for me.
In my third year of study, which would be my last with Raymond, he gave me the piece you just heard. He handed me these four pages of Xeroxed music, with a title that made little sense to me, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, Crying, Worrying, Losing Heart), Liszt’s tribute to Bach’s stunning cantata of the same name. I never learned it. I just didn’t have the requisite skills or musical sophistication to play that piece, and somehow, I knew it. But I also knew that Raymond had given me something precious, that he had seen something in me that made him hand me that music. And each time Jeanine and I moved house, or we cleaned out our music cabinet, and I came across the Liszt piece, I tucked it back into the ‘keep this’ pile, not really knowing when or if I would ever learn this little played piece.
I left Raymond’s studio after being placed on probation at MSM and was reassigned to a teacher who was right for me, a gifted educator and artist, Zenon Fishbein. It was a painful time for me, and I had to find a way through the shame I felt being on probation. I thought of quitting, but my father, whose big dream for me was that I become a doctor or a dentist, said, ‘you can’t quit now. If you do, you’ll never know if you were meant to have this life’. My agoraphobic father summoning courage for both of us.This year, Jesse Lee Methodist music director Sarah Fox challenged our choir to sing Bach’s cantata for Good Friday. Bach had written it for Jubilate, the third Sunday after Easter when he was Konzertmeister at Weimar. For the entirety of Lent, I had asked Sarah to allow me opportunities to attempt to recapture a solo performer role. I hadn’t felt comfortable in that role, for a very long time. Sarah graciously granted my request, and granted it again when I suggested playing the Liszt on the same program as the Bach cantata. And so, after carrying and housing those four pages of unknown promise around for forty-two years, I began the process of learning it, which felt like a homecoming of sorts.
That evening in Carnegie Hall with Rudolph Serkin playing Les Adieux I had no an answer to the question, ‘what could he possibly have left to say with this piece?’ From where I sit now, the answer seems inextricably linked to the shape of a human life and the change that drives that shape.
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