The very next year, of course, came his stunning performance of the Concerto for Eight Fingers, composed by his father.
Soon World War I loomed. With his mutilated hands and his cultural prestige, Hronek was clearly of more use to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in concert halls than on battlefields. Not only was he not drafted, he was actively discouraged from enlisting. But for reasons that musicologists continue to debate, Hronek insisted on joining the army anyway.
At the Battle of Galicia, one of the first of the war, Hronek’s left arm was shot by a Russian sniper and had to be amputated at the elbow. His commander later recalled that Hronek kept kind of accidentally lifting both of his arms above the lip of the trench. “Hronek!” he would bark. “Keep your arms down!” And Hronek would lower his arms. But a couple of minutes later the arms would drift up above the parapet again. “Hronek!” the commander would bark. “Don’t you want to play piano again?” And Hronek would say yes and lower his arms again, but only temporarily. Finally, his left arm was shot and amputated.
His father began composing the Concerto for the Right Hand almost immediately. Hronek’s wartime performance of the piece with the Vienna Philharmonic is considered by many aficionados to be one of the greatest piano performances of the last century.
Days after the armistice, Hronek lost his right thumb in an eating incident at his apartment in Prague. The following month he lost his remaining ring finger in an eating incident. He told journalists he would never, under any circumstances, touch a piano again. In May he performed, before a packed concert hall, his father’s Concerto for Two Fingers. Musically, it wasn’t great, critics said, but as an expression of the resilience of the will it was a revelation.
Tragically, this would be the only performance of the concerto, for that summer Hronek mangled his right arm in what he called a hunting accident. Asked to elaborate, he said it was a boating incident. The arm had to be amputated at the elbow.
Hronek’s father embarked on his Concerto for Two Stumps, but midway through its composition Hronek’s body was found floating facedown in the River Vltava.
His father spent the last twenty years of his life composing a final piano concerto. It is believed that at least four of the era’s most illustrious pianists approached him about playing it, but he told each of them that it was intended for his son.
11: THE FLEMISH ENGRAVER’S SON
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A seer whose prophecies had never failed foretold that the artistic fame of the great Flemish engraver Dierckx would one day be eclipsed by that of his infant son. Dierckx immediately built a small stone tower behind his home and locked up his son in it. The boy never learned to speak. He never learned to draw, never held an artistic tool, never encountered paint, clay, or wood. Twice a day he received through a slot in the wall a meal of bread and water, and as he ate his father watched from a peephole to ensure that nothing artistic was made of it. The boy had no medium with which to express himself; even his excretions were promptly removed. Nor, to the father, did he seem to possess an artistic sensibility at all. He ate, drank, urinated, shat. In winter he sat huddled in his rags. In summer he pressed his forehead to the cool stone floor. He moaned, he howled, he quaked. Often he dashed his head against the wall.
But none of this reassured the engraver. Just the opposite, in fact. He’d surpassed his own masters not by engraving better what they engraved well, but by engraving what they had not even thought to engrave. Likewise, the way in which his son surpassed him artistically, he would probably not even recognize as art.
Any of this might be the art! The moaning, the howling, the quaking. The art of rag-huddling, the art of pressing-against-stone. How he ate, how he shat: was it art? The head-dashing: art? What aspect of his son’s evident insanity would one day be regarded as genius, while his own lucid engravings were left to rot? On the son’s nineteenth birthday, the elderly engraver rushed into the stone tower, appeared before his son for the first and last time, and stabbed him to death with his largest chisel. The son’s name is not recorded. Dierckx is still considered the high-water mark of late Renaissance Flemish engraving.
The seer’s failed prophecy was little noticed, but it became a source of fascination and skepticism for the seer’s son, an apprentice to his father. Whenever his father averred the perfect certainty of his prophecies, or regaled another dinner party with his impeccable predictions about the King’s Duck, the Bookbinder’s Goiter, or the French Merchant’s Fortune, the son would inquire, with an air of naive curiosity, “What about the Flemish Engraver’s Son?”
12: THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
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For many years an author had been trying to write truthfully about his father, Allan, a sociologist at the University of Illinois who was gentle and generous to his students but terrifying toward his family. He abandoned one memoir manuscript after another out of fear of his father’s reaction. Then — a breakthrough. He realized he could write honestly about his father by disguising him as a children’s book character. Instead of “Allan,” he wrote about “Al the Alligator.” Instead of a sociologist, Al was an alligator sociologist. Instead of teaching at the University of Illinois, he taught at the Alligator University of Southern Illinois. The author felt liberated. Instead of tenure, Al had alligator tenure. In lieu of emotionally tormenting his wife — a grant writer for a nonprofit — he ate his wife, an opossum grant writer for a woodland animals nonprofit.
Now, in this new form, the whole book simply flowed out of him. It begins with Al the Alligator taking him to Florida, ostensibly to meet his grandfather — a depressive wombat with a tracheotomy hole — but really to have an affair with a Decision Sciences professor at Alligator Florida International University’s School of Business. The Decision Sciences professor is a goose. The story ends four hundred or so pages later with a visit to Alligator Auschwitz, where Al makes him watch a horrifying documentary about the Alligator Holocaust over the protestations of their kind dog guide, who does not usually let animals under age fourteen watch it. Alligator Al screams at the dog guide in front of everyone: “The Alligator Holocaust is part of my son’s history, too!”
The author is currently seeking a children’s book publisher.
13: OBLIGATION
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A mountaineer’s son — who had always been expected to fulfill his father’s legacy by climbing the peak that had claimed his father’s life — was put in touch, through a mutual friend, with the son of a sea kayaker who was likewise expected to traverse, by kayak, the ocean that had consumed his father.
The mutual friend had long wanted to introduce these two friends, one a college roommate and one a coworker. He was constantly telling the son of the sea kayaker, “I need to introduce you to the son of the mountaineer,” or telling the son of the mountaineer, “You have to meet the sea kayaker’s son.” He was struck by the similarity of their situations: they were both short, pensive Jewish guys whose dads had died in the wilderness while attempting extreme physical feats, who both felt that they were expected to fulfill their fathers’ legacies and attributed the imposition of this expectation to others when in fact they imposed it on themselves. They will either love each either or hate each other, the mutual friend told his girlfriend.