Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [92]
She gave her final concert of the century in December, at the Royal German Theater in Prague. It was, at her insistence and over her managers’ objections, a program consisting entirely of Chopin. Those present said that she looked pale and strained; critics noted a fragile, almost glassine quality in her playing, which seemed to heighten rather than diminish the emotional effect. “She was dreaming,” the countess Lara von Pergler recorded in her memoirs, “and she allowed us to dream with her. It is a dream which, after all these years, haunts me still.” And indeed, it appears that Anna captured the rare essence of Chopin that night. Romantic and expressive, yet aristocratic and restrained, it is difficult even for masters to convey the spirit of Chopin, which is, ultimately, sadness. Not the sadness of great tragedy, but the irredeemable sadness of time itself: days pass, the world changes, and that which we most treasure must inevitably be lost.
WEDNESDAY 20 DECEMBER
To Uncle’s; pretended to read while Anna practiced, then got her bundled in her cloak and out the door before Hermine et al. could come along, thank God.
Gray skies, bitter cold; plane trees along the Ring limned in snow. Walked in contented silence for a kilometer, her arm on mine. Blessed moments! We understand silence, cousin and I.
“How do you do it?” I finally asked. “What you create on the piano, how do you do it?”
A: “I concentrate, and I hear it. But I must concentrate very hard—that’s the value of practice, really, learning to concentrate properly, but in a way it’s not me, it’s something coming through me. If I concentrate very hard it comes through me.
“Then there’s this.” She pulled her right hand out of her muff, shot back her sleeve, and held up her hand, examining it as one might judge a piece of fruit.
“You see this.” She was smiling! Smiling as she waggled her extra finger, and blushing, her breath rapid. I was excited too. “This isn’t mine either.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s yours and it’s wonderful, just as everything about you is wonderful.” But she only shrugged and slipped her hand back inside the muff.
At the time she was trying to master the nearly impossible fingering of the Fantasy, a task made harder by the fact that her hands were much smaller than Visser’s—she could stretch somewhat past an octave with her left, and marginally better than that with her right. In the midst of her efforts Christmas came and went, followed by the turning of the century. Hugo duly noted the fireworks and balls in his diary, along with the latest crises in Parliament, new ideas for plays, and his obsessive running count of the city’s suicides, a not unusual preoccupation in Vienna—to the mystification and endless fascination of its citizens, the Austrian capital led Europe in the self-murder statistic. He rather drily records as well his engagement to Flora Lanner, the blond, beautiful, magnificently wealthy daughter of Oskar Lanner, manufacturer of fruit conserves. By all appearances it would be a brilliant match, not least for the families’ smooth pragmatism regarding matters of faith; though Jewish, the Lanners were so fully assimilated that two of Flora’s brothers had been baptized in order to join the Imperial officer corps. Whether Hugo’s engagement had any bearing on his cousin’s fate—whether, bluntly put, he and Anna were in love, and the engagement