The Soloist Read Free Page B

to shake his hand he surprised me by calling me Renne, the familiar version of my name. He remembered it from the only other time we’d met, sixteen years before, after one of my recitals in New York. That night he had come backstage to compliment me and we had a brief conversation before my mother pulled me away to meet a conductor. I remember liking him instantly, especially since we were the same age,and I hoped we could build a friendship, but my mother purposely kept me away from him. This was just after he had chosen to attend Harvard rather than one of the famous music schools in order to get an all-around education. It turned out to be a very wise decision, but at the time some people grumbled that he wasn’t being serious enough, and that his music would suffer for it. I think my mother was afraid that if I spent too much time with him some of his rebelliousness might rub off on me and I would do something rash, like ask to live on my own or choose my own friends.
    After seeing Yo-Yo off I went back to my apartment to get in some practice before dinner. On my way inside I checked the mailbox and found the usual pile of junk mail and a letter from the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. Even though I had no reason to worry, my heart started pounding as I opened it. It turned out to be a trial jury summons, requiring me to appear for a period of at least ten days starting the second week in May, just around graduation time. My relief that it was only jury duty quickly turned to annoyance. I’d assumed that teachers were exempt from the process.
    The thought of having to sit in a stuffy courtroom for days, listening to evidence and legal mumbo jumbo, watching people get upset or perjure themselves, then debating a verdict with a bunch of strangers filled me with anxiety. Just watching coverage of trials on the news made me tense.
    I poured myself a drink and put the summons aside. I had to practice. I got tuned up, ran through a few bowing exercises to get my shoulders loose, then jumped right into some music. I had hoped that Yo-Yo’s surprise performance wouldhave some residual effect on my playing, but this was not the case. The pattern was the same. The first few minutes I played were my best; I felt relaxed and largely unaware of my fingers on the strings, the way we are unaware of our feet when we walk. But then, a few bars into the piece, I heard myself come in flat on a note. All of a sudden I became aware of my fingers as they struggled to find the exact center of the note. This little distraction was enough to cause me to come in sharp on the next note, which made me even more conscious of my fingers. They started to feel cold and numb on the strings, and I had to stop. When I tried to do a simple scale to get my intonation back, I could hear the flaws in pitch so acutely that it became hopeless; only a machine could produce notes pure enough to satisfy my ear. Trying to find the right pitch with my fingertips, which now felt like giant frozen sausages, became like trying to guide a badly frayed shoelace through the eye of a needle. Only force of habit kept me at it until dinner.
    For probably the thousandth time, I wondered what advice Professor von Kempen would have given me if he were still alive. I remembered that once, when I became frustrated that my fingers were not long enough to reach a certain extension, my frail teacher edged forward on his hard pine chair until I was afraid he would slide right off. “Every musician,” he said as if reciting a prayer, “discovers that God has given him faulty equipment. That’s where the difference between an ordinary musician and a great artist lies—how they face their shortcomings.” As always, he spoke to me in his archaic Bavarian dialect, with his eyes fixed on mine, and tapped my knee with his cello bow for emphasis. “The common man is shackled by them, Herr Sundheimer, but not the great artist! He finds creative ways to make use of his