In the beginning of his memoirs, Casanova, now an old man, said that he was unable to enjoy the pleasures of his youth, but by writing his memoirs, he could revisit them. Although my adventures in opera and ballet pits are obviously not in the same class with Casanova, I hope they will afford some enjoyment to my readers.
At my first Lyric Opera rehearsal I met Lois Bickel Colburn, a cellist
in her late 60s or early 70s. She had been my predecessor Shirley Tabachnick’s
teacher, and had four former students in the cello section of the Chicago
Symphony. She gave the Chicago premiere of the Kodály Unaccompanied Cello
Sonata, and was a member of the first string quartet to perform all the Bartók
quartets in the American Midwest.
She must have viewed me with a certain disdain and suspicion when I
arrogantly announced that I would play the Tosca solo better than anybody had
in the history of Chicago. I did eventually win her over when Tosca came up
early in the season, but she told me not to break my arm patting myself on the
back. This was only one of her many tangy phrases. She said about one of our
conductors, “What he knows about music you can put in your eye and see better.”
About the cello section, minus the two of us, she offered the comment, “They
add up to a big round zero without the rim.” Years later when Bruno Bartoletti
conducted the Ritual Fire Dance from Manuel de Falla’s El Amour Brujo, her
response was “Jesus wept.” Whenever it looked like I might get myself into
trouble, she advised, “When the devil says good morning, tip your hat.”
She had emphysema, caused by a lifetime of smoking, and had shoulder
problems. Since the best defense is a good offense, she had something bad to
say about everybody, and she did it in grand style. She would call the younger
players “junior geniuses,” and some of the older colleagues who talked too much
were “IN-sufferable!” When Joe Saunders, my stand partner, asked her to listen
to him play and criticize it, she said there was a lot to criticize. I’m sure
that once was enough for Joe. On the other hand, she really liked me, and encouraged
me to play as loud as I could and let them know what I could do, but also
encouraged me to go back and study with Leonard Rose because he was “Mister
Big.” There wasn’t anything exceptionally dramatic about our friendship, but we
shared our time together every day in a spirit of love and appreciation, and I
treasure the memory of my time with her.
There were two things that really stuck with me over the last five
decades since Lois came into my life. “When the devil says good morning, tip
your hat and don’t borrow trouble.” How many times in my life has the ghost
of Lois Colburn come down just at the right moment to tell me not to borrow
trouble or to tip my hat for the devil, when my instincts would have been to do
the exact opposite.
Lois desperately wanted me to have her Testore cello and was terribly disappointed when it did not suit me. In a way, I would’ve liked to have had her cello to be able to hold on to a tangible part of her. I’ve often wondered why I had so much trouble connecting with so many of this generation who were 40 years younger than me, since I had such a good and fluid relationship with Lois, who was 40 years older than me.
The ghost of the past who haunts and inspires me continually is the
ghost of Jerry Beal.
Gerald Beal had been a famous child prodigy who toured the world under
Columbia Artists Management with his identical twin brother Wilfred, playing
the Bach Double Concerto and other works for two violins. Jerry had a tendency
to make things up, so I tried to stay out of his way during the tour, but one
day between matinee and an evening performance at the Metropolitan Opera House,
I heard him play an extraordinary performance of the Bach C Major Fugue.
Jerry was a long-time student of Ivan Galamian, and he had also studied
privately with Jascha Heifetz. Because of this, my wife asked him to give her a
lesson on how to practice scales. I was interested as well, so I listened to
the lesson, and then I asked Jerry to show me a few things. I was so impressed
with what he taught me that I spent the rest of the tour and the next five
years studying with him.
It is said when the student is ready, the teacher appears. This was
absolutely true for me at that time. I was playing well, but I was doing so
with a great amount of physical tension. The first thing that Beal did was to
give me a series of very clever exercises to re-sensitize me to the cello. The
object was often to see how little pressure was required in either hand to
create a sound, and to work up from there. Beal taught me to listen to myself.
He would have me play through slow movements, making sure I would vibrate on
every note. If I happened to play a single note without vibrato, I would have
to start again at the beginning. I felt like Sisyphus.
