Ten Words No. 1:
How I Inadvertently Redecorated
the Church of St. Stephen
in Montenegro
A Short Story
by Sawyer Brown
(See 10
Words Intro for an explanation of the concept.}
The random words:
intramural, fermenting, percentage, suckling,
notorious, chalice, improvisation,
Hughes, breaching, Montenegro
| intramural fermenting percentage suckling notorious chalice improvisation Hughes breaching
intramural intramural
intramural intramural
intramural
intramural intramural
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I made the mistake of making eye contact with the audience as I moved onto the platform. Normally, before bowing, I cast my eyes toward the highest point at the back of the venue, then bow, and turn quickly to the piano. This evening, my ploy was interrupted by a too clear image of a half full auditorium. Church, actually. The Church of St. Stephen in Montenegro. As my eyes moved quickly upward, they were stopped by the vacuum of several hundred empty seats. For a terrible moment, I scanned the occupants of the other seats. Maybe they thought I was seeking assurance that it was not as bad as it seemed. Worse, actually, because in the dim light of the old Orthodox architecture, I had the strong impression that many of the occupied seats were taken by parishioners who’d just as soon their normal worship hour had not been preempted by me. Not really by me, though they had no way to know this. By my wife, who had volunteered my services for a fund raiser. The church had been heavily damaged in the most recent Balkan unpleasantness, and the head priest, a distant cousin to some portion of my wife’s family, had called her in Belgrade and asked if I would play for a good cause. So there I was, trying to find God or solace or something in the rafters and getting stuck on a sanctuary where the religionists clearly outnumbered the moneyed fund-raiser attendees. I completed my bow, moved to the piano, busied myself for a moment getting settled on the bench. Again, my eyes betrayed me. Normally, during these little housekeeping moments (adjusting the height of the bench, the distance to the keyboard), I look at the keys. This evening, for some reason, I glanced up and locked gazes with the distant cousin, who was seated in full priestly regalia beyond the end of the piano. I was about to look away when I noticed he was holding a chalice, a lovely bejeweled silver thing, which was glittering, picking up the flickering candlelight very nicely. Odd, I thought, as I went back to my adjustments. Settled in, I took a breath and started. This was a one piece recital. At the request of one of the church’s big supporters, a local American representative of the Hughes companies, I was doing the Bach Goldberg Variations. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a slow theme followed by 32 variations, some fast, some slow. Depending on the player (how many repeats you take, how jaunty you’re feeling), a performance can last anywhere from 35 to 60 minutes. Still, the Goldbergs are sort of the Mount Everest of keyboard music. When you’re finished, you know you’ve done something. I started. Now, in my sort of second-level career (there’s probably not a concert hall in southeast Europe I’ve not performed in), I’ve played the Goldbergs probably 200 times. It’s not as if I don’t know the piece. I know it, know it well, and know that I can get through it without serious problems. Tonight, as soon as I started, I felt something was different. The piano was old, a late 19th century concert grand, with heavy action but a lovely muted voice, like that of a grande dame who’s seen and commented on everything. I’d come in that afternoon and gotten acquainted with the instrument. I’d played worse, much worse. Now, the first note of the opening theme put me in a different world. It was as if a door opened into a room where a Bach lived whom I had never met before. Hard to say: As if I were suddenly hearing the piece from this room and playing along, but not as a copycat. In some strange way, I almost felt as if I were improvising as I went. Not only that, the acoustic of the old church vanished. The stony echo of the high walls that breached any sense of intimacy when I had done my test playing in the afternoon was gone, and my ears told me the notes I struck were spreading unhindered in all directions. No feedback, in other words. Before I finished the first measure, I sensed that the old, somewhat rickety piano was filled with riches, and the universe was like a vast suckling thing eager to draw out whatever I could produce from the instrument. Fifty-five minutes later, I finished. I have no memory of anything between the start and the end. Only that initial sense of something musical happening that I’d never experienced before. I finished. There was polite applause. The moneyed purchasers of tickets came onto the platform to chat, confident that their donations gave them the right to shake my damp, tired hands. The four priests of St. Stephen’s thanked me. The head priest took me aside to give me my nominal percentage of the receipts, which I declined graciously. He as graciously accepted my refusal. And I went back to the hotel, ate, slept, and next day flew back to Belgrade to resume my teaching duties in the academy. In the following weeks