I’m a Midwestern girl, born and raised in Zionsville, a suburb of Indianapolis. I’m still in Indiana, working on a master’s degree at IU’s Jacobs School of Music. I was an undergraduate at the University too, with a double major in Music and French. I’m like a lot of my kind—that is, highly educated females from beige, Republican suburbs. Because we’re imaginative and dissatisfied, we tend to infuse other places and times with that incandescent but suspect effect of the imagination called romance. If only, we tell ourselves, we’d been born not here and not now but there and then, in Paris in the Twenties, Hollywood in the Thirties, or New York in the Fifties, and so on. I’ve always favored fiction that isn’t escapist but that I can use to escape, good books that I didn’t read in a good way. I relish picturing myself someplace that isn’t here and isn’t now; but, being a Midwesterner, I laugh at myself, and at romance too. I stick pins into balloons almost as soon as I inflate them. Dreaming up alternative lives is part of our Midwestern contribution to the American stew, but so is puncturing pretense, a pointed gift from the middle of the country to the coasts, along with wheat and corn.
There’s tension in this way of being; at least there is for me, loving my home and longing to get away from it, inclined to debunk yet yearning for a sublime something that can’t be deflated. The armature of my life, the field that holds my contradictions together, is music. And my love for music has a lot to do with my late great-uncle Joachim “Jack” Landauer. I’m working toward a master’s degree in Music because of Uncle Joachim and I’m writing this now because of what he has left me.
I didn’t meet my great-uncle until my family traveled to New York City for my maternal grandfather’s funeral. I was seven. We flew in a plane and stayed in a hotel and I ordered room service. We cruised the Circle Line around Manhattan and ferried out to the Statue of Liberty. We hiked to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and then back again. It was my first real trip and everything about it was a marvel to me, even the funeral—also my first.
Joachim/Jack was my dead grandfather’s younger brother and I hadn’t even known he existed, but then I hadn’t seen much of my maternal grandparents either. The New York wing of the family was like a probable rumor, not a confirmed fact like the Marinellis, my father’s family whose name I carried. Mother kept in touch with her parents but not with the rest of the Landauers, of whom there weren’t many.
On the flight home, I sat next to my mother and asked a lot of questions. I learned that my Landauer great-grandparents and their five-year-old son Ernst (“Ernie”) had emigrated from Germany in 1925. Joachim “Jack” was their second son, born in 1932 and so nearly twelve years younger than Ernst, my late grandfather. The boys had nothing in common and, apparently, didn’t like each other. Mother told me that she had never heard her grandfather mention her Uncle Joachim without rancor and distaste. She speculated that her father resented Jack, all the attention he received as a “late gift from God,” the natural gifts with which he was endowed, and then, later, the wealth he accumulated. Joachim was the “brainy” one for whom everything came easy, apparently even the Depression. He went to Columbia and married young. “Too young, your grandmother said, right after he graduated.” A few years later, his wife moved out with their infant son; then there was a divorce. My mother knew Jack’s wife had remarried, quickly and suspiciously, she thought. Mother wasn’t certain about the chronology, but she did know that Jack paid for his son’s upbringing, even though he didn’t have to. She said she didn’t think that he and the boy were ever close; in fact, she wasn’t sure that, now Charlie was all grown up, they were even in touch. I asked how her uncle got to be so rich. She said the story she was told was that his fortune came from whopping real estate deals followed by shrewd investing. She added that he was well read and a globe-trotter. All this was informative, but I had already learned the two most important things about my great-uncle. He loved music and he liked me.
On our last night in New York, Joachim/Jack invited my parents, my brother and me to dinner. He lived in an East Side brownstone and it was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, nothing like the sprawling suburban places people were so impressed by back in Indiana. It had a thick wooden door with designs carved in it, flanked by draped female figures holding up a little rounded roof—caryatids I later learned to call them. Joachim met us in a vestibule that was more like a lobby. The floor was a giant marble checkerboard. He greeted us warmly but I could see he took a particular interest in me, just as he had after the funeral when he asked me what I thought of the organ music. Now he gave my hand a little squeeze and told me to feel free to wander around. My brother chose to stick with our parents. They headed for the living room where there were drinks and hors d’oeuvres and two people in black outfits to serve them. The dinner was catered.
