The Pianist
Barry Aitchison
The bone-thin hands appeared arthritic yet they moved with such sinewy
grace
as to put the lie to any such claim. So, too, his skeletal frame, made in
the mold of a Fred Astaire. His hair, as white as purity, coiled at his
ears, hiding most of the collar; thick well-groomed hair that framed his
caricature of a face.
He followed Patsy along the isle then took a seat beside her. Already the
orchestra was warming up, the almost melodious cacophony of randomness
challenging the concert hall.
“Thank you for inviting me, Miss de Angelo,” he said, in a voice of
honey-dripping honeycomb. “I tried for tickets as soon as I hit town, but
this orchestra is so popular.”
“Yes, they have that young Russian conductor tonight. You know they did
the
Ring Cycle recently and could have sold out twice over. Who did you say
your
friend was that knows Jason?”
He looked up and she was caught in the sapphire beams of his gaze. The
eyes
seemed brand new, young, out of phase with the rest of him. “Oh, you mean,
Hilde? Brilliant pianist. Plays the Rach 2 better than anyone.”
“And she plays with Jason in the YSO?”
He looked crestfallen. “How wonderful would that be. Unfortunately there
are
so few works for two pianos. I suppose I could write one.”
“You’re a composer, Franz? I didn’t know. Would I know any of your work?”
A smile of mystery preceded, “Anything is possible, Patsy. Ah, our young
conductor!”
The applause ascended and declined. “Has this fellow an affinity with
Beethoven?”
Patsy twisted her mouth. “He’s no Beethoven specialist. He made his name
with Mahler. Still, it’s the Seventh and that should be no challenge for
him.”
His stare was intense. “You consider the Seventh easy?”
He only just got the sentence out as the conductor’s baton fell and that
burst of sound that starts the Seventh claimed the hall. He turned back
towards the stage.
At first his right hand stayed oscillating just centimetres above his lap,
as he conducted the building first movement. Gradually, he became more
agitated, the hand edging out and up to conduct with a more demonstrative
passion than the conductor on stage. He seemed to meld two opposing
streams
of thought; his own conducting of the Fifth with angry instructions to the
conductor under his breath.
Alarm entered Patsy’s evening the moment Franz sprang from his chair,
muttering something about incompetence. “Use a metronome!” he called out,
presumably to the conductor, who looked up briefly at the gesticulating
man
with the spotlight behind his white mane. Franz remained on his feet,
despite the calls to ‘sit down, you clown’.
Patsy tolerated this, in a seething way, until half a chocolate éclair
came
flying from a side box to spread over her face. “Do you have to do that?”
she snapped at Franz, wiping her face with a tissue. “Did you see what
just
happened? I can’t believe it.”
He offered a hurried look, grunted, yet continued his relentless
conducting.
By now, however, his arm was beating the air mercilessly. Sibilant sounds
came from the rear that might have been hissing.
“Franz!” shouted Patsy, imprisoning her words to a whisper, “you must stop
this madness. People are hissing you. Sit down.”
He turned to her as he sat and smiled, such a beatific smile, then cocked
his head. “Me, dear lady? No one has ever done such a thing to me. It’s
him.
That impostor on stage. Look at him. He’s not feeling a thing for the
work.
He’s like a cadaver. Who is he?”
“His name is Igor Something-vitch. An unpronounceable name with a million
syllables. Oh, God, please, Franz, stop this stuff, you’re embarrassing
me.
Please stop.”
“But, madam, does his vivace not sound more— solemnis?”
Patsy had no answer for that. She was busy burrowing into the seat, her
head
well below the top to protect her from the occasional missiles that
continued to come their way.
“At last,” he said, as the first movement ended, “the torture has abated.
Now for the Allegretto. Perhaps he’ll flap in the breeze just a little
faster for the second movement.”
“Please, Franz, I’ll be the laughing stock of the Music Appreciation
Society. Do you think you could refrain from suggestions to the conductor
and stop your own conducting?”
His concern was reflected in the furrows of his frown. “I’ve been
intolerably thoughtless, Patsy. I beg your forgiveness. I will do my best,
but I find this buffoon an insult to Ludwig’s dear memory.”
Patsy loosed a sigh from deep down and relaxed, just a little. The
conductor
below brought down his baton and sound bloomed in the orchestra.
Franz bounced up like he’d been suddenly freed of a taut elastic band.
Next
second he was standing on his seat, screaming at the conductor. “Butcher!
Murderer! You make a dirge of the Allegretto. Shame on you. I say, string
him up, fellow music lovers. Who will join me?”
From the rear corners of the balcony, doors opened and security guards
appeared, looking around for the troublemaker. He wasn’t difficult to
find.
He was poised on the balcony rail, arms spread like a bird in flight, his
lean frame jerking back and forth in an attempt to keep his balance. In
the
meantime, the orchestra played on, the conductor looking up at Franz with
a
face of frowns. He was not alone, the whole orchestra had turned their
eyes
to the balcony. They had never seen a music-lover balance on a rail ten
metres above the floor during a performance.
“Charlatan! Fakir! You insult the memory of Ludwig by your lack of talent.
Leave now before I kill you for such intolerable disrespect.” Franz had a
voice that could top any opposing sound.
The conductor froze, his baton left suspended above his head. The
orchestra,
trained to allow nothing to interfere with a performance, hardly missed a
note.
“Go, you bumbling pig’s fart. Go!”
