Fantasian knuckles development12/27/2023 Soon he settled for playing the theme in the bass, more or less in time. “I know… but that is not exactly what I mean… Does not matter anyhow.”Īt the same instant, ten years earlier, they attacked a forte passage Lenny was faultlessly executing chords and broken arpeggios, while Hermin was wrestling with the particularly convoluted accompaniment. It was better not to exhume certain buried emotions. Suddenly, their listening to that cassette together seemed oddly reckless to Hermin. “You can even hear him singing,” he added in a strangled voice, well aware that Lenny wouldn’t be fooled by these beside-the-point reflections. “You can hear Gould breathing too, in his recording of the Goldberg s,” Hermin said. Their mingled breathing functioned as a sort of symbol for their former connection, for what united them back then, for the bond to which the young composer today hesitated to give the beautiful name of friendship, although he could think of no more fitting term. He himself hadn’t stopped paying attention to it, not since the very start. The question might have seemed strange however, from the young man’s intonation, from his furtive glance, Hermin understood, beyond any possibility of error, what Lenny was alluding to. Their mingled breathing functioned as a sort of symbol for their former connection… for the bond to which the young composer today hesitated to give the beautiful name of friendship.” “Do you hear?” Lenny went on when their eyes met again. The development of Schubert’s theme, now in a major key, was proceeding apace, and the melody, Hermin’s skirmishing in the bass register, the tape hiss in the cassette, and their twinned breathing resounded indiscriminately in the room. For an instant, the light that enlivened his pupils thrust into Hermin’s eyes like a lance piercing a breastplate. “I used to love playing with you,” the young man suddenly said, his voice toneless, his eyes fixed on the window adorned with frost. Nonetheless, I used to love playing with him… Without regret, I’d let Lenny take the high part, which he exalted with his singing sound, by turns sorrowful, violent, thin, panting as for me, I provided muted accompaniment, trying to disguise, as best I could, my deficiencies: I hadn’t done much work on the piece and didn’t possess the instantaneous sight-reading ability, no doubt innate in the greatest players, of which Lenny gave daily, dazzling proof. We would play music together in the garret, sitting side by side on the threadbare velvet of the old piano bench, which creaked and groaned with every movement we made our shoulders would touch, and so would our legs. In the last months of his life, Schubert lived with his friend Schober, and Hermin had always wondered whether that fact hadn’t given rise to the late outpouring of works for four hands – the Fantasia, an Allegro, a Rondo, a Fugue – in a sort of amicable communion that functioned as a substitute for the pipe dream of a romantic collaboration. The memory came back to Hermin immediately: a rehearsal of Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor, a piece for four hands that he and Lenny had started to work on before eventually abandoning the effort. A disturbing crackling sound issued from the speakers. Without waiting for any further comment, the young composer inserted the cassette in the player. “If you want…” Lenny replied, shrugging his shoulders. He showed the object to Lenny and said, “All right with you if we see what this is?” The silence must not be allowed to drag on and on again topics of an oversensitive nature must not be brought up… Suddenly, he felt an object in his pants pocket – the cassette he’d found a short time before – and he was saved they needed only to listen to it. While Lenny, shaken by a new coughing fit, gasped for air, Hermin began a feverish search for a subject, any subject, capable of guaranteeing a normal conversation. “ An atmospheric, delicately wrought study of misunderstood emotion, heartbreaking yet incisive.” Library Journalīreathless, they sank into the armchairs in the Great Room.
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