Letters from Cleveland

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 16: Letters from Cleveland

The emails arrived on her phone. She read them in the evening, in the room above the workshop, sitting at the desk by the window that overlooked Via Palazzo, the desk lamp casting a circle of warm light on the surface of the desk, the phone in her hands, the small screen glowing with the words of people she had known in another life, the life of the performer, the life of the orchestra, the life of Cleveland.

Sarah Lindgren, second violin. Sarah wrote the way she played, with precision and warmth, the sentences organized, the details selected for their specificity, and the specificity was the Cleveland Orchestra, the specificity was this week's rehearsal schedule and this weekend's concert program and the new principal oboist who had arrived from Berlin and who played with a tone that Sarah described as Continental, which was Sarah's way of saying rich and slightly dark and different from the American brightness that the Cleveland wind section was known for, and the Continental-ness was a topic of discussion in the orchestra, the discussion quiet, professional, the kind of discussion that orchestral musicians conduct in the tuning room and the green room and the corridors of Severance Hall, the discussion that is not gossip but assessment, the collective judgment of seventy musicians whose ears are trained to the highest standard and whose assessment of a new colleague is a matter of professional importance and personal curiosity.

Nadia read about the oboist. She read about his tone and his phrasing and his tendency to hold the fermatas slightly longer than the American convention, the holding a European habit, the habit audible in the extra beat of sustain that gave the oboe line a different weight, a different presence, and the difference was the kind of thing that Nadia would have noticed immediately if she had been sitting in the violin section, the kind of thing that her ears were trained to detect, the micro-adjustments of timing and tone that differentiate one performance from another, the adjustments that are invisible to the audience and that constitute the daily texture of orchestral life, the fabric of small judgments and small accommodations that makes an orchestra not merely a collection of skilled musicians but a single instrument, a body that plays together.

She was not playing together. She was not part of the body. She was in Cremona, in a room above a workshop, reading about the body on a phone.

David Park, viola section. David's emails were shorter, less descriptive, more like dispatches from a front line, the front line being the Cleveland concert season, which was a front line in the sense that it was continuous and demanding and that the musicians who served on it were under constant pressure to perform at the highest level, the pressure not of competition but of standards, the standards that the Cleveland Orchestra maintained and that every musician in the orchestra internalized and that became, over time, not external pressure but internal expectation, the expectation of excellence that the musician carries inside, the expectation that does not diminish when the musician leaves the orchestra, the expectation that follows the musician into the parking lot and the grocery store and the kitchen and the bed, the expectation that is the musician's companion and burden and pride.

David wrote that they were rehearsing the Mahler Sixth. The Mahler Sixth Symphony, the Tragic, the symphony in A minor that begins with a march and ends with an annihilation, the symphony that Mahler wrote in the summer of 1903 and that he later revised and that conductors and scholars have debated and reordered and argued about for a century, the hammer blows in the finale, two or three, the number contested, the contest a testament to the work's power, the power that resists definitive interpretation, that remains open, that invites each conductor and each orchestra to find their own version of the tragedy.

Nadia had played the Mahler Sixth. She had played it twice with the young artist program, sitting in the first violin section, the part demanding and relentless, the first violins carrying the melodic burden through four movements that span nearly ninety minutes, the span exhausting, the exhaustion part of the experience, Mahler intending the exhaustion, the Sixth Symphony a work that leaves the performers and the audience spent, emptied, the emptiness the emotional destination, the tragedy not a story but a state, the state of having gone through the thing and come out the other side, and the other side is silence.

She remembered the passages. She remembered them in her fingers, the fingers remembering what the mind had not forgotten, the physical memory of the notes, the positions on the fingerboard, the shifts, the double-stops in the second movement, the scherzo's rhythmic bite, the adagio's long singing line that required the vibrato that her fourth finger could no longer produce, the vibrato that was the warmth, the vibrato that was the life of the sustained note, the vibrato that was gone.

She put the phone down. She looked out the window. Via Palazzo was dark, the streetlights casting pools of yellow on the cobblestones, the pools separated by darkness, the darkness the space between the lights, the space that was most of the street, the visible portions small and bright and the invisible portions large and dark, and the ratio was the ratio of memory, the remembered moments bright and specific and the forgotten moments dark and extensive, and the bright moments were the performances and the rehearsals and the practice rooms and the concerts, and the dark moments were everything else, the daily life that surrounded the music, the life that was not the music but that held the music, that provided the context for the music.

She picked up the phone again. She read more emails.

Jennifer Torres, principal second violin. Jennifer was the musician Nadia had been closest to in the orchestra, the friendship built on the foundation of adjacency and admiration, Jennifer sitting two chairs away in the violin section, Jennifer's playing characterized by a sweetness of tone that Nadia admired and could not replicate, the sweetness a property of Jennifer's right arm, the bow arm, the arm that drew the bow with a lightness that produced a sound that floated rather than projected, a sound that was the opposite of aggressive, the opposite of the bright, cutting tone that soloists cultivated, and the opposite-ness was Jennifer's signature, her contribution to the section sound.

Jennifer's email was long. Jennifer wrote about the season and the repertoire and the guest conductors and the backstage politics that every orchestra generates, the politics of seating and solos and section dynamics, the politics that are the social dimension of the musical enterprise, the human machinery that surrounds and supports and sometimes interferes with the artistic mission. Jennifer wrote about these things and Nadia read about them and the reading was a form of participation, a form of remaining connected to the world she had left, the world that continued without her, the world that her absence had not altered, because orchestras are institutions and institutions are larger than any individual and the individual's departure creates a ripple that the institution absorbs, the ripple fading, the surface smoothing, the institution continuing.

Jennifer also wrote about Nadia. Not about Nadia directly, not about the injury or the departure, but about the new violinist who had taken Nadia's seat, a young woman from Juilliard, twenty-four years old, technically brilliant, her left hand fast and sure and precise in the way that Nadia's left hand had been fast and sure and precise, and the description of the new violinist's left hand was not cruel, was not intended to wound, was the innocent reporting of a colleague's ability by a friend who did not realize that the reporting was a blade, the blade entering Nadia's chest with the quiet precision of good news about someone else's intact hands.

She put the phone down again. She held her left hand in her right hand. The holding had become a habit, a gesture she performed without thinking, the gesture of self-comfort, of self-assessment, of the daily reckoning with the thing that was wrong, the thing that was broken, the thing that the emails from Cleveland illuminated by contrast, the contrast between the world of performing musicians and the world of the workshop, the contrast between the hands that played and the hands that made, and the contrast was her life, was the boundary that she lived on, the boundary between the two worlds.

She did not cry. She had finished crying about the hand. The crying had ended in Cleveland, in the apartment in Cleveland Heights, in the months after the diagnosis, the months of therapy and hope and diminishing hope and the final acceptance that was not acceptance but exhaustion, the exhaustion of hoping, the exhaustion that comes when the body has produced all the tears it can produce and the ducts are dry and the eyes are tired and the crying becomes unnecessary because the loss has been absorbed, has been integrated into the body the way a foreign object is integrated, encapsulated, walled off, the body building a structure around the loss that holds it in place and prevents it from moving but does not remove it, the loss permanent and contained, present but not active, a fact rather than an event.

The crying had ended. What replaced the crying was the workshop. The wood, the tools, the gouge, the plane, the bending iron, the smell of spruce, the patience of a craft that measured time in years of drying and months of varnish and the lifetime of the instrument, which would outlive the maker, which would outlive the player, which would carry sound into a future that neither the maker nor the player would inhabit. The workshop had replaced the crying not as a therapy and not as a distraction but as an alternative, a different structure for the days, a different content for the hours, a different use for the hands, and the different use was the apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship was the life she was living now, the life that the emails from Cleveland illuminated from the outside, the way a streetlight illuminates a window, the light coming from a distance, touching the glass, passing through.

She read Jennifer's email again. She read it carefully, slowly, the way she read a score, looking for the details, the nuances, the things between the lines. Jennifer had written: We miss you. The three words at the end of the email, after the news and the gossip and the description of the new violinist's left hand, the three words that were simple and true and that meant what they said, which was not a common quality of words, most words meaning less than they say or more than they say or something different from what they say, but these three words meant exactly what they said: we miss you, we the orchestra, miss the absence of, you Nadia, and the meaning was precise and the precision was painful and the pain was the proof that the loss was still there, contained but present, encapsulated but real.

She did not reply. She had not replied to any of the emails. She had read them all, every one, every email from every colleague, every dispatch from the front line of the concert season, and she had not replied to any of them, and the not-replying was not rudeness but inability, the inability to find words that would span the distance between her world and theirs, the distance that was not geographical — Cremona to Cleveland, a day's travel — but existential, the distance between the person who plays and the person who cannot play, and the distance was measured not in miles but in trills, in shifts, in the vibrato that her fourth finger could no longer produce.

She turned off the phone. She turned off the desk lamp. The room went dark. Through the window, the streetlight on Via Palazzo cast a pale glow on the ceiling, the glow that had become familiar over the months, the glow that was the room's nightlight, the room's companion, the light that stayed when the other lights went out.

She lay on the bed. She listened. Through the floor, the workshop was silent. The silence of the workshop at night was different from the silence of the workshop during the day, the daytime silence being the silence of concentration, the silence of hands working, the silence that was not the absence of sound but the suppression of unnecessary sound, while the nighttime silence was the silence of emptiness, of tools at rest, of wood waiting, of the workbench holding the violin-in-progress in the dark, the violin resting, the violin waiting for the morning, for the hands, for the next stage of its becoming.

