"Come on," I said, putting my arm around her. "I'll escort my princess to her throne." She laughed, and we left the green room with her limping along beside me.
Now, I'm not much of a theatre person. I never attend plays, and the last time I was on stage I was in the third grade. By the time we reached the wings, I knew my face had already turned the color of a ripe tomato and I was sweating. I should have let one of the bustling ladies turn pages for her. How I could face an audience, I had no idea. I concentrated on keeping my daughter's weight off her sprained ankle.
As we sat down, I had a brief moment to look out and feel terrified. The auditorium was dark, so I could only see the first few rows. And I could sense the breathing masses beyond the lights, hovering expectantly