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• • •
BY THE TIME I was nine, I was allowed to sit at concerts or the opera alone, or with Anneliese, whose parents rarely took her to hear music. We sat with our knees leaning together, tracing messages with our fingers on the soft insides of each other’s forearms. Afterward, we waited in the lobby for my father or mother to take us home.
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• • •
“THAT SOUNDED LIKE the national anthem of Friedenglückhasenland.” Anneliese nudged my foot. We were at a café after a charity concert in May 1937, to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie. The Alpine Symphony.
“Maybe it is the national anthem of Friedenglückhasenland. Though it sounds different when rabbits perform it.” I cupped both hands around my hot chocolate.
“The orchestra has a carrot section.”
“And a celery section. They crunch to keep time.”
“For the finale, they eat the instruments.”
We started laughing, spraying crumbs across the table. A stout man with grey hair and a monocle frowned at us, making a clicking noise with his tongue. No one can do disapproval with the passion and precision of Austrians.
* * *
• • •
I HAVE SEARCHED so many times for programs from the concerts I attended in the 1930s, but they are not so easy to find. I suspect it is because so many of the audience members who would have gone to those concerts, who would have treasured and tucked away those programs, have been erased.
* * *
• • •
ON JANUARY 16, 1938, I took Anneliese to see my father perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I remember the applause; it sounded like a summer rain on a tin roof. We didn’t know it then, but it was the last time Anneliese’s parents would allow her to go outside of our building with me.
It was also the last time Mahler’s music would be performed until the war was over. It was the last time that seven of my father’s colleagues would be alive to play it.
Eight
On July 19, 1937, the Nazis open the Degenerate Art exhibit to condemn paintings and sculptures they find unacceptably un-German.
Though I wanted to learn to sing, my mother insisted I start with piano. I don’t know if this was because she suspected my voice lacked potential, or if she simply wanted me to learn the notes on a more tangible instrument. I put up no resistance. Piano would at least differentiate me from my brother. Like my father, Willi played viola. Unlike my father, he was lazy about practicing. While Willi had an ear for music and could mimic any melody, he preferred to be at the pool or stretched out on the sofa with a book. My father didn’t understand how anyone could demonstrate such an utter lack of respect for his talent. It was a constant source of tension.
Anneliese had begun piano lessons, too, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her having a musical life that didn’t involve me. Although Anneliese’s parents had become stricter lately, no longer allowing her to stay for dinner or go with us to the Prater or the Vienna Woods, they permitted her to come over every afternoon to practice because there was no piano in her apartment. For my parents, a piano was as fundamental a furnishing as a bed or a kitchen table. My mother played to accompany her voice or my father’s viola, while he played to entertain us or to stretch his fingers in new directions. They made it look so effortless, hands flickering across the keys like light, like shadows.
I was sure that as soon as I began lessons, I would be able to do that too.
Our teacher, Frau Milch, was quick to disillusion me. When she asked me if I knew what any of the keys were, the only one I could point to was middle C. Thus we began the laborious process of learning the location of each note as well as how it was written.
Learning piano, it dismayed me to discover, was very hard work. I had thought that my parents’ skills would simply have been passed down in my blood, that as soon as I touched an instrument I would channel both their talent and their education. Not until I had been studying for more than a year was I able to pluck out short pieces and sense the joy that could come from playing. Anneliese, who had her lesson in our apartment after mine, picked up things more easily, but she too was lazy about practicing. It didn’t help that we used up some of her practice time talking and planning games to play at school. As soon as her allotted hour was up, her mother would be hovering at our doorstep to fetch her, though she wouldn’t come in. When I protested the new restrictions, Anneliese told me that her parents thought she needed to be more serious about her studies.
At least I had the consolation that those studies included piano.
* * *
• • •
ON THE NIGHT of our first recital, Anneliese and I stood in the shadowy wings of the auditorium. My heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my navel, in my palms. Inhaling deeply, I smelled sawdust and face powder. Anneliese found my hand in the dark and squeezed it. Frau Milch droned on about the music we’d chosen, while our parents rustled their programs and recrossed their legs. Anneliese was to go first, then a boy named Thomas, then me.
“Are you scared?” she whispered, her breath wafting chocolate across my face.
I shook my head. Then, realizing she couldn’t see me, I whispered back. “No, but I’m glad you’re first!”
She pulled me closer, and then swiftly, her hands were on my cheeks and her lips found mine. Her warm, soft lips, slightly sticky and sweet. For luck, she said.
“. . . and first to play for you tonight will be Anneliese Meier, playing ‘Kinderball.’” As our parents broke into polite applause, I gave Ana a push toward the lights. “Hals und Beinbruch!” Break a leg!
I watched as Anneliese approached the piano bench, smoothed her skirt beneath her, and lifted her hands to the keys. While her cheeks had flushed and strands of her dark hair stuck to her forehead, her hands did not tremble. As I listened, I became aware that someone was watching me. Turning my head, I saw the dim outline of Thomas lurking in a corner of the stage behind me. How long had he been there? I pushed the thought of him from my mind. Thomas was not important.
Anneliese played her piece with fierce near-perfection, fumbling only one note near the end, and then exited the other side of the stage. Thomas brushed by me. I was dismayed to hear that he had chosen “Unter Bäumen,” the same piece I had chosen, though he played it with an unsuitably martial precision.
And then I was there, in the middle of the stage, a blaze of nerves and sweat under the lights. I dried my hands on my skirt as I tucked it under me. The piano keys were cool and familiar. I lifted my wrists.
I cannot remember a second of my performance, only the rising of my ribs as I played, a feeling that my fingers were propelled by pulses of electricity that shot from my heart down my arms. It was a simple little piece, but to me it was Mahler, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky.