Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [84]
Fantasy for Eleven Fingers
So little is known about the pianist Anton Visser that he belongs more to myth than anything so random as historical fact. He was born in 1800 or 1801, thus preceding by half a generation the Romantic virtuosos who would transform forever our notions of music and performer. Liszt, more charitable than most, called him “our spiritual elder brother,” though he rather less kindly described his elder brother’s playing as “affectation of the first rank.” Visser himself seems to have been the source of much confusion about his origins, saying sometimes that he was from Brno, at other times from Graz, still others from Telc or Iglau. “The French call me a German,” he is reported to have told the countess Koeniggratz, “and the Germans call me a Jew, but in truth, dear lady, I belong solely to the realm of music.”
He was fluent in German, Slovak, Magyar, French, English, and Italian, and he could just as fluently forget them all when the situation obliged. He was successful enough at cards to be rumored a cheat; he liked women, and had a number of vivid affairs with the wives and mistresses of his patrons; he played the piano like a human thunderbolt, crisscrossing Europe with his demonic extra finger and leaving a trail of lavender gloves as souvenirs. Toward the end, when Visser-mania was at its height, the mere display of his naked right hand could rouse an audience to hysterics; his concerts degenerated into shrieking bacchanals, with women alternately fainting and rushing the stage, flinging flowers and jewels at the great man. But in the early 1820s Visser was merely one of the legion of virtuosos who wandered Europe peddling their grab bags of pianistic stunts. He was, first and foremost, a salonist, a master of the morceaux and flashy potpourri that so easily enthralled his wealthy audiences. He seems to have been something of a super-cocktail pianist to the aristocracy—much of what we know of him derives from diaries and memoirs of the nobility—although he wasn’t above indulging the lower sort of taste. His specialty, apparently, was speed-playing, and he once accepted a bet to play six million notes in twelve hours. A riding school was rented out, fliers printed and subscriptions sold, and for eight hours and twenty minutes Visser incinerated the keyboard of a sturdy Érard while the audience made themselves at home, talking, laughing, eating, playing cards, and roaming about, so thoroughly enjoying the performance that they called for an encore after the six-millionth note. Visser shrugged and airily waved a hand as if to say, Why not? and continued playing for another hour.
No likeness of the virtuoso has survived, but contemporaries describe a tall man of good figure with black, penetrating eyes, a severe, handsome face, and a prominent though elegantly shaped nose. That he was a Jew was widely accepted, and loudly published by his rivals; there is no evidence that Visser bothered to deny the consensus. His hands, of course, were his most distinguishing feature. The first edition of Grove’s Dictionary states that Visser had the hands of a natural pianist: broad, elastic palms, spatulate fingers, and exceptionally long little fingers. He could stretch a twelfth and play left-hand chords such as A flat, E flat, A flat, and C, but it was the hypnotically abnormal right hand that ultimately set him apart. “The two ring fingers of his right hand,” the critic Blundren wrote, “are perfect twins, each so exact a mirror image of the other as to give the effect of an optical illusion, and in action possessed of a disturbing crablike agility. Difficult it is, indeed, to repress a shudder when presented with Visser’s singular hand.”
Difficult, indeed, and as is so