des Mémoires d'Anatole Nozière

sequel to the blogs of April 11, 2006 and November 27, 2007

A couple of months after the Great Apostasy of my eleventh year, in the month of May (I remember that the lilacs were in bloom), I participated (competed? performed?) in the Greater Spokane Musical Festival, as one of Mrs. Osbourne's more promising piano students. Preparation had begun two or three months before. In order to demonstrate well-roundedness (Something about the very notion of that put my back up--and still does) of taste and technique, we were given two pieces, one "classical," and one "romantic," to learn by heart. There was some allowance for personal preference in the selection of the classical piece; but little or none in the choice of the romantic piece. So, gladly enough, I chose a Rameau menuet in G Minor for the former, and, with considerable feeling of being put upon, was given the Chopin prelude in E Minor for the latter. The Rameau was a breeze; I had it memorized within a week, and spent the rest of time polishing it, mastering the ornaments, terrace dynamics, and trills-like-a-jack-hammer. But the Chopin, even with the music in front of me, was a disaster; next to the elegant, vigorous, articulate Rameau, I found it cloyingly sweet, vulgarly emotional, "stupid," and indeed romantic. I would not, could not memorize it--not even with the performance date coming up and doom and Mrs. Osbourne's reputation riding on it.

Came the day, I was miserable, not having slept the night before for worry, wearing a hot, itchy woolen suit and strangling bow-tie. In utter despair, I mounted the platform, and when my turn had come (I was fifth in a performance-group of ten), I bowed to the adjudicators and to the assembled parents and teachers and took my place at the keyboard of the nine-foot Steinway grand. The first piece, the Rameau, went swimmingly: Fear lent precision and delicacy. Heartened, I began the Chopin prelude, and had played the first five measures, when I realized that I had not a clue as to what the sixth measure should be: my Doom had come. So, without missing a beat, I began to improvise. I no longer remember what. But methinks I may have made a half cadence of the whiny original material, modulated into G Major for a contrasting poco allegretto B-section, and brought back the beginning for an extended coda in E-Minor. With my heart in my mouth, I rose and bowed to slightly nervous and uncertain applause, and took my seat among my fellow victims waiting for judgement.

There was a long pause after the final performance, while the three soberly dressed middle-aged adjudicators shuffled their notes and whispered together; then the chief among them, a tall and distinguished forty-something man with a rather austere expression from whom I expected no mercy, rose, faced the assemblage and began to speak: "I particularly want to congratulate two of our young performers today: Susie Mullen for a wonderfully skillful and delicately expressive rendering of both her Classical and the Romantic pieces...and Anatole Nozière." He went on then for nearly fifteen minutes, praising (such praise as I have never earned before or since--well, maybe once since: See blog 4/6/08, "Whoring and Lusting after Romanticism mit Schlag") my musicianship and my pluck, telling stories of other musicians with the ("rare, precious") gift of improvisation who had done as I had done, and winning me at the end of his speech another virtually standing ovation, while I went from pale to pink and back again.

Afterwards, the two most important women in my life, my mother and Mrs. Osbourne, could scarcely contain themselves for joy and wonder at me. And yet, and yet... For all the pleasure of praise heaped on me when I had expected severest censure, a worm of unsatisfied and insatiable desire for recognition of my actual achievment gnawed at the astonishing fraîcheur (I was, on the photograpic evidence, an angelically beautiful boy) of my damask'd eleven-year-old cheek: In all the amazement at my precocious faking of Chopin, my genuinely superb rendition of Rameau was overlooked. And no one asked why I had forgot the Chopin; it was simply assumed that, for some reason, I had been unprepared. No one appreciated that I detested the Chopin piece, and that my negligent improvisation on it was as much as to say, "Anybody with my talent can make up better music than this crap!" At our next piano lesson, I began to intimate as much to Mrs. Osbourne, but the glitter in her eye, and the tongue against her teeth on the side of her mouth (She loved Chopin) gave me to understand that I'd better drop it; another word out of me and there'd be a seismic rift in the Social Fabric. So, swallowing bilious vainglory and implacable contempt, for once, I held my peace.