and months, occasionally I would think briefly of those puzzling moments as I had started to play, but the experience seemed unreal, like a dream, and as time passed it faded, also like a dream. A couple of years later, the first letter came. From Sao Paulo. A young father had tracked me down, found the conservatory’s address in Belgrade on the Internet, and wrote to thank me for saving him from suicide. He had recently lost his job, had no prospects of a new job, and had determined to kill himself by crashing his car at high speed, so that his wife could collect his insurance. He had been driving toward the location he had selected for the accident when on the car radio he heard the opening measures of the Goldberg Variations. He was not, he said, knowledgeable about classical music, rarely heard it. But this music, he said, entered his ears and went straight to his heart. He stopped the car and listened all the way through. After it was finished, he said, he saw what a terrible mistake he had been about to make, went home, started job hunting with renewed energy the next day and was now again well employed. The letter ended with effusive, florid thanks. Because it was my performance at St. Stephen’s that he had heard. I was baffled. Flattered, a little embarrassed, and baffled. I knew that Radio Montenegro had recorded the performance for later broadcast but I had thought no more about the recording. From my office at the conservatory, I called Radio Montenegro and asked about the tape. Yes, they still had the master. They had broadcast it a couple of times and then put it away. They had no idea how it might have got to South America. I then called my alleged agent in Belgrade, who handles my bookings, told him about the letter and asked him to investigate. I knew, from my teenage children, that bootleg tapes were notorious in the world of pop music. I found it difficult to imagine anyone being interested in a bootleg tape of a Bach recital by an unknown pianist in the Balkans. A couple of days passed. My agent called. Never the most supportive of people (you always had the feeling a barely tamed resentment was fermenting in him because you had not made an international superstar career on the order of that of Van Cliburn), he said, "Something odd going on here." I was silent. "The guys in Montenegro swear they never copied the tape. No record that it was ever sent to another station. So I do a search on the Internet. You’ll be happy to know there’s a 40 megabyte mp3 file of your Goldberg at about 50 different sites, free for the downloading." "How—" I started. "No idea. No fucking idea." I had one of my kids download the file. Sure enough. There it was. Complete. Including opening remarks from the head priest, identifying the church, and yours truly. My agent assured me there was nothing we could do copyright-wise. Even the big recording companies had lost control of their product. "Just be happy that your name’s getting into places it wouldn’t ordinarily have gotten to," my agent said. OK. Again, I put the performance out of my mind. Then the next week two letters came. One from Australia, one from the United States. People who’d been in dire straits, heard my Goldberg, and they started getting better. Within a few days, the letters were coming by the dozen, then by the hundred. All with the same kind of story. Despair, followed by hope, and deeply felt thanks. I didn’t know what to do, what to make of it. I called the head priest at Montenegro and told him what was happening. I heard a smile in his voice. "I suppose it’s our little miracle, isn’t it," he said. It was as if he had been waiting for me to call with this bizarre news. "What do you mean, ‘our little miracle’?" "After you played, I noticed several of our regular worshippers were still in their seats an hour later. I was ready to close the building for the night. They didn’t want to leave. I asked what was going on. They all tried to speak at once. None of them could really explain, but I knew something very unusual had happened." "What should I do about all these letters?" "Just send them along to us. We’ll handle it." They did. My agent followed developments at that point. The church fathers in Montenegro responded to all "Goldberg letters" (as I came to think of them), suggesting that the writers might best show their appreciation by sending a small donation to the St. Stephen Building Fund. If you go to Montenegro now, you’ll see that St. Stephen, though primary construction took place in the 14th century, looks as if it were finished yesterday. New roof, sandblasted exterior, repaired plaster, restored paintings, stained glass reinstalled, full heating and air conditioning system, and so on. And yes, my career received a small boost. I still do the Balkans circuit, but now occasionally I’m invited as far afield as Prague and Kiev, and once even to Vienna. They always want me to play the Goldberg. I always decline. I haven’t played it since that night, and do not expect to play it again. As for the mp3 file, I refuse to listen to it and refuse to allow anyone in my household to play it in my presence. An unwitting participant in the wholly obscure metaphysical intramurals of God? No, I think not. No. No. END
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