The Recital

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 27: The Recital

Martin Kelley's last concert with the Oregon Symphony was on a Saturday evening in June, the program Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the symphony with the choral finale, the symphony that contained everything — the darkness of the first movement, the fury of the scherzo, the tenderness of the adagio, the transcendence of the Ode to Joy — and Martin had said, months ago, at the kitchen table on Belmont over tea, that the Ninth was the appropriate ending, that the Ninth left nothing unsaid, and Clara had agreed without fully understanding what Martin meant, had agreed as a statement about music without understanding it as a statement about ending, about the act of leaving a thing you have done for twenty-seven years, about the silence that follows the last note of the last concert.

She understood it now.

Clara arrived at the Schnitzer at seven o'clock, entering through the public entrance — the front door, the audience door, the door she had begun using in December when she attended the Brahms, the door that marked her as a listener rather than a worker, a member of the audience rather than the person who had prepared the instrument — and she walked through the lobby in the crowd, in the press of people dressed for the occasion, the Saturday-evening audience in their dark suits and their dresses, and Clara was wearing what Clara wore, jeans and a clean sweater and boots, the uniform of a person who did not dress for occasions but who was present for them, who showed up not in costume but in herself.

Yuki was not with her tonight. Tonight was between Clara and Martin, between the ex-wife and the retiring cellist, between two people who had organized their lives around listening and who were both, in their different ways, approaching the end of the listening they had known — Martin leaving the orchestra, Clara leaving the tuning — and the approaching was not the same, was not equivalent, Martin's departure chosen and Clara's compelled, Martin leaving because he was ready and Clara leaving because her ear required it, but the approaching had a similar shape, had the same quality of moving toward a threshold beyond which the daily practice would cease and the daily identity would change.

She found her seat — tenth row, center, the same acoustic position she had chosen for the Brahms — and she sat and waited. The hall filled. The lights dimmed. The orchestra filed onto the stage, and Clara looked for Martin and found him — fourth chair, cello section, second row, the position he had occupied for twenty-seven years, the chair that was his, the stand that was his, the place on the stage that his body had occupied for thousands of rehearsals and hundreds of concerts, the place from which he had produced his sound, his part of the orchestral sound, the individual voice that blended with the other voices to produce the collective.

He was wearing concert blacks. His hair was gray in the stage lights. His cello was between his knees, the German instrument, the instrument he had played for thirty years, and he was sitting the way he always sat — upright, attentive, the bow in his right hand, the left hand on the neck of the cello, the posture of a musician waiting for the downbeat.

The chorus filed in. A hundred voices, the Portland Symphonic Choir, the singers who would join the orchestra in the fourth movement for the Ode to Joy, and the singers filled the risers behind the orchestra, their black folders held at their sides, their faces lit by the stage lights, and the hall was full now, orchestra and chorus and audience, the three constituencies of the concert assembled, and the conductor walked on stage and the audience applauded and the conductor bowed and turned to the orchestra and raised the baton.

The Ninth began.

It began with a sound that was not quite a sound — a tremolo in the strings, a murmur, an instability, the violins playing an open fifth on A and E that was not a melody but a texture, a vibration, the musical equivalent of the universe before the Big Bang, the sound of something about to become something, and Clara heard the tremolo and felt it in her body, in her sternum, the low frequencies of the cellos and basses vibrating in her bones, and the tremolo grew, built, accumulated, the texture becoming denser, the murmur becoming a roar, and then the first theme arrived — D minor, the horns and the strings in unison, the theme that was not a melody so much as a declaration, a statement of purpose, the music announcing itself with the authority of something inevitable.

Clara listened. She listened with the full capacity of her hearing, with the ear that was diminished above 6,000 hertz but that was, in the range of the orchestra, in the range of the strings and the brass and the woodwinds, extraordinary. The orchestra's frequency range was approximately 30 hertz to 15,000 hertz, but the energy was concentrated in the middle — in the 100-to-4,000 hertz range where the fundamentals of all the instruments lived, where the melodies and the harmonies and the rhythms were produced, where the music was — and this range was Clara's range, was the range where her hearing was undiminished, where her ear was still the ear Leonard had trained.