There were a lot of paintings on the walls, old ones and new, all of them interesting, none too large or intimidating for a little girl. They were, in fact, intimate pictures, domestic scenes, still lifes, little pastoral landscapes, and wonderful drawings of fascinating faces. There were étagères and display cases with bright minerals and antique statuettes and an extraordinary floor lamp that looked as if it had been designed in the future and sent back in a time machine. I wandered down a corridor into what I took for a second living room. It had a long leather sofa and two oversized matching chairs and a coffee table made of cherry wood with sturdy legs instead of spindly ones. The long walls were made of shelves, one side filled from ceiling to floor with books, the other with record albums. A tan, brown, blue, and red oriental carpet was spread in the middle of the room, and on top of it stood a black piano that said Steinway on it. While I was staring at the room, Uncle Jack came up behind me and touched my shoulder so gently I wasn’t startled.
“Your parents are afraid you’ve gotten lost,” he said with a grin that seemed more conspiratorial than avuncular. “I’ve been sent out as a search party.”
“Well, here I am.”
This answer seemed to delight him. “Yes. Here you are,” he said and chuckled. It was as though we were sharing a private joke. Perhaps we were.
He could see I’d focused on the piano.
“Would you like to hear it?”
“Oh yes, please.”
He sat down on the upholstered bench and asked me to sit next to him. He played a lively piece and played it fast. I later learned it was a sonata of Scarlatti’s.
From the way Great-Uncle Joachim/Jack looked at me when he was finished, I suppose my mouth must have fallen open.
“Would you like to play?” he asked seriously.
“I don’t know how.”
“I didn’t ask if you could play. I asked if you’d like to.”
When our family’s finances took a hit in 2008, it was Uncle Jack who paid for my piano lessons and then the extra tutoring. And it was he who picked up the tab for my glorious summers at Interlochen. I found out about this only a month before heading off to my freshman year at the University. When she told me, Mother said he’d asked her to keep it from me but she thought it was time I knew.
“Did you tell him that you were going to tell me?”
“I did. He wasn’t so pleased, but he gave in.”
“But why keep it a secret at all?”
“Because he’s eccentric,” Mother said with a shrug, “or because he wanted you to think it came from us. It may have to do with you being the only person in the family with any musical talent.”
“Oh, no. You sing and Dad still has his old guitar.”
She scoffed. “I’m talking real talent, not teenage hobbies. You know it’s true.”
“But why the secret?”
“I think Uncle Jack likes secrets. He was a secret from me growing up. In fact, he’s a bit of a secret himself.”
I wrote a long letter of thanks to my great-uncle whom I had seen only three times in my life and couldn’t claim to know, even though that sympathetic understanding we established when I was little had never faded. The bond was double, really. We just took to each other at first sight, but then, just as my mother said, there was music. The two of us side-by-side on that piano bench when I was only seven sums it up. I love my parents and my brother dearly, but we don’t share many interests. Sometimes I wondered if my secret-loving great-uncle might just have been my nearest kin.
Joachim/Jack wrote back and asked if it would be possible for me to come to New York for a visit before I started my freshman year. All expenses paid, of course. He would be particularly pleased if I could arrange to be in town on the coming Friday. And could I phone to let him know?
Only a day after I left my message on his voice mail, a courier hand-delivered a round-trip ticket and a generous check—“for cab fare,” said the note. By one o’clock the next afternoon, a Thursday, Uncle Joachim and I were enjoying baked scallops in an underlit and overpriced Midtown restaurant. Then we stopped by the Met for a look at a few of my favorite pictures and one or two of his.
That night he took me to hear a chamber group perform Brahms’ Second Piano Quartet, Opus 26. The piece is nearly an hour long and was the first half of the group’s program. The players were all twenty-something, around the age of Brahms when he composed the piece. The final allegro is exuberant, glorying in pure musicality, Brahms being Brahmsian. The musicians played it hot, galvanized by its rhythmic and melodic drive, gyrating and head-bobbing, as they bowed and banged their way to the finale and a well-earned ovation.
We left during the intermission.
In the cab, Joachim said, “You’re a Romantic, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a question. “You like Brahms?”
“More than Wagner.”
He chuckled. “I had an inkling this quartet might be one of your favorites.”
“And it is. I mean, it is now.”
He liked that. “What do you say we go shopping tomorrow?”
“You’re way too generous. I don’t need a thing. Really.”
“Happy to hear it. Let’s find something you don’t need.”
“Oh, New York must be full of things I don’t need.”
We smiled at each other just the way we did when I was seven sitting on the bench beside him at his Steinway.
“More music tomorrow night,” he said. “Something special. And even more Romantic.”
“I’m up for it. What is it?”
“A surprise.”
“Mom says you like secrets.”
“She does? Well, I guess that’s no secret, then.”
In the morning, I put my foot down. No expensive presents, no Fifth Avenue über-consumerism, no outfits that would get a freshman laughed out of Bloomington.
“Okay. We’ll go to the Academy. You’ll like the Academy.”
The Academy turned out to be a used CD store on West 18th Street, crammed with treasures at student-friendly prices. Given bathroom access, water, and a few sandwiches, I could happily have spent the rest of the weekend there. I found a disk of Gabriel Tacchino playing Poulenc and another with Bernstein conducting both Sibelius’ Fifth and Seventh. But the grand prize was Richter’s recording of Brahms’ Second Quartet. And all three came to less than twenty bucks. While I was treasure-hunting in the Classical section, Uncle Joachim went off to look at jazz. He came back with a pair of Bill Evans CDs.
“You know Evans?” he asked while we waited in line to pay.
“Everybody digs Bill Evans,” I replied. Uncle Jack laughed out loud because that’s the title of one of Evans’ albums. Oh, he and I were just delighted with one another. Saying we were congenial or simpatico hardly does our affinity justice.
After an early supper, we grabbed a cab to Carnegie Hall where Murray Perahia played all four Chopin ballades. I was enraptured, convinced I was hearing the ballades not just the way Chopin would have played them but the way he heard them in his head and felt them in his gut as he wrote them down.
The following afternoon, Saturday, we went to an orchestral matinee, two symphonies, Haydn’s “Military” and Mahler’s Seventh, two of my favorites. “The short and the long of it,” Jack joked.
That night we stayed up listening to our new recordings. No doubt Joachim had much to teach me about Poulenc, Sibelius, and Evans. He could have played the pedant but he never did. All the talk was about me. He asked me sharp questions about my past, present, and future.
My flight left the next morning. As a farewell present, my great-uncle gave me Perahia’s recording of the Ballades. One reviewer rates it at the very top, above even Rubinstein’s, praising its “sumptuous coloring and profundity of feeling.” Profound feeling in a performer means empathy for the composer; Perahia knows prolonged illness and physical suffering.
I saw Joachim/Jack only twice after that, all-too-briefly. He flew in to attend my senior recital and sat with my parents. I was thrilled but we didn’t get to talk much. There was more conversation when we had lunch at a New York deli. I arranged to meet him when I was in town for a long weekend with a boyfriend whose family lived in the Village. I had some fun explaining to the boyfriend that I’d be leaving him for a lunch date with another man when I’d be having corned beef piled at least six inches high. Joachim/Jack and I were thrilled to see one another and, as always, there was that unspoken sense of sharing something warm and unnamed. But he had aged, and he didn’t look well. I phoned him a month later, just to see how he was. I left a message asking him to phone back. He didn’t like talking on the phone and when he called me he sounded distant. We exchanged a few letters, but they weren’t chatty. I didn’t mention my boyfriends, and Jack divulged none of his secrets. It was all about what I was studying and my plans.
Then his heart stopped and I flew in with my mother for the funeral. Just the two of us. Another funeral, I thought, full circle, the Circle Line.
A week later came the certified letter from the lawyers with an open round-trip plane ticket and the courteous command to come to their offices at my convenience. The lawyer who greeted me was younger than I expected and impeccably polite, inquiring about my trip, offering coffee or tea. I asked if my great-uncle had left a complicated will. “Not at all,” he said. “Everything goes to his son. There’s just this one exception. For you,” he said and, opening an envelope on his desk, he handed me the key to a safety deposit box housed in the East 86th Street branch of Chase Bank.
In the autumn of 1838, Frédéric Chopin and Aurore Dupin, aka George Sand, decided to vacation on the Spanish island of Majorca along with Dupin’s two children. The couple were looking for exotic warmth, sunlight and respite. The sojourn began well. On November 19, Chopin wrote a letter with the enthusiasm of a Chamber of Commerce brochure, “Sun all day, and hot; everyone in summer clothing.” Majorca is a gem and everything there is a jewel: “A sky like turquoise, a sea like lapis lazuli, mountains like emeralds, air like heaven.” The four occupied a comfortable villa near Palma and enjoyed an idyll while awaiting the arrival of Chopin’s piano from Paris to make their happiness complete.
