Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke
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“The mood’s got to be right but maybe tonight. He’s coming over after. I’d really like it to happen before the party because if he comes to the party with other people, he probably won’t stay after. You know, appearances and all that.”
“Why?” asked Tina.
“He doesn’t want anybody to know about us because he’s not officially divorced yet.”
“First of all, I have to say, Miranda Lyme, are you out of your gourd? You’re fucking the conductor…and he’s married.”
“Separated.”
She said to the air, “Kurt Hancock, I don’t know what you’re up to with my friend Miranda, but you’ve disillusioned me. I am so disappointed. I thought you were better than that. Yet another married man screwing around.”
“Well, not really, not exactly, not yet anyway…”
“Okay, and another thing. You’re nearly fucking the conductor and you don’t tell me? Some friend you are, Miranda Lyme.”
“It’s complicated. It’s not what it sounds like. And I would have told you as soon as it became a fait accompli. But it hasn’t yet.”
“You better get moving. Only two more performances left and then closing night and he’s outa here. Back to…where is it he lives? Paris?”
“London. But he’s got engagements in the States first.”
“So tell me about this not-what-it-sounds-like stuff. But I’m warning you. I’ve almost definitely heard it all before and reserve the right not to believe any of it.”
“His wife’s away in Tuscany. She wants a divorce…”
“Heard it,” blurted Tina.
“Just wait. If you could only see how upset Kurt is, you’d know it was for real. I mean, he must really care. It’s her that wants to leave him. He’s been pretty open about his feelings. They’re legally separated, and now it’s just a matter of finalizing.”
“Uh-huh?” Tina’s tone was skeptical. “So why’s she divorcing him? He tell you?”
“Yeah. He said it was because he’s always away. She wants someone who’s there. He’s almost single. Really,” I protested.
Tina was silent for a long time.
“Listen, Tina. I’m going to England anyway. I bought my ticket today.”
“Miranda. No. Really? You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”
“I’ve got that audition with the ENO.”
“Fantastic. Sort of… I wish you weren’t going though. Where am I going to find somebody else who lets me boss them around the way you do?”
“Jeez. It’s not forever. The audition’s in January. So I figure, if Kurt happens to be part of the bargain, all the better. Lots of people have these tricky back-and-forth relationships. You’re going to have to deal with it, too, you know, Tina. One of these days. Once you decide to take yourself seriously. Once your career gets going, you’re going to be traveling a lot.”
Tina snorted, “My career? Ha.”
“Trust me. You have to have a couple of plans of action. I can’t predict how things are going to go with Kurt. I don’t want to get inside his head, I just want to enjoy the feeling while it lasts, and then we’ll see. It’s been ages since anyone paid so much attention to me. So right now, it’s London, and the ENO, and getting to know my father again, and then I have to be back here in Vancouver for March. Kurt wants me to sing a song cycle of his.”
Tina gave me a dark look and I can’t say it wasn’t envy. “Nice side benefit to screwing the conductor, eh?”
I shrugged. “I had to work for it.”
She glared at me. “Sure you did.”
“I did.” Tina had a nerve. My first big date with Kurt had been an audition.
The evening after the broom-closet incident, he’d sent an unsigned note to me in the women’s chorus dressing room asking me to wait for him in the lobby of his hotel, and then to follow him up to his room at a distance. I was a bit put out by the cloak-and-dagger stuff but I did what I was told. I watched him get his key at the front desk of the Pan Pacific, then went up a few paces behind him. He left the door of his hotel room ajar, so I went in without knocking. When I came into the room, he was already seated at the piano.
Kurt had an entire suite. His rooms had fruit baskets, fresh-cut flowers, iced champagne, little chocolates on the pillow, pristine perfumed bed linen, Chinese screens, a giant claw-foot tub, a recently tuned Steinway baby grand piano and a spectacular view of Vancouver harbor.
I had to stand for a minute and take in the hotel suite. The best hotel in my hometown of Cold Shanks has lasagna carpeting to hide the spills and a series of black-velvet masterpieces and sad clown faces decorating the flocked bordello wallpaper.
Before he touched or kissed me again, Kurt asked me to sing for him. I was ready for it. In fact, I’d prayed for it to happen. I took some music out of my bag and put it on the piano. First I sang some French songs by Ravel and then some Rossini.
Without a word, Kurt then thrust a part of his song cycle at me and made me sight-sing it cold. I had to concentrate so hard I practically sweated treble clefs. Later, he made me sing it again. I must have impressed him because he was happy enough with my interpretation to promise me that I would be the one to premiere it with the Vancouver Symphony the following March.
But first, I’d have to deal with Madame Klein. She disapproved of young singers doing anything that was slightly beyond them, and Kurt’s music was difficult, even more difficult than Oskar Klein’s music. Oskar had been a composer in the line of Richard Strauss. The avant-garde composers of his time accused Oskar of holding back the progress of music, because his music was harmonic and harked back to romanticism. But it was singable, accessible, moving and beautiful.
As for Kurt’s music, that was something else.
Kurt’s music was all the fault of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone row.
One day at the beginning of the twentieth century, old Arnie must have woken up, taken a sip of his good strong Viennese coffee, clutched his stomach and yelled, “Mein Gott im Himmel,” as an undiagnosed ulcer started acting up. Maybe if he’d been feeling good about himself and the world, he would have sat down and written some gorgeous postromantic tonal symphony.
Instead, old Arnie had a bone to pick with the world.
You have to picture a short, balding man, whose big bulging eyes were filled with a fanatical gleam as he thought, “Ja. I’ll make all of them suffer, too. I shall invent the twelve-tone row and then they’ll be really sorry.”
So he uses the twelve notes that you find in an octave of black and white piano keys, lines them up in some kind of arbitrary order and calls it a tone row. Then he takes that little sucker of a tone row and sticks it everywhere in his composition, and God help you if you don’t know it’s there because that’s the whole point of the exercise. The new big test for the musical-chic crowd—spot Arnie’s tone row.
It’s also been called serial music, and I can guarantee that at times it’s been serial murder to listen to.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, Arnie had to go and start teaching his new approach and acquiring his disciples, Webern and Berg.
Collectively, they make up the group that I like to call the Bing Bang Bong Boys.
Imagine a cat with a really sophisticated sense of rhythm walking around on the piano. Black keys. White keys. It doesn’t matter. Then imagine scoring that sound for a big orchestra. That’s more or less how atonal music sounds.
I’m not saying this music doesn’t have its