Death and the Maiden (Daniel Jacobus Series #3)

Read an Excerpt

ONE

SATURDAY
 

Hearing the tepid applause as the maestro du jour sauntered onto the Tanglewood stage, Jacobus relegated the lawsuit to the back of his mind.
He was among the sparse, haggard crowd that braved the damp chill to hear the Boston Symphony’s next-to-last outdoor concert of the summer season, a Saturday night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece of music that he often turned to for life-affirming reassurance in moments of personal despair. More than a work of uncompromising genius, it was the most compelling clarion call to universal brotherhood in all of music. But as he sat shivering under the relentless frozen mist that lashed through the open-sided Tanglewood Shed, the overwhelming restless energy of the first movement served only to make him feel insignificant by comparison. Insignificant and mortally fragile, like a leaf in autumn. Unlike the millions of tourists who came to New England, Jacobus, blind, was unable to revel in the stunning brilliance of the impending fall foliage. The mental visualization of red, orange, and yellow, long lost to his mind’s eye, was replaced by the decaying smell of moldering leaves, thickening day by day in layers under his slowing footstep, a harbinger of an eternal winter. He was a leaf, one of the thousands of leaves on one maple among thousands of maples, his vitality slowly but inexorably sapping, tenuously fixed to its mooring until even the most inconsequential puff of air would separate him from his station and blow him, brown and lifeless, to the frozen ground, to be covered by the snow.
Jacobus put his hands in his pockets. The violinists’ fingertips must be stinging like hell in this cold, he thought—as the driving intensity of the music built to the defiant recapitulation of the first movement—especially the ones who had developed deep grooves from years of pressing the strings too hard. Jacobus laughed as he recalled one cold August night, back when he was still in the orchestra: Sal Maggiolo, who was from the Amalfi coast, had played with gloves on, the fingertips of the left glove cut off so he could still feel the strings. It was the most obscenity-laced Haydn symphony Jacobus had ever played.
But it wasn’t just the cold that was making this performance listless and unconvincing. The conductor was run-of-the-mill at best, adding to Jacobus’s discomfort. Someone had mentioned to the blind Jacobus who it was—some young Englishman, the latest to claim the banner of the newest in-term: the “historically informed” performance, as if Toscanini didn’t know his music history. Jacobus had heard of this guy, though he’d never listened to his recordings, so he had come to tonight’s concert curious about what he was going to hear. It became increasingly clear, at least to his own discerning ears if not to the philistines in the audience, that the conductor was one of the sort that revels in browbeating the musicians over every detail—“Beethoven wrote a dot above the E-flat, you dolts!”—without having an overall conception of the music. He may have done some homework about the performance style of Beethoven’s time—more likely he just listened to some CDs from his own crowd—but used that always debatable information to disguise the absence of true musical insight. The result was a mishmash of insipid, disconnected wisps of phrases with little sense of continuity or purpose. “Beethoven Lite,” his friend Nathaniel called it. As the musicians circled the wagons to counteract the directionless conducting and tried to play as best they could, the conductor would no doubt engage in greater and greater histrionics in order to elicit the kind of response he thought he deserved. This would arouse the resentment, if not the ire, of the musicians who, believing the maestro was trying to show them up, would then become more obdurate. And on and on it would go. Jacobus pitied all those in the audience who had the gift of sight, because they would shortly be bearing witness to what he easily predicted would be a musical revolt by the orchestra.
Jacobus had long ago come to the conclusion that great conductors and lousy conductors had much more in common than great conductors and good conductors. A good conductor has enough sense to basically let the orchestra play on its own, guiding it along a path without imposing his will upon it. Both the great conductor and the lousy conductor try to control all the details. The difference is that the great conductor knows how to do it; the lousy one thinks he knows.
As the tide of Jacobus’s interest in the music ebbed, it was replenished by the knotty issue of the lawsuit in which his former student, Yumi Shinagawa, was now enmeshed.
For five years, Yumi had been the second violinist of the world-renowned New Magini String Quartet, a source of secret pride for Jacobus. What dismayed him was that even though the quartet still played magnificently, it had essentially become dysfunctional. None of the members spoke to each other outside rehearsals, and when they were at work there was constant tension.
And then there was the lawsuit. The former second violinist, Crispin Short, whom Yumi had replaced in the New Magini String Quartet, had ongoing litigation against them, claiming that he had been illegally fired, had been deprived of his livelihood, and had had his reputation publicly smeared, making it impossible for him to make a living.
The kind of public airing of dirty laundry that occurred between Short and the quartet was almost unprecedented in the classical music world, and while it might have made for juicy reading, it had forced colleagues and media throughout the profession to choose sides. Right now, they seemed to be lining up behind Short. Akin to omertà, the Mafia’s fanatic dedication to the code of silence, in-house backbiting among musicians might be vicious, but that’s how it almost always stayed, in-house. The beehive network of artistic and professional relationships, so complex, so constantly changing, and so based on lofty but easily bruised egos, was usually enough to keep even the worst musicians insulated from public attack by colleagues.
Maestro Swen Anskerbasker might be universally regarded among orchestral musicians as a conducting hack who can’t count to four without looking at his fingers, but you never know if he’ll invite you to play the Brahms Concerto with his orchestra. Reginald Biffin might be too old and senile to remember that he plays the violin even when he’s holding it, but if he’s a friend of the local recording contractor, then he’s magically transformed into a revered colleague with a world of experience. Larry Martino, chair of the string department, might have sexually assaulted his student, but then next month, just before your tenure hearing, you might have to play string quartets with him.
