The Battle of Stuttgart

Almost every night my wife and I settle in with our books and read.  It is something we have always done; it’s a release from the work that we do during the day.  She is a tax accountant, and I am a piano teacher.  Both of us find that we spend most of the day deep in thought, working at 130% capacity to do justice to our clients and students.  Reading allows the brain to slip to another track.

A couple of nights ago I came across a phrase in my book that referred to the sounds and sights of war.  I experienced the most incredible series of images, all in a matter of 3 seconds.  The images were clear, vivid, and worthy of a Hollywood director.  I provided the sound track, thank you!  Below, I have written the scenario, as best I can relate it, with “flashbacks” intact.

I am on the familiar stage of Howard Auditorium at Louisiana Tech University, in Ruston Louisiana.  I love performing there.  It is a real concert hall, with proscenium stage, balcony and carved plaster for decoration.  The piano sits midway between the two chambers of pipes for the concert organ.  The curtain behind me is a deep blue, one of Tech’s colors, and to the best of my recollection, it does not sport the ugly Bulldog face of its mascot.  I love looking straight ahead at the round school clock; it is reassuring to me.  The clock has been there through every one of my many recitals on this state, and it has become almost a friend.  The time never registers on my mind; I think it functions like the focal point that Lamaze mothers choose when they’re in labor.  The clock helped me to NOT think about the extraneous.

I do hear everything that comes from the audience, but that just becomes part of my “script”.  I believe it has always been important to occupy my conscious mind during a performance.  One teacher I heard recently says that if we don’t occupy our conscious during performance, it will cause trouble.  I keep mine busy with images that bring my music to life… for me, and I hope, for my audiences.  On this wonderful Sunday afternoon, I heard a baby cry; I love that baby.  I have convinced myself over the years that it was my youngest daughter, who would have been at the recital.  She has never been shy about her utterances.  The wonderful part is that she let out her bellow during the “dead baby” section of the Sonata I was playing.

I guess that got your attention?  Yes, I had a section of this grand piece that I thought of as a cemetery, probably in Europe (France, I think) with long rows of white crosses.  This was a World War I graveyard; that was a brutal war that counted many civilians among its casualties.  The saddest part of my cemetery was where they buried the countless babies… the innocents that never even had a chance to object to war, or poverty or the cruel twists of fate that might have made up their lives.  I’m pretty sure that Cheryl, my daughter, helped me to convey that deep despair during that performance.  I did perform the Sonata of Charles Griffes again, but I never captured the emotion quite like that.

Charles Griffes was a remarkable American composer.  He spent four formative years from 1903-1906 at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. He loved Germany, and one particular German composer, Konrad Wölcke, helped Griffes through rough times after Griffes’ father died in 1905. Wölcke even loaned Griffes money to continue his studies.  World War I was traumatic for Charles Griffes; he was an American patriot, but he had personal relations and friendships with Germans, and Germany, and the evils of war broke his heart.  His Piano Sonata of 1918 bristles with sounds of bombs and rockets, tension and trauma, and in one particular section, the wide-open sound of still and loneliness convey to me everything about war that is both fascinating and hateful.

I have never fought in a war, but I have a somewhat personal relationship to a different war that Charles Griffes did.  My father and several uncles fought in World War II.  One of my uncles fought in North Africa, against Field Marshall Rommel, and another was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, and incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp.  He made it out.  As a result, I’ve heard enough stories to enliven my fascination.  Uncle Reub gave me a Nazi armband, an insignia from a German officer’s hat, and a copy of Mein Kampf in German.  I interviewed Uncle Slug about his prison camp, and wrote a paper in high school.  I am possibly one of the few that read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” while still in high school… twice!

I tease people who ask about my Army experience; I tell them that I fought the Battle of Stuttgart!  I did live in the Stuttgart area for almost two years.  I worked on the base that Field Marshall Rommel used as his administrative headquarters.  Four kilometers away was Panzer Kaserne, where Rommel’s tanks were housed.  The underground tunnel between Patch Barracks and Panzer Kaserne was sealed in 1945, flooded by the British and killing all who hid in the tunnel.  One night, late, as I was doing preventative maintenance in Bldg. 1 (Rommel’s living quarter, when he was at “home”) I know I saw a ghostly apparition walking down the staircase.  An MP told me that I was not the first to see the ghost of Rommel’s mistress.

I really knew I was in the Battle of Stuttgart however, when I drove home one day and found a sign taped to my door.  “Warnung vor schlusswaffen gebrauchen.”  Loosely translated, have your weapons ready when entering.  It turned out that my landlord had recently been released from a mental ward.  He sometimes transported himself into an era when blackout curtains and fear dominated the town of Stuttgart.  He had seen a friend of mine in army fatigues, and it triggered a little hysteria.  The next morning I was very convincing in explaining to a Frau Niebergall of the US Army Housing Office that my family, with one-year-old twins in tow, would be moving to another house.  The traumas of war seem to live on.

I’m once again on the stage of Howard Auditorium, this time in a recital of two-piano music; there is such a wealth in this literature, and it is too rarely touched.  With twin 9 foot Steinways to bring the music to life, my partner and I opened with En blanc et noir, by Claude Debussy.  Written in 1915, Debussy insisted the work was not a comment on the First World War, but since virtually all of his correspondence from this period indicates a near obsession with the subject, it’s hard to imagine this music without WWI as a backdrop.  There are suggestions of bugle calls and quiet military drum rhythms.  The second movement, dedicated to a French army officer that had been killed in battle is overpoweringly sad, filled with the sounds of drum beats, chimes, and out of the silence comes a powerful quote from the Lutheran hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.  I can’t but help think that if that movement could bring chills and tears to the performers that day, the audience left unmoved.  A war which was over before my father was born, came back to inspire me to a powerfully satisfying musical experience.

