Excerpt: The Deviationists: An Adventure Story

CHAPTER ONE
CONCERTO
“My dear Faustus, do not be so faint-hearted!
Even if you lose your body
There is still a long way to go
Before your judgment.”
-Alfred Schnittke, Faust Cantata

And now that we have established our motifs, let us move on the role of individual instruments in the score, which is to say, our darling Deviationists, Lyalya and Kurt. They are dead now. I do not know where they are buried, probably at some place out in the woods in a pile of bones like the Romanovs, but I know what happened to them (because I made it up, you see, and for that I am sorry to them). If I brought them into being is only right that I attempt to give them meaning, to force their intersecting melodies into the symphony of their time and place (which was of course Wagner’s, Wagner with his obsession with purity, with blood, with love, with heroes and villains). Call my contribution to the musical field of 20th-century evil a concerto, in which two soloists shall share the stage against the awful clangor and clamor of the less-competent musicians consigned to the orchestra (I ache to compare it to Schnittke’s Cello Concerto No. 1—you cannot make the cello an un-erotic instrument but Schnittke tries his hardest, the roar of that piece turns it into a beautiful naked woman perched at the edge of a pit of offal—the trumpets are the gleaming bones that peak up from it like Dresden’s church steeples—and only as you approach do you see that her panting mouth is caked with blood—can you think of a better metaphor for our Deviants?—but no, a Russian? and a Jew? Even Mahler would be better).
First Kurt then, in his narrow spectacles and his lock of hair that was not exactly blonde and had the tendency to fall over his eyes, causing him to flip his head back when he was playing, his skinny white fingers and shabby brown wardrobe, his nose that made him look like a Jew even though he was not (except for maybe his father’s grandfather had converted to marry a Catholic woman, we have no records), he went to a Lutheran church but loved the Catholic bible. What instrument shall represent him? (It hurts me to revert to stale allegorical composition, like it hurt Prokofiev to say the oboe is the duck, all the strings stand for the Young Soviet Pioneer [did he consider that the strings, with their ability to glissando and their lack of valves and keys, are the instrument that can most easily improvise and evade set doctrine?]) Why, Kurt is the piano of course, the one instrument he could play, whose keys on cold nights hurt his fingers. Delicate and ordered and pale, mathematical, simultaneously the widest-ranged of all instruments and yet the most dead—the oboe whines, the horns proclaim, the viola begs, and the piano can simply state, just as at the end of his life with a pistol to the top of his skull and his hands raw from the autumn leaves he is kneeling in Kurt will merely say “please don’t--.”
Having settled on our composer, we are now compelled to compose for him a leitmotif. I imagine a little cyclical moment in D minor (the key of associated with counterpoint, which is to say, associates with revolutionaries), the lower three fingers pacing back on forth on the white notes like his on Lyalya’s white spine, before darting up to his delicate pinky at the highest pitch and then falling down again, not stopping so much as fading out. When he was bored at his bench, his left arm resting on the bass keys, he could play the theme from Schubert’s Gretchen Am Spinnrade to himself over and over by muscle memory—a leitmotif like that, then, for him. In his small apartment at three in the morning he paces back and forth while speaking in whispers to Lyalya until his feet hurt, and the moment when he leans on the windowsill and looks out into the street is the moment at which his left hand plays the harmonic cord and the melody permutes, his right stumble-dancing down into the lowest until both hands are concurrent, and then they rest for indefinite measures.
What of Lyalya then? She was wide-hipped, moody, and her pale thighs pressed into his waist slowly and insistently, and whether she screamed or moaned it always built and shuddered. Let us say cello, then. But let us not. It would seem too easy to say “oh, the woman hero is a cello,” it would smack of the obvious decision which we know that modern composers must avoid (when Schnittke’s Satan dismembers his Faust it is to a tango, when Lyalya builds bombs she listens to ballet)(and besides, if you leave a cello and a piano to their own means they will lock the door on the world and spend an eternity writhing in bed, look at Shostakovich for proof of that). What then, for the pale woman with her short black hair, her broken nose, her weathered eyes and the toes numb from Ukrainian frostbite? It is 1928, she stands on a streetcorner in Hamburg shouting with a handful of red papers, it is 1935 and even though Comintern has withdrawn all resources from the hopes of creating an ally in Germany she is holding meetings in basements and hiding her notes on Das Kapital in a hollow in her mammoth Mein Kampf. All warriors charge to their doom to the shouts of the trumpet, so let one represent her, one of such light brass that it is nearly silver with valves that glisten white. It is true that her love-yelps call to mind the opening horns of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which begins with a lone note in silence and builds to a point of unending. It is also true that her volume was difficult to modulate, at her quietest she sounded muffled, raspy (she never learned to use a mute), she was happiest exalting, and merely shouting when she could not do that, and whereas Kurt’s instrument relies alone on some of the tiniest bones in the human body, hers is powered by breath alone, her tune sustained entirely by muscle and lung.
Her leitmotif challenges me more—I do not play the trumpet like I can play the piano, which is to say that I cannot even stammer out a Cole Porter melody. But in my head is her in a ragged skirt skipping down a flight of stairs, jumping over whole steps (which is to say that she progresses in thirds)—she listened to Grieg on her phonograph when she couldn’t sleep, and it resembles something he would write. Cast it in A so that it can harmonize with Kurt’s and you’d better cast it in A minor because we know where those steps lead (Am and Dm harmonize beautifully, almost to the point of discord, in their shrill, off-kilter notes. Play them together on piano and the fingers of your two hands interweave, touch both ends of the octave, rest comfortably on the fat white keys). If Kurt transposed it to piano his fingers would crash over each other in their rush to descend, once he reached the end he would jokingly keep the same rhythm going though the air until he leaned ridiculously far off the piano bench and was drumming on the wall. Whereas Kurt’s leitmotif fades, hers increases until it cuts off suddenly, here come the shrill woodwinds in a chorus that overpowers her (see Prokofiev’s usage of them), when she dies she will scream and scream until all is silence. As he ponders and paces, she roars and spirals downwards like a comet, like an eight-eight mm shell screaming down to Russian soil trailing a cloud behind it.
So there is the outline: Concerto for Trumpet and Piano in D Minor, “The Deviationists.” And now the overture is completing, our two melodic lines are beginning to emerge, and we hear the pacing of Kurt’s leitmotif swelling up under his skeletal fingers as bone begins to wrap itself around them. Now he is nothing but bone and clinging nervous thought, now he is blood, now he stands in front of us, no longer leaving red stains on his keys as the concerto truly begins.