The Russian fled, wailing and stumbling towards the rear of stage.
But justice was about to be served with security closing in. Franz saw
this
as he twisted his body to regain his balance. Not fazed in the least,
Franz
bent his legs to a crouch before leaping into the space over the lower
floor, heading towards a chandelier suspended by a very long cable from
the
acoustically shaped architecture of the ceiling.
The chandelier seemed quite out of reach, a fact the audience appeared to
agree with for their collective cry of horror rose and fell in a way that
added a poignant touch to one particular part of the second movement. Yet,
as the sigh faded, Franz’s fingers were already twisting around the iron
hoop that framed the outside of the chandelier.
Another mighty gasp left the audience as Franz’s weight forced the
chandelier to tilt and swing wildly. He kicked at nothing in particular,
sending the constellation of electric candles jerking across the hall with
some in the audience now screaming hysterically.
“Get down from there right now,” screamed Patsy de Angelo, “or you can
forget cocktails.”
With what seemed absolute lunacy, Franz let go one hand and waved to the
audience. A cannon fire of enthusiastic applause shot back at him, but
Franz
was no longer there. His hand had been so sweaty that his grip had simply
slipped away and Franz was on his way down.
There are some for whom the natural laws of physics seem inapplicable.
Franz, with that jerky hand wave, had put the final gram of overstrain to
the cable and the cable had broken away from its tie-down and was lose.
This
allowed the chandelier to rocket to earth and it was close to the stage as
Franz slipped off. He fell five metres, into the comfortable lap of a
buxom
spinster who couldn’t believe her prayers had finally been answered.
Unfortunately, the chandelier continued on, cutting a swathe through the
orchestra’s instruments, quite deserted in haste by their owners.
The audience, open mouthed, waited breathlessly to see what Franz might do
next. He saw this and waved again. There was no doubt he had them in the
palm of his sweaty hand. Then he saw the piano and leapt up on the stage.
With guards climbing after him, Franz strode to the $150,000 Yamaha grand,
staring for a second at the name with a look of bewilderment before
flopping
a leg over the seat. The audience laughed good-naturedly. It didn’t last
for
long.
****
Beethoven composed his Fifth Piano Concerto around 1811, when he was
almost
totally deaf, yet it remains today the favourite piece of concert goers.
The
concert hall had heard the Fifth far more than any other composition and
had
been visited by some of the most famous classical pianists of the last
fifty
years to give their interpretations. Daniel Barenboim, Arthur Rubenstein
and
more recently, Evgeny Kissin had breathed a freshness into the piece. All
this celebrated history was about to lose significance.
With the members of the orchestra huddled in back of the brass section,
and
three security guards determined to bring down the man who disrupted an
im****tant concert on their watch, the white-haired stranger called Franz
sat
back and played the beginnings of the Fifth Piano Concerto, sans the
normal
initial burst of sound from the orchestra, of course. Suddenly the hall
was
swollen with magical notes, light and vibrant, curling around the edges
and
changing colour in the mind of the captivated listener. The guards were
halted by a hand signal from the leader of the orchestra. The musicians
were
running for their instruments.
Not a soul moved in the audience for the remainder of the concerto. No
one coughed or sneezed or burped or giggled mindlessly. No one left for a
desperate drink at the bar. Not a soul felt an urgent need to go to the
bathroom, for if they did, they never went. About the only moving things
in
the hall were the orchestra and Franz’s hands and his head as he flicked
his
white mane back out of his eyes.
The thunderous applause as the final note faded into history came after a
stunned silence where not a single sound disturbed the hall. Then the
roaring and cheering and foot-stamping was so intense, it might have done
a
finals football game proud.
Franz stood in the waves of sound, warming his old bones, arms stretched
to
receive them. Then when he had had his fill, he dropped off the stage and
strode out of the concert hall.
One question dominated the many conversations that ran around the hall
and
on stage. “Who was he? Who can play that well and be an unknown?” The
conversation bounced back and forth until Igor, the young Russian
conductor,
returned to the stage.
“Has he gone,” he asked, head twisting as he scanned the hall. “Who was
playing the piano? He must surely have been Russian.”
The answer came from all directions and Igor reeled backwards. “It was
that
fellow? But—he’s a barbarian. I have seen him somewhere. I never forget a
face.” Igor retreated back stage.
A security guard was escorting Patsy on to the stage by the time Igor
reappeared waving a poster in the air. “I found him,” he yelled. “I found
him.”
Like iron particles to a magnet, the orchestra assembled in a tight circle
with Igor as the hub.
“That’s not him,” the leader announced, emphatically, “that’s a
reproduction
of an old poster from the canteen. Paganini, isn’t it?”
“Liszt, actually, said the first violinist. “Same first name, Franz?
Little
bit Twilight Zone?”
The third flautist, a giant of a man, laughed a booming laugh that played
havoc with the hall’s echo control. “Yeah, right, like when did the dude
die? A hundred years ago?
“Almost two hundred,” said the blonde third cello, softly.
“Thanks,” said the third flautist, with a snarl. “Like, I needed you to
show
me up.”
“Actually, you didn’t,” she said. “You always do so well by yourself.”
“So, he looks a little like Franz Liszt, does he?” the leader asked.
“Exactly like, for my money,” said the third cello. “Why doesn’t someone
go
after him?”
But, they never did. You can chase a legend, but beware of catching one
for
they melt back into the orchestra of time while their melody lingers on
forever.
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