A few weeks ago, I walked past a house near my own and heard the strains from a piano. It was a real acoustic keyboard, of the pre-electronic kind.
And it set me off on two adventures, one mental and one physically intrusive.
The person inside the house played well but became stuck on a passage, from Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turka” (or “Turkish March”), practicing those bars over and over, as one must do when stuck.
This piece, to play it properly, requires flying fingers, grace notes, muscle memory, a peppery pedal and, of course, discipline.
I had played it as a kid, and remembered how it may have convinced my teacher that my efforts over nine years of lessons might be all for naught.
Miss Fessler was old school. She insisted that her students play the right notes in the right way, paying attention to accents, phrase markings, crescendos and diminuendos, and proper tone. In short, obstacles that diminish the prospects of most would-be prodigies.
Each December, though, she delivered delight. Driving her green Studebaker to our house for my Tuesday afternoon lesson, she brought books of Christmas music. Which meant I could put aside Mozart, Clemente, and other frenzied note makers to play carols, much easier to learn.
This annoyed my mother no end. It irked her that she had to purchase each book (about $4 at the time, plus the fiver for the lesson) and didn’t think her bar mitzvah boy should be so enchanted by “O, Holy Night.”
I argued that many great Christmas songs were written by Jews – among them Irving Berlin (“White Christmas”), Johnny Marks (“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”), and Jay Livingstone (“Silver Bells”). It was Mel Torme who penned the line, “Chestnuts Roasting on an open fire.”
She went to her default argument: “Just because somebody else jumps into the lake, you’re going to jump in the lake too?”
To which I replied, smartly, “Huh?”
Soon after the new year, Miss Fessler and I returned to the usual fare, and I had to practice hard for the spring recital at the teacher’s Victorian house. There, a dozen girls in sun dresses and one boy in an itchy brown woolen suit sipped tea and then each of us played our respective recital respective piece to proud parental ears.
Mine one year was that “Rondo.” During my next private lesson, my teacher said, “You know, as far as your piano skills go, you should take up the bass fiddle.”
This was Miss Fessler’s Germanic way of delivering hard truths. And it is true that although I ignored her advice and have continued to tickle the ivories for seven decades, my name has never appeared on a program at the Horowitz piano music series at Yale’s Sprague Hall. At least I don’t think so.
But ah yes, that Turkish march being played recently by an East Rock neighbor. I tried to imagine if it was a man or a woman or a kid at the keyboard. How heavy was the touch? How graceful were the notes? This I knew was a fruitless inquiry, as talent is talent and pays no attention to age or gender.
I thought, “I think I’ll just knock on the door and give that person a pointer or two about difficult passages.” But the player did not stop the practicing to welcome me in.
Perhaps on hearing my knock, the musician thought, “Oh, I get it. Using the ruse of door-to-door Mozart advisor, an old man worms his way into the house steals my rare sheet music copy of Gene Autry’s ‘Back in the Saddle Again.”’
So, my help rejected, I kept walking. I forgot about my little musical interlude until I recently saw the new film “The Power of the Dog,” set in 1925 in Montana, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays the lead role of a Yale grad in the classics who has gone west and gone rogue.
Without giving anything of plot substance away here, I’ll reveal that sometime in the first half of the film, a baby grand arrives at the ranch. It’s a Mason & Hamlin, built in Boston, the same brand and size that I have. It was probably built around the same time as mine, which was 1913.
A big deal is made out of it in the film, as I have made a big deal out of mine, which I bought in 1988 from the superb piano rebuilder Shawn Hoar in West Hartford.
I had a 100th birthday party for the Mason a few years ago as a fundraiser for our Chester synagogue, and I asked Dan Pardo, who was associate music director at the Goodspeed Opera House, to play a tune composed in every decade of the piano’s life.
So we went from ragtime to Gershwin to Samuel Barber to Billy Joel and rap to a piece with lyrics of my own, the title song of the musical, “A Woman of a Certain Age.”
Ninety minutes and many hors d’oeuvres after we began, we had raised $6,000.
I also had the pleasure of improvising on the 88 in a jazz combo, and providing oom-pahs for a Klezmer band. (Take that, Miss Fessler.)
Lately, I’ve been trying to master and memorize the haunting theme from the HBO series, “Succession.” I’m encouraged. At the rate I’m progressing, I’ll have it down pat, provided I live another 62 years.
On the other hand, there is something intoxicating about the power and subtlety of the old Mason. Sometime I just get lost in it. I play the melody and harmony to the Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke love ballad, “It Could Happen to You,” and then, unexpectedly, I hear my wife Suzanne’s lovely voice.
“All I did was wonder how your arms would be, and it happened to me.”
The magic of music – music we can make ourselves, or swipe from those who really know how, to try to play the same notes that Dvorak or Beethoven or Duke Ellington composed and performed themselves — well, that’s a balm for these times.
By the way, this piece is not a pitch to teach you to play the piano for considerably more than a fiver a week. But maybe the bass fiddle.