And don’t forget the great, the esteemed, the infamous Feodor Malinkovsky! thought Jacobus. That most revered violin pedagogue of the twentieth century. Pedagogue? Pedophile! Everyone in musical circles knew it, but even after he was deported back to Russia and disappeared in the darkness of a Stalinist purge, still the circles wouldn’t say it aloud. And for Jacobus, the memory lingered on, etched indelibly in his being. As a pre-adolescent contestant in the prestigious 1931 Grimsley International Violin Competition, Malinkovsky, the head judge, had privately offered him a prize in exchange for …
Like a passenger in a car about to hit a telephone pole, Jacobus gripped the arms of his seat as the orchestra almost fell apart during the always mischievous tempo change into the Scherzo, but he relaxed again, at least for the moment, when there was a brief rapprochement at the beginning of the third movement, Adagio molto e cantabile. Unpredictably flooded with memories of his brief tenure with the Boston Symphony long ago, cut short by the devastating onset of his sudden blindness on the very day he won the concertmaster audition, Jacobus momentarily forgot the cold. If not for that freak medical chance, he thought, if not for that I might still be playing there on stage instead of dying of pneumonia out here.
Yumi’s situation seemed as precarious, her career balanced on the head of a pin. It had been Aaron Kortovsky, the first violinist of the New Magini Quartet, who had spearheaded Short’s dismissal six years earlier. Kortovsky had taken an intractable artistic situation and compounded the problem by making it politically ugly, thinking that firing the first shot across the bow by recruiting a Times correspondent for an interview about Short’s termination he would gain an advantage in the public arena. It backfired in a way he could have predicted had his ego not blinded him. Short not only went public himself, he sued all the members of the quartet, including Yumi, even though she had become a member only as Short’s successor. In a countermaneuver, Kortovsky officially changed the name of the quartet from the original Magini String Quartet to the New Magini String Quartet and reapplied for nonprofit corporation status. He claimed that since there was only one member of the original all-Russian ensemble left, cellist Pravda Lenskaya, the name of the quartet should reflect the change. In reality, he was attempting an end-around Short’s tenacious pursuit of legal vengeance, and in that he failed. The four musicians were now on the brink of seeing their bank accounts, homes, even instruments go up in smoke if Short was successful in his litigation. It would be almost impossible to explain to a nonmusician what the loss of a beloved instrument means. To be forcibly compelled to give such an instrument away would not be far removed from giving up one’s own child. Jacobus imagined the judge doing a Solomon act and sawing a violin in half in order to be fair. When asked if that was the kind of resolution he wanted, Short’s response was that, tragic though it might be, they brought it on themselves. And now the expectation was that the judge would be making a ruling within weeks.
Jacobus found that he was shivering from the cold, damp fog that had condensed into droplets on his dark glasses.
As the orchestra made the miraculous transition, seamlessly changing meter, key, and tempo into the second theme of Beethoven’s love song for humanity, someone elbowed him in his ribs.
“Hey, pal, you want a pair of these?” asked the voice next to him.
New York accent, Jacobus determined.
“What? A pair of what?” he asked.
“Shhhh!” said someone else. “Shut up.”
More New Yorkers, thought Jacobus.
His neighbor whispered, “Earmuffs. I’m no fucking Eskimo.”
“How the hell do you hear the music?” Jacobus asked.
“Doesn’t matter. We hear the Ninth here every year. Besides, Beethoven was deaf. Wasn’t he?”
Jacobus got up and moved to an empty seat. Cold, tired, wet, he should have just gone home but hoped that the last movement, the greatest single movement of symphonic music ever composed, would somehow redeem the performance. In that, he was again disappointed. If the musicians were laid low by the inclement weather, the singers suffered even more. The vocal quartet caterwauled like alley cats in heat, and the crowning sixteen measures of fortissimo high A’s in the soprano section of the chorus sounded like a synchronized swim team in a pool with a great white shark.
By the time the symphony came to its crashing conclusion, the antipathy between the orchestra and conductor was palpable. Jacobus heard the seats of the folding chairs around him snap up, but he suspected the audience rose, not to give the performance a standing ovation, but to flee to the protective comfort of their Volvos and Mercedes-Benzes. Tomorrow’s review would no doubt extol the conductor’s heroic, historically informed efforts while tongue-lashing the musicians for their halfhearted response. Equally certain was that the musicians’ artistic committee would demand that management never again engage the boy wonder. What happened after that, who knew, except that next year there would be someone standing on the podium.
*   *   *
Jacobus followed the exodus to the main gate, shuffling along the packed clay floor of the Shed that had become as slippery as ice from the moisture it had absorbed, guiding himself with his right hand on the row of seat backs. With his left hand, he slapped his rolled-up program against his thigh to try to ward off stiffness in both appendages.
Within moments of arriving at the gate, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hi, Jake,” said Yumi. “Am I late?”
“Only about three movements’ worth.”
“Hmm. That bad?”
“The ‘Ode to Shit’? Nah, it wasn’t that bad. It was worse.”
Yumi had parked in the handicapped section for Jacobus’s convenience, so they were inside the car and out of the soaking mist within moments, but Jacobus felt miserable.
“Did you have a chance to think about what we should do about the lawsuit?” Yumi asked.
“Yeah. No. I’ll think about it. Maybe the judge’ll come up with a reasonable solution. Mind if I smoke?”
“Not in the car, please. Yes. I think he will too,” she said, turning on the engine, and the heat.
They spoke little during the fifteen-minute winding drive through the darkened Berkshire hillside. Jacobus tried to put his mind to the quartet’s dilemma, but his concentration quickly wandered as he pondered the irony of musicians engaged in mortal combat over music that celebrated the brotherhood of mankind. Rarely did a light penetrate the mist-enshrouded woods; of course for Jacobus, it didn’t matter.

 
Copyright © 2011 by Gerald Elias