Three seconds to evoke all of this.  I swear this to be true.  The images and experiences of life, and those of music, seem inseparable to me.  I hope they will always be thus.

MY HEARTFELT THANKS

As piano teachers, we spend great amounts of time… giving.  We meet so many different personalities, so many minds, during our workweek that we almost feel as if our “gears” were being stripped.  I have longed for the Vulcan Mind-Meld that Mr. Spock used so effectively in the Star Trek series.  Lacking that, I try as best I am able, to find where each student is, meet her there, and take her to the place she longs to be.  It’s fascinating, invigorating and exhausting work.  My colleagues and I attend workshops, recital, concerts and more extended conferences for our transfusion of “new blood”.  I am a confessed convention junky.

The MTNA Conference is one that I always anticipate.  It comes at the end of March every year.  Besides giving my mind and soul a refreshing, I look forward to one or two moments of transcendence…a workshop that gives me something totally new to chew on, or expresses old truths in new ways.  I am never disappointed, and sometimes I stumble into a session that underlines why I even bother to get up each morning.  And of course, the end of the Conference means the real beginning of spring for me.

I find that I am very protective of my time in general, and more so when I’m at MTNA.  I face the choices of several workshops for each hour with anguish, because often I would like to attend more than one.  Over the years, I’ve learned to deal with it, but it is never easy.  I like to find sessions that are different, possibly tangential to piano teaching and piano playing.  This year, with trepidation, I chose a session that seemed intriguing.  Its topic was Performance Medicine, a relatively new field related to the well-developed Sports Medicine field.  They promised a new collaborative endeavor that would bring Performance Medicine, the treatment for musicians with small muscle and joint injuries, to the level of it’s older and smarter cousin.

I knew this session had the possibility of disappointment.  It could be laden with medical lingo, filled with concepts of physiology and anatomy that were beyond my comprehension.  I knew I couldn’t WASTE an hour, but it beckoned to me.  I got there early.  Carrying my weird, flat muffin (it looked like someone stepped on it) and my ubiquitous coffee, I approached the door.  There was a girl pacing in the hallway; she seemed to move in a slightly jerky, unbalanced manner, but she had such an engaging smile!  She asked me where I got my coffee, and I told her.  But something in that meeting lingered; I didn’t know what it was.  I knew it was not a sexual attraction, but a sensual attraction, something mysterious she projected.  I soon forgot about her, and watched the huge group of presenters setting up their multi-media. 

The session proceeded on schedule, and it was very interesting.  There seems to be not only a promise of something happening with Music Medicine, but an extremely vibrant group of experts in many fields that are collaborating to make it a reality.  Just when I was settling in, the group leader said it was maybe time for a little musical interlude.  I was pleasantly surprised to see “the girl” introduced as an opera singer with experience in roles throughout Europe.  She moved, almost imperceptibly in her strange gait, across the stage, and proceeded to deliver a wonderful aria.  She was greatly gifted, and one of the best singers I have heard in a long time.  Still, it seemed strange that she was appearing in this particular session.

The group leader addressed that very question when the aria was done; he told us that within the last year she was the recipient of a bilateral lung transplant!  I don’t know if you have ever heard a collective gasp before, but it is very dramatic.  This singer had the breath control of Pavarotti, with no signs that she had ever had any related problems.  It seemed that this might be the worst thing that an opera singer could be faced with.  She had undergone a successful operation, and a year of rehabilitative therapy with several members of the panel presenting the Performance Medicine workshop.  That got our attention.  These professionals not only were determined to make Performance Medicine as advanced and prevalent as Sports Medicine, they were capable of a rehabilitative miracle.

With the information given through the workshop, I was certain that I had chosen well.  So many musicians have been incapacitated with overuse syndromes of one kind or another.  At least two major professional concert pianists have had career ending problems with their hands; tendonitis and carpal tunnel problems are minor compared to dystonia and other debilitating skeletal and muscular problems.  The world of medicine has seemed to ignore these maladies, while professional and collegiate sports personnel have some of the best restorative and rehabilitative treatments known.

It wasn’t until the end of this session that I fell in love with the session itself, and the little opera singer.  She rose to say a few words to us, knowing that we were 90% piano teachers, and 10% vocalists.  As she struggled to keep herself composed, she described her yearlong therapy.  When she began trying to sing after her bilateral transplant, she couldn’t get a sound out.  Years of study in private and in college, and years of professional experience in operatic roles seemed to be worthless.  She worked with her therapists, tried to remember the many vocal lessons she had completed, and nothing seemed to work.  She wanted to give up.

She said she wanted the piano teachers assembled before her to know that they had her supreme gratitude for a life saved.  “I was a terrible piano student”, she said.  “I loved my piano teacher, and she also was my first voice teacher.”  She went on, “I never worked as hard as she did.  But I want you to know that during my therapy, when it was too hard, and I wanted to give up, it was my piano teacher and the things she really taught me, that saved me.” 

“What I learned after all those years is what all of you teach now, to young students like me.  Self discipline, the spirit to never give up until it is finished, the mental calluses that allow a person to repeat and repeat and repeat.  Voice lessons did not get my voice back, but what my piano teacher gave me did, and I don’t have her to thank anymore, but I have all of you.  Please accept my heart-felt thanks for what you do everyday, even when it seems to you like you are getting nowhere with that particular little boy or girl.  When you wonder why you still teacher into your 70’s, and when you feel the pain of every student that quits lessons, remember that you never know how much you changed someone.”

Let me tell you that the sounds of collective sobbing are much more musical than a collective gasp.  I now feel good about going back to my students.  I’m refocused on what I might accomplish.  And I won’t forget the singer with the engaging smile and the need for a little morning caffeine.