She thought about the Mahler Sixth. She thought about the march that opens the symphony, the relentless, driving rhythm that establishes the tragedy's momentum, the momentum that will carry the work through four movements to the annihilation of the finale, the hammer blows, the collapse, the silence. She heard the march in her mind, heard it with the internal ear that musicians develop, the ear that can hear music without external sound, the ear that holds the music inside the skull, plays it back, analyzes it, responds to it, the internal ear that is the musician's most essential tool, more essential than the fingers, more essential than the bow arm, more essential than the instrument itself, because the internal ear is the thing that makes a musician a musician, the thing that distinguishes the musician from the civilian, the thing that is always on, always listening, always playing the music that is not playing, the music that is remembered, the music that is imagined, the music that lives inside.

The internal ear was intact. The internal ear had not been damaged by the dystonia. The internal ear could still hear the Mahler Sixth in its entirety, every note, every chord, every timbral shift, the internal ear playing the symphony from memory with a fidelity that no recording could match, because the internal ear's recording was not a recording but an experience, the experience of having played the piece, the experience encoded not merely in the auditory cortex but in the motor cortex, in the sensory cortex, in the emotional cortex, the whole brain contributing to the internal playback, the playback richer and deeper and more complete than any external reproduction.

She could hear the music. She could not play the music. The gap between the hearing and the playing was the injury, was the loss, was the thing that the emails from Cleveland illuminated, the gap that the emails measured by describing the world on the other side of the gap, the world where people played the Mahler Sixth and the Brahms Concerto and the Beethoven Quartets and all the music that Nadia could hear inside her head and could not produce with her hands.

But she could produce other things. She could produce the bass bar and the rib and the arching and the f-hole edge and the practice plate and the shaving that curled from the plane and the curve that the bending iron produced and the surface that the gouge revealed, the things of the workshop, the things of the craft, the things that her hands could make, and the making was production, was creation, was the generating of something from nothing, from wood and glue and skill, the same kind of generation that music was, the same fundamental act, the act of making the thing that was not there before, and the making was the connection, the bridge between the old life and the new one, the bridge that the emails from Cleveland illuminated from one side while the workshop illuminated from the other, and the bridge was her, was Nadia, was the person standing in the middle.

She lay in the dark and she listened to the Mahler Sixth inside her head, the internal ear playing the march, the rhythm driving, the strings surging, the brass cutting through, the timpani marking the beat, and the music was there, was present, was alive in her mind, and the aliveness was the thing that the injury could not take, the thing that the dystonia could not disrupt, the thing that the loss could not erase, because the music was not in the fingers, the music was in the ear, and the ear was intact, and the intact-ness was the gift, the gift that remained after the taking, the thing that was left when the thing was lost.

The Mahler Sixth played in her mind and the workshop was silent below her and the streetlight glowed on the ceiling and Via Palazzo was dark and Cremona was quiet and the fog lay on the city and the fog lay on the river and the river flowed to the sea, the Po flowing east through the plain to the Adriatic, the Adriatic that washed the coast of Croatia, the coast where her father was born, the coast where the maple grew in the Dinaric mountains, the maple that was in the workshop below her, the maple that would become the back of the violin, the violin that Giovanni was making, the last violin.

The connections were there. The connections between Cleveland and Cremona, between the orchestra and the workshop, between the playing and the making, between the Mahler Sixth and the bass bar, between the fog on the Po and the fog on Lake Erie, between the emails on her phone and the wood on the bench, the connections invisible and essential, like the bass bar, like the sound post, like the graduation, like the things that cannot be seen but that determine everything.

She slept. The sleep was deep. The Mahler Sixth continued in her dreams, the internal ear still playing, the dream adding images to the sound, images of the workshop and the concert hall superimposed, Giovanni carving the arching while the orchestra played the adagio, the gouge and the bow moving in the same rhythm, the shaving and the sound emerging together, the making and the playing the same thing in the dream, the same gesture, the same act, the distinction dissolved by sleep, the dissolution the dream's gift.

In the morning she would go to the workshop. She would stand at the bench. She would pick up the tools. She would work. The work would not be the Mahler Sixth. The work would be the wood and the glue and the carving and the fitting and the patience. The work would be the craft. And the craft would be enough. Not enough to replace the music, not enough to fill the gap, not enough to answer the emails from Cleveland, but enough to fill the day, enough to occupy the hands, enough to give the hours a purpose and the purpose a shape and the shape a meaning, and the meaning would be the instrument, the violin, the thing that was being made, the thing that would carry sound into the future.

And the future was the thing that the emails from Cleveland could not reach.

And the future was the thing that the workshop was building.

And the building was the work.

And the work was enough.