She heard the cellos. She heard Martin's cello, or believed she heard it, knew she could not actually isolate Martin's sound from the sound of the section — the whole point of the section was the blending, the merging, the subordination of the individual to the collective — but she believed she heard his tone, his vibrato, his particular way of drawing the bow that produced a sound that was slightly darker than the section average, slightly more weighted toward the fundamental, the sound of a player who had spent twenty-seven years listening to the section and adjusting his sound to blend with it, not by eliminating his individuality but by offering it in service of the whole.

The first movement unfolded. The D minor fury, the developmental passages, the recapitulation, the coda. Clara heard it all. Every note, every chord, every dynamic shift, every entrance, every silence. The hearing loss was irrelevant here. The hearing loss existed above the range of the music, above the range of the concert experience, in a territory that the orchestra did not occupy, and Clara's ear in the territory the orchestra did occupy was complete, was full, was the ear of a person who had spent her life listening to music and who could hear, in the orchestral texture, details that most audience members could not — the slight sharpness of the oboe in the development section, the slightly wide vibrato of the second violin section leader, the precision of the timpani's tuning, the D and the A matched to the orchestra's A at 440, the pitch that Clara had set on the Steinway that afternoon — no, not that afternoon, months ago, the Steinway was Yuki's now — the pitch that was the same pitch regardless of who set it.

The second movement, the scherzo, followed without pause — the timpani's solo, the rhythmic drive, the fugal passages, the music fierce and relentless — and then the third movement, the adagio, and the adagio was where Clara felt Martin's leaving most acutely, because the adagio was the movement where the strings sang most purely, where the cello section's voice was most prominent, where the melody passed from the violins to the cellos and back, and the cellos sang the melody with a tenderness that was the tenderness of musicians who knew this was the last time, who were playing this adagio for one of their own, for the fourth chair who was leaving after twenty-seven years.

Clara did not know whether the other musicians knew this was Martin's last concert. She did not know whether Martin had told the section, whether the conductor had acknowledged it, whether the program note mentioned it. She knew only that the adagio was tender, was played with a quality of attention that was heightened, that was more than usual, that was the quality of playing that occurs when the musicians are aware of the significance of the moment, and the significance was — Clara felt it in the hall, felt it in the sound, felt it in the space between the notes — the significance was the ending, the leaving, the silence that would follow the last note.

The fourth movement began. The recitative, the bass soloist, the review of the previous movements' themes — each one recalled and rejected, the music searching for something it had not yet found — and then the Ode to Joy theme, the melody that Beethoven had been working toward for the entire symphony, the melody that was the most famous melody in Western music, the melody that was simple and profound and inevitable, the melody arriving not as a surprise but as a destination, the place the music had been going all along.

The chorus stood. A hundred voices. The Ode to Joy swelled in the Schnitzer Concert Hall, the orchestra and the chorus and the soloists all sounding together, the full force of the ensemble producing a sound that was — Clara sat in the tenth row and received the sound — a sound that was beyond analysis, beyond frequency and amplitude and timbre, beyond the categories that Clara's trained ear applied to every sound it heard. The sound was the Ninth. The sound was Beethoven's argument that joy was achievable, that the human spirit could transcend its suffering, that the darkness of D minor could resolve to the light of D major, and the argument was made not in words — the words were Schiller's, were in German, were a poem about brotherhood and the divine spark — the argument was made in sound, in the combination of all the sounds, all the instruments, all the voices, all the frequencies from the lowest bass to the highest soprano, and Clara heard them, heard all of them that her ears could hear, which was almost all, was the vast majority, was everything except the highest overtones of the highest voices, and the everything-except was enough, was sufficient, was right enough to receive the Ninth, to hear the argument, to feel the joy.

The symphony ended. The last chord — D major, the resolution, the light — rang in the hall, the full orchestra and chorus sustaining it, the sound immense, the hall vibrating, the air thick with the combined energy of a hundred and fifty musicians and a hundred singers and an audience of 2,776, all of them participating in the sound, the audience through their attention, their stillness, their held breath, and the chord decayed and the conductor held the baton aloft and the silence arrived and the silence was — was the silence that follows the Ninth, which is unlike any other silence in music, is the silence of completion, of having said everything, of having arrived at the destination, the silence that Beethoven earned by writing four movements that moved from darkness to light, from D minor to D major, from suffering to joy.