Then the weather turned and so did everything else. Life modulated from C-major to B-minor. A biting northern wind made everyone miserable and Chopin even sicker than usual. The locals turned against the unconventional household that never went to church. They were evicted from their villa and retreated inland to an abandoned monastery on a hilltop in Valledemossa. They stayed there for eight weeks, through a winter of which Sand wrote that “every attempt at cheerfulness and calm was frozen in my breast by the gloom.” The locals she dismissed as “monkeys.”
In Palma, a doctor diagnosed Chopin with tuberculosis. Sand didn’t believe him and even today the cause of Chopin’s death is disputed. His health had always been delicate. He coughed up blood as early as 1831 and in 1835 was so ill with bronchitis that he wrote no letters for two months. People in Warsaw thought he had died.
Though Sand scoffed at the local doctor’s diagnosis, Chopin may have taken it as a sentence of death. The Majorcan pianist Joan Moll certainly thought so. He wrote of the visitors who put his island on the map that “they produced works that are intimate, contemplative and as luminous as the landscape. Then he realized his sickness was incurable. . .” In the recently privatized Carthusian monastery, in the murk and chill of Cell Four, while Sand vented her displeasure and revenged herself on the islanders by writing A Winter in Majorca, Chopin composed prolifically, completing several pieces and beginning new ones. He wrote preludes for Opus 28, polished off a polonaise, mazurka, scherzo, nocturne, and a tarantella. Notably for me, he also completed the F-major Ballade, begun three years earlier.
A hundred and thirty years after Sand and Chopin arrived on the island, in 1968, my great-uncle Joachim “Jack” Landauer, amateur pianist, music lover, footloose tycoon, also decided to visit Majorca. He wanted to see where Chopin had spent that memorable, melancholy, yet productive winter. It was not possible to stay in the monastery, now known as the Cartoixa de Valledemossa or the Charterhouse, but Jack took an apartment close by. The pious burghers of Valldemossa may not have cared for the bohemian ménage in 1839, but their descendants know who had buttered their bread. The Charterhouse offers piano recitals throughout the year and all the brochures feature the Museu Frédéric Chopin i George Sand, established in 1932. This Museum advertises itself rather quaintly as “the second most important private collection in the world of Chopin and Sand,” promising close-up views of many personal items, portraits, manuscripts, and Chopin’s piano.
According to the typed two-page statement in Jack/Joachim’s safe-deposit box, it was not in the museum that he discovered the other item in the box, something so precious that it was wrapped in plastic, placed in a small brass casket, and sealed in the antique fashion, with red wax. My great-uncle’s statement is anxious to make clear that he had not lifted the precious item from the museum but discovered it while visiting the almost deserted Charterhouse, as he was idly looking through the leather-bound volumes in the monastery library. “It was in the geography section, large tomes presumably with old maps, that I spied a corner of something just sticking out about an inch from between the tall volumes. I reached in and extracted a cracked leather pocketbook. I opened it gingerly and looked at what had been folded up inside and left there for well over a century.”
Was he stunned? Did he realize what he was seeing at once or did he secrete the pocketbook and examine it back in his rented apartment? What did he think? Finders keepers? And what did he feel? The statement says nothing on these matters. Even when divulging his greatest secret, Joachim contrived to be secretive.
The word ballade implies a program, suggests story-telling. Yet the term actually derives from the Italian balleta, signifying a dance piece, not a narrative. Anyway, there’s something ambiguous about the word. Chopin’s ballades seem to me to satisfy both meanings of the term, being dancelike in their rhythmic invention as well as movingly dramatic. Many Chopin scholars seem certain the ballades were inspired by certain poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s Romantic genius; but they can’t agree on which poems might have inspired which ballades. To me, the matter of external inspiration is insignificant because the music feels so inward, each ballade being a passionate working through of themes that are also emotions, telling a story, but an inward one. For me, the ballades are works of dramatic self-expression and what unifies them is not what the scholars point to—the use of “ballade meter” (6/4 or 6/8 time) or the “mirror reprise” (reversing the exposition in the recapitulation)—but the brilliance and sensibility of Frédéric François Chopin.
