Memory's Way With Youthful Missteps And Their Consequences
Double bassist, classical music reviewer, and blogger Chantal of Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks gives an unusually candid account of stepping in for the absent principal of her section (she doesn't say of which orchestra) at the dress rehearsal for an upcoming concert. I read that account with utmost sympathy not because I've been in a similar situation, but because it called to mind a better-forgotten orchestral experience of mine during my student years at conservatory.
I occupied at that time the middle regions of the rather fair-sized first fiddle section of the conservatory orchestra, and there are three things you need to know about that before I can proceed further.
The first is that I almost never practiced my instrument — or, rather, practiced as little as possible, my practice sessions being confined mostly to a frantic two- or three-hours worth just prior to a fiddle lesson (this with one of the most brilliant and revered fiddle teachers in the country at the time who put up with my outrageous dereliction because he loved me as a human being, believe it or not). The second is that I never practiced orchestral music, pretty much sight-reading my part at first rehearsal. And the third is, I was perhaps the world's worst sight reader. I took this cavalier attitude toward my instrument not only because I'm essentially lazy about such things, but because I was at conservatory to study conducting, not fiddle, the fiddle being for me merely the fulfilling of my instrument entrance requirement.
With that information in place, we can now proceed with the story.
One day there was a rehearsal of a standard-repertoire orchestral work (Brahms No. 3, if memory serves), but one the orchestra had not done during my time there. This rehearsal was special for the orchestra not only on that account, but because the rehearsal was to be conducted by none other than the great Charles Munch, then music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Did this provoke me to alter my no-practice ways for the nonce as it would have any sensible and sane fiddle player (that is, sensible and sane as fiddle players go)? It did not, and I walked into that rehearsal as unprepared as always.
Things went pretty much OK for me for the first ten or fifteen minutes or so, and then, as was bound to happen sooner or later, I botched an entrance, coming in almost an eighth too late. A few measures or so thereafter, Munch stopped the orchestra, issued some instruction or other, and asked for a start again at four or so measures previous to my botched entrance, and I again botched the very same entrance. This time, Munch stopped the orchestra almost immediately, looked directly at me, and said — sneered would perhaps be a better word here — "You're late again! Can't you count? And you want to be a conductor!"
Oh, the humiliation! But an instant before that overwhelming emotion kicked in, two thoughts flashed across my mind: what a sharp ear the man had! I mean, it wasn't as if I were second flute in a three-flute flute section. I was a fiddle player in the middle of a 14-member fiddle section. And I came in late, not early, which would have been a different matter altogether.
The second thought that flashed across my mind was Munch's, "And you want to be a conductor!" How, by all that's holy, did he know that? We'd never met before, and he couldn't have known me from Adam, as the saying goes. An instant later, the humiliation kicked in and pushed everything else into the background. I stammered an apology (a lame, "Sorry"), and somehow managed to get through the rest of rehearsal without further embarrassing incident.
About a week later, under considerably more congenial circumstances, I learned from Munch himself how he'd known me from Adam. He'd been at the rear of the auditorium during a conducting master class in which I was a participant, and, impressed, had made note of me and my name. But even the memory of being singled out by him in that supremely gratifying way has never managed to mitigate in memory his singling out of me in that other way, and to this very day I can still remember the humiliation, the cause of which was my fault and mine alone, as vividly as if it occurred just yesterday. And lo these many decades later it's lost none of its power to make me cringe in the remembering.
Such is the way with the memory of our youthful missteps and, more to the point, of their immediate consequences.
A good thing, perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
Parents and teachers, take note.