Beal reduced technique down to a few basic elements, and could organize
the execution of any melody or passage around a few simple principles. He
reminded me that every note has a beginning, which is an attack of some sort; a
middle, which is a development of the sound; and an end, which is either a
tapering off or a connection to another note. He had me practice this by
playing scales and arpeggios, one note to a bow, in order to develop a complete
command of balance and vibrato. To Beal, the trick was to create the greatest
amount of beauty on the longest note of a phrase, and organize the rest of the
notes in a particular phrase around it.
He taught me about the way silence connects to sound, the infinite
variety of sound once created, and how that sound could join either to silence
or to another sound. Jerry taught me to organize my playing in terms of attack
and release, and after I learned to manage the release part, I found I had a
great deal of control.
Jerry worked tirelessly with me when I had important solos to play
(before my first rehearsal at the Lyric Opera, he took me through the entire
cello part of Salome. It took eight hours a day for three days to get through
it all, but in the end I could play it like a concerto, and lots of it by
memory). He understood the importance of making a stunning and permanent
impression, and over the next five years he gave me as many lessons as he
thought I needed, covering solo and chamber music repertoire as well as
orchestral solos. Jerry knew that he had an unsavory reputation, which may be
the reason he encouraged me not to mention him as one of my teachers. He
assured me that the name of Leonard Rose would carry a great deal more weight,
and would cast me in a more positive light.
Jerry pounded his concept of rhythm into me, hour after hour, at every
lesson. He would sing and conduct and click out rhythmic subdivisions while I
played in order to create a framework for attacking and releasing. He taught me
that as long as the interval between pulses is predictable, anything done in
between pulses would be plausible. He taught me that the challenge is to keep
the pulses as far apart as possible. If I take a melody and pulse it by the
quarter note, and then I pulse the same melody (in the same tempo) by the half
note, by the measure, by two measures, by four measures, or by eight measures,
each statement of the melody would be correct, but the amount of freedom
offered by the longer interval between pulses makes it possible to bring
imagination to bear.
I was always told that you should never make a musical virtue out of a
technical vice, and that you should work out your problems. When I proposed
this notion to Jerry Beal, he would laugh in my face, and say, “If at first you
don’t succeed, try something else.” For Jerry, any plausible way of organizing
a group of notes was perfectly good, so picking one that featured your
strengths, rather than your weaknesses, seemed the obvious choice. Comfort and
security were more important to Jerry than conjuring up the most transcendental
phrase imaginable.
Jerry Beal taught me that every phrase must make a point that cannot be
missed. The best non-musical example of a point that cannot be missed can be
described by the way the colorblind test works. The colorblind test is a
picture made of red and green dots, with the red dots spelling out the number
two, and the green dots providing the background. A person with normal vision
will see the red number two clearly stand out against a green background, but a
person who is colorblind will only see a field of gray. He taught me to apply
the figurative colorblind test to every phrase I play.
Jerry was fond of telling me that while I was smart, my medulla
oblongata (the reptilian part of my brain) was dumb. Since most of playing has
to do with conditioned reflexes, it is necessary to program the reptilian part
of the brain. In order to build trust with the reptilian brain, it’s important
to play entire movements or pieces many, many times. By doing so even the most
difficult moves eventually become internalized. Before my Alice Tully Hall
debut he had me play my entire recital program for him two or three times in a
row. Eventually as soon as I played the first note of any piece, the whole
piece seemed to set itself in my brain, and all the technical issues melded
into the musical concept. Technique to Jerry was ultimately the physical
choreography of a musical idea.
He also taught me how to internalize a phrase, and always insisted that
I practice as much as possible in context. He encouraged me to hire pianists to
make tapes of piano accompaniments, and he taught me the importance of playing
along with recordings in order to physically feel the flow of a piece.
He taught me to use the very flow of the phrase itself to make a
difficult maneuver, like a difficult shift, simply happen in the context of the
trajectory (this works particularly well in the Schubert “Arpeggione” Sonata).
He created
for me a vista of unlimited possibilities. Through his unique method of
teaching, I was able to play it at a level unimagined for me at that time. His
primary method was to sing and clap out subdivisions while I was playing,
changing my experience of playing from action to reaction.