She turns to him, blood rushing to her face. “Maestro, I brought you an unusual gift from Jerusalem, something you might find useful.”
“A gift?” He is surprised. “Oh, my dear Venus, I do have a weakness for gifts, but on condition they are inexpensive and small and just symbolic, because that way I am not obligated to give gifts in return.”
A quake of anxiety seizes her as she leans over and produces the whip from her bag, wrapped in a shawl of her mother’s and tied with string.
He recoils. “What is this?” he asks. “It doesn’t look like a small gift.” But his lust for gifts overcomes his resistance, and he carefully undoes the string and shawl, releasing the strong scent of leather that has whipped the bodies of many beasts.
“What is this?” The conductor is shocked.
“It’s a whip I bought from a Bedouin in the Old City, a whip that tamed and drove camels in the desert, and I thought, Maestro, that it might also be good for taming and driving us musicians.”
The froggy blue eyes of the Dutchman light up with great amusement, and he raises the whip to his nostrils.
“I don’t believe it… You thought about me all the way in Israel.”
“Why not? I’m a musician in your orchestra.”
“True. And you thought I need to strengthen my conducting not only with a baton but a whip?”
“In a symbolic way, Maestro. Only symbolic. It’s a symbolic gift, the kind you like.”
“Marvelous,” he murmurs, and extends the whip along the empty seats to measure its length, apparently tempted to whip something or somebody.
“But why symbolic?” he asks, studying the pretty harpist warily. “Why only symbolic? Why not whip someone who ruins the tempo or misses notes or comes in at the wrong place?”
She is alarmed.
“No, no, Maestro, it’s a symbolic whip, only symbolic, otherwise the musicians will blame me.”
But the maestro continues to marvel.
“Where did you get the idea to bring me a whip?”
“As it happened, I bought it for myself, to protect myself from the neighborhood children who were breaking into my mother’s apartment to watch television, which was forbidden in their homes.”
“Television is forbidden? Why?”
“Because according to our religious people, it corrupts values and draws the children away from Torah studies.”
“Yes,” rhapsodizes the Dutchman, “your religious people have it exactly right. Television is evil and corruptive, and you did well to whip their children.”
He clasps the Bedouin whip to his breast like a beloved infant.
“Symbolic… symbolic,” he mutters, “and I have the urge to whip this young man on the podium who is driving our orchestra crazy with his music.”
She laughs. “No, no.”
With great feeling he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips, gathers up the whip, takes it with him to the podium and embraces the young composer, who has just concluded his Melancholy Arabesques with a blast.
“Bravo,” he says, “but it still needs polishing.”
The percussion players vacate the front of the stage for the string players arriving from the wings. The two harpists take their positions behind the harps, the timpanists tune their drumheads, the other percussionists strategically arrange their instruments, the French horn players remove their slides and shake out the spit, the oboists and bassoonists choose the right reeds and adjust them. Gradually they all finish leafing through the scores, and quiet descends on the stage.
The conductor taps the music stand with his baton and begins the little lecture he likes to deliver when starting a new piece.
“At the end of the nineteenth century, France lost a war to Germany but won the culture war. Paris became the capital of the European artistic avant-garde, the city where the painters Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas created Impressionism, while French poetry thrived in the Symbolist vein.
“Claude Debussy, born in the year 1862, was revolutionary in his style and became the greatest painter of music and a leader in the Impressionism of sound, though he complained that ‘imbeciles,’ as he called them, categorized his music as Impressionist, confusing painting and music. Debussy established a new concept of tonality in European music. With his fertile imagination he rebelled against the strong German influence in classical music and turned to exotic areas of influence, taking non-European scales and musical colors from the Far East, also borrowing from Spanish dance, and experimented boldly with instruments that seldom had central roles in classical music, writing, for example, complex parts for the harp.”
Van Zwol points his baton at the two harpists and smiles broadly.
“Symbolism in literature also influenced Debussy,” continues the conductor, “and he wrote program music, giving symbolic and literary titles to his compositions, and strove with elegance and sensitivity to evoke the complexity of nature and humans, first and foremost to fathom the soul of woman.”
“We would like to have more specific details,” says Ingrid, a beautiful French horn player. “Also personal ones if possible.”
Laughter and applause.
The conductor raps his baton.
“If we start recounting Debussy’s romantic adventures, we won’t get to the first notes of the piece today, nor do I wish to be responsible for corrupting decent Dutch men and women with racy French anecdotes. That’s what the Internet is for, answerable to no one. So suffice it to say that he was quite the adventurer, and that his tonal instability may have derived from romantic instability. He switched women easily, cheated on them unconscionably, and one of his wives shot herself in despair in the Place de la Concorde and survived only by a miracle. But all this proves that for him, woman was the ultimate creation, an eternal grail of love and desire, even when no longer young and pretty. She is the purpose of art.”
The musicians, women and men, nod in agreement.
“Debussy died at the age of only fifty-five, at the end of the First World War, as German cannons battered Paris with their last remaining shells. And so his funeral procession took place in empty streets, although he was, in my view and that of many others, the most important French composer of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to be felt to this day.”
“How, exactly?” demands a white-haired cellist.
The maestro laughs. “I see you don’t want to play today, just talk.”
“We want to have a better understanding of what we’re playing,” several voices chime in.
“Fine, fine, you’re right, because in recent years this orchestra has not played Debussy, and this is music that requires particular precision. It’s not easy or simple. A complex and dreamlike harmonic world, scales of whole tones, atonal passages, glittering transitions. His repetitiveness is unsettling. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we are not lounging in a beach chair and looking at the sea, but entering the depths, and the Japanese want an answer from us — what to do in the next tsunami.”
“Just so it doesn’t swallow us too,” interjects a veteran oboist, and everyone laughs.
“No,” the humorless first violinist assures her, “we shall not perform on the east coast of Japan but on the west coast, the one not exposed to the Pacific Ocean that still yearns for the moon that was born from it.”
The conductor silences them with a tap of his baton.
“Now let’s get to work. And since this is a serious and difficult piece, I will be more of a taskmaster and less of a comedian, nor will I limit myself to mere criticism. Rather, I’ll do some whipping, since I just got a whip as a gift.”
He picks up the Bedouin whip, extends it and waves it cautiously above his head.
Pandemonium. The orchestra goes wild. Shouts from every corner. “Not fair!” howl the string players. “Your whip only reaches us and not the winds and percussion!”