What was in the sealed brass casket? What did my great-uncle with his double-name, his generous and affectionate if enigmatic nature bequeath me as the only other musical member of the family? His statement describes it simply as “a fair copy in Chopin’s hand of a previously unknown ballade.” It is Chopin’s Fifth Ballade, though in order of composition the third as the manuscript is dated “January-February 1839.” This means Chopin wrote it in the depths of that windy winter in the gloomy cells of the old hilltop Carthusian monastery, composed to the accompaniment of racking coughs, perhaps in the anticipation of impending death, written by a delicate genius haunted by imagined demons.
Yes, death and demons. In 1848, the year before he died, Chopin was in Paris performing his Second Sonata when he suddenly stopped and left the stage. He explained in a letter: “I was about to play the march when, suddenly, I saw emerging from the half-open case of my piano those cursed creatures that had appeared to me on a lugubrious night at the Carthusian monastery.” The march he was about to play was, of course, the famous funeral march, composed in 1837.
I’ve played the ballade twice. It shares the spirit of the funeral march, though it is far stormier and has no passage like the consolatory calm of the march’s trio. I played it locked in a practice room in the basement of the music school. I played it late at night, alone. The ballade is a devastating collision of rebellion and despair. It is wild, with dynamics running from triple pianissimo to triple fortissimo, and it concludes with four hammer-blows reminiscent of the end of the Revolutionary Étude. As there we hear Poland crushed, in the ballade we hear Chopin struggling unsuccessfully against his doom. The silence after the last blow feels like a premonition of non-being. The music isn’t tragic; it’s terrible.
The ballade is less ordered than the other four, more turbulent, crazier really, even a little hysterical. It’s certainly Chopin, but a Chopin distraught, under torture. It feels like disciplined Romanticism battered, hurtling toward anguished Expressionism. Though it shifts keys a good deal, the ballade’s dominant one is B-minor, the solemn key of Bach’s Mass and Scarlatti’s most tragic sonata, L. 33. In his statement, my great-uncle makes a point of saying, presumably in his own defense, that “Chopin did not choose to have the piece published, and I have found no evidence that he ever performed it or informed anyone else of its existence. On the other hand, he did not destroy it.” Joachim/Jack must have speculated on Chopin’s intentions and state of mind, though he doesn’t let me know in precisely what ways. But I can speculate too. Maybe Chopin, the perfectionist, abandoned the piece because he judged it a botch, far beneath his standard of excellence. Or perhaps Chopin feared he was not in his right mind when he wrote it and concealed it to keep from disclosing that madness to others. I can even imagine that Chopin was superstitious enough to fear that this shattering music had the power to conjure up those scary creatures that lived inside his piano, Lilliputian hallucinations the memory of which could terrorize him even after nine years.
What am I supposed to do? My great-uncle left me no instructions, only a challenging problem, the same one, I see now, he had when he chose to lift the ballade from that library. Why didn’t he turn it in? Why not share it with the world? Why keep it to himself? Did his love of secrets include relishing possessing what nobody else had, knowing what no one else knew? Was my generous relative that selfish? Did he persuade himself he was respecting Chopin’s ambivalent wish, that the ballade not come to light but also that it not be destroyed? There were, after all, plenty of fireplaces in the old monastery. It’s possible that Joachim just put off deciding what to do for decades. But it’s also conceivable he intended all along to pass the conundrum off to the relative he had so carefully prepared to receive it. That last is a vertiginous thought; it makes me want to reach for something big and immovable and hold on tight.
I could take the manuscript to my advisor, ask for advice. I might propose writing my master’s thesis on it or practice playing it then arrange to give a world premiere. But all that feels like a “mirror reprise” of my great-uncle’s concealment, putting myself at the center of a revelation, even profiting by displaying what he opted not to, seeking an aggrandizement I don’t deserve. Moreover, if I do any of that, I’ll have to answer some inevitable questions. I might blacken the memory of my great-uncle or have to deal with some tangled legal fallout. And then there’s the question of whether I’d be betraying Chopin. Do I have the right to give the world this desolating Fifth Ballade when he chose not to? Or is it my obligation to do exactly that?
I began this account hoping that by the time I reached the end the right choice would become obvious. I was pretty sure that this would be publishing the ballade. I know that ethics demands revelation, the whole truth, nothing but, warts and all. Nevertheless, I find it isn’t so easy to tell what’s right. Maybe my great-uncle was also stuck between revelation and concealment, paralyzed between right and wrong, like Chopin when he saw the demons clambering out of his piano.
Maybe I’ll just flip a coin.
