88: THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Last year we read about the enormous bequest, rumored to exceed $50 million, that promised to rescue the Metropolitan Opera from the brink of insolvency. This year the bequest was challenged in court by the benefactor’s son, a self-described actor, spoken-word poet, and performance artist, who claimed that his father had never shown any interest in opera, or, indeed, any of the performing arts. His lawsuit claimed that his father had been manipulated by his third wife, whom the son referred to only as “the Russian woman,” into removing him from the will and funneling his former inheritance toward the opera — an art form the father, according to the son, had never understood or appreciated.
Opera supporters feared the worst. The son’s case seemed solid, especially since the father was mentally enfeebled in his last year, when the will was changed.
But the court proceedings took a strange turn.
The son’s lawyers, the most talented team of litigators in the country, focused at first on arcane aspects of estate law and appeared, as anticipated, to be winning the case. The Metropolitan Opera looked to be doomed. But after week one of the trial, the son fired all of his lawyers and insisted on arguing the case himself. He called himself to the stand and interrogated himself at length about the high school performance of The Music Man, twenty years prior, in which he had played Harold Hill. His father, who had promised to attend, went instead on a last-minute business trip to London and missed all four performances, including the Saturday matinee.
The son then called to the stand a musical theater expert and asked him a single question: Was, or was not, Harold Hill the main character in The Music Man?
He was, the expert said.
The judge ruled all of this testimony irrelevant and inadmissible and ordered the son to pursue a more pertinent line of questioning. When the son refused to speak about anything other than The Music Man, the size of the Harold Hill role, and the last-minute London business trip, the judge held him in contempt of court and threw out the lawsuit.
The dramatic way in which the son was dragged from the courtroom, screaming about a classmate who played a mere townsperson of River City but whose father had managed to attend all four performances, led some to suspect that his entire case had been a piece of performance art. In a coy interview this month the son seemed to imply as much, and hinted that he’d always intended for his “brothers and sisters in the opera” to keep his father’s money. Others believe this to be an obvious face-saving tactic; opera supporters, in particular, have scoffed at the son’s ex post facto attempt to turn the trial into some sort of modern art piece. At any rate, the Metropolitan Opera remains, to their relief, flush with funds, and has supposedly lined up a spectacular season, ending with Wagner’s Lohengrin.
89: IN SYMPATHY
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The son of a famous Swiss strongman was born with a suite of physical deformities. His father, who’d once been able to clean and jerk 173 kilograms, felt now that his enormous, powerful body was an obscenity, and in sympathy for his son he let it waste away, in fact rather dramatically. Soon the sympathetic strongman was nearly as weak as his son, then he was just as weak as him, and shortly thereafter he dropped dead. The coroner actually wrote down as the cause of death: Strongman’s sympathy for son. Needless to say, when the son grew up and found out what had happened to his father, he developed — in addition to the suite of physical deformities — a set of mental disorders.
90: THE FOURTH SONATA
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A German composer whose earliest songs and sonatas had been dismissed as trifling and derivative, and whose father had begun to suggest, in his exceedingly gentle way, that he look into business or the law, went in 1924 to live in a timber hut beside a lake in the north of Finland, where over the course of several years, in perfect solitude, he pioneered an ingenious method of composition, very, very different from Schoenberg’s chromaticism, if superficially of course somewhat similar to it.
He returned to Leipzig in 1927 with his Piano Sonata No. 4, imagining the whole way home his father’s teary-eyed rapture when he plopped down at the family’s little upright piano and played for him, quite casually, his groundbreaking new piece. But upon his arrival he discovered, to his horror, that in consequence of a locomotive whistle sounding too close to his head his father had gone, at some point during the son’s Finnish sojourn, completely deaf.
Unable to play the piece for his father, the composer cast about desperately for other means of transmitting its essence into his father’s head. First he described the piece, its theoretical innovations, the crucial ways in which it diverged from Schoenberg; next he asked his father to observe please the faces of two delighted listeners; then he had him place his cheek to the piano as he played the piece in order to feel its vibrations. Yet none of this was capable of actually transmitting the essence of the piece into his father’s head, even though that head was constantly nodding and smiling and producing statements like: “I’m sure it’s a very nice piece, and not just nice but important.”
Finally the composer came to recognize that his sonata could only be absorbed as art, not as theoretical explanation, secondhand observation, or cranial vibration. And while art for the ear could no longer reach his father, there was still, was there not, art for the eye.
Yes, he would get his art into his father’s head through the front of it rather than the two sides. Forget the sides, he thought, reinvigorated. The front! The front!
He returned to his Finnish hut in 1928, committed to inventing a visual idiom that would let him communicate to his father, in a painting, the essence of Piano Sonata No. 4. Not since grade school had he held a paintbrush. But after two years of arduous study he had mastered the basics, and after two more he had translated his musical idiom into a corresponding visual one. At this point he sent a letter to his mother asking simply, “How is Father’s vision?” She sent an effusive loving letter in return, filled with maternal irrelevancies, but noting at the end that Father’s vision was fine and he was excited to see the painting. In his fifth year in the hut the composer painted his colossal Composition IV, which expressed perfectly the essence of his fourth sonata. Carefully, very laboriously, he transported the canvas back to Leipzig, bent over beneath its weight for the final leg from the train station home. His mother opened the door grimly. Behind her his father hobbled toward them with a cane, one eye milky white, the other covered by an eyepatch.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“I understand you have made a very nice painting!” his father shouted. “And very important!”