The applause began. The hall stood. Clara stood. The applause was thunder, was waves, was the audience giving back to the musicians the energy the musicians had given the audience, and Clara applauded and watched the stage and watched Martin, who was standing with the cello section, who was bowing with the orchestra, who was — Clara saw it — who was looking out into the audience, looking for her, and their eyes met across the distance of the stage and the tenth row, and Martin's expression was — was the expression of a person who had just done the thing for the last time and who knew it and who was not grieving but was complete, was finished, was the expression of a resolution, a D major chord after four movements of struggle.

Clara met Martin in the lobby after the concert. He had changed out of concert blacks into a sweater and jeans, his cello case in his hand, and he looked — lighter. Clara noticed it. The lightness of a person who has set down a weight they have been carrying for twenty-seven years, the weight not a burden but a responsibility, and the setting-down was not a relief exactly but a change in posture, a straightening, a settling into a new shape.

"You played beautifully," Clara said.

"The section played beautifully. I was part of the section."

"You were."

"For the last time."

They stood in the lobby as the crowd thinned, the audience dispersing into the June evening, the long light of the Portland summer still holding at nine-thirty, the sky not yet dark, the city lit by the last of the sun and the first of the streetlamps.

"How does it feel," Clara said.

Martin considered the question. He held the cello case at his side, the case that contained the instrument he would continue to play — at home, in the quartet at Reed College, for himself — but not here, not on this stage, not in this hall.

"It feels like the last chord of the Ninth," Martin said. "Complete. Resolved. Not sad. Or not only sad. The sadness is there but the resolution is larger than the sadness. The D major is larger than the D minor."

Clara looked at Martin, at his face, at the expression that was lighter than she had seen it in years, and she thought about the difference between Martin's ending and her own, the difference between choosing to stop and being required to stop, between retiring and declining, between the resolution and the diminuendo, and the difference was real, was significant, was the difference between a chord that resolves and a tone that fades, between an ending that is composed and an ending that is imposed.

But the silence that followed was the same. The silence after Martin's last concert and the silence after Clara's last tuning would be the same quality of silence — the silence of the completed, the silence of the done, the silence that was not empty but full, full of everything that had preceded it, shaped by the sound that had filled it.

"Walk me to my car," Martin said.

They walked through the June evening, the warm air, the long light, the city quiet after the concert, and they walked without speaking, the silence between them the silence of two people who had heard the same music and who did not need to discuss it, the silence that was itself a form of listening, a way of hearing the echo of the Ninth in the air of the city, and Clara listened to the echo and heard it in the frequencies she had, in the range that was hers, in the vast middle of the audible world where the Beethoven lived.

At Martin's car he put the cello in the back seat and turned to Clara.

"I heard you in the audience," he said.

"You couldn't have heard me."

"Not your sound. Your attention. I could feel your attention. From the stage. It's the same quality of attention you bring to tuning. The same — immersion."

Clara thought about this. The attention that Martin described was the attention that Mrs. Ashford had described in Leonard, the full-body immersion in the sound, the swimmer entering the water, and the attention was the thing the hearing loss could not take, the thing the audiogram could not measure, the thing that was not in the cochlea but in the cortex, in the mind, in the self, and the attention was intact, was undiminished, was the capacity that would survive the loss of the upper frequencies and would persist into whatever silence followed the last tuning.

"Thank you for coming," Martin said.

"I wouldn't have missed it."

"No. You wouldn't have."

He got in his car. He drove away. Clara walked to her own car and drove home through the June evening, through the long light, through the city that was entering its summer, the dry season, the clear-sky season, the season when the pianos went flat and the light lasted until nine-thirty and the air was warm and the world was, for three months, the Portland that people imagined when they imagined Portland, the city of bridges and rivers and mountains and light.

At home she sat at the kitchen table and struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present.

She held it and listened and thought about Martin's last chord and Clara's ongoing note, the chord that was complete and the note that was fading, and she thought that both were forms of the same thing — the sound that had been made and that would, eventually, cease — and the difference was only in the timing, in the rate of the decay, in whether the ending was sudden or gradual, and the ending was the ending either way.

She set the fork on the table. She went to the Knabe and played — not the Chopin tonight, not the nocturne, but the Ode to Joy, the simple melody, the melody that Beethoven had made from the simplest materials, four notes rising, two notes falling, the most basic contour, and Clara played it slowly, in the key of D major, and the melody filled the small house and the melody was in the range she could hear and the melody was beautiful and the beauty was sufficient.

She closed the fallboard. She went to bed. The June light lingered. The fork waited on the table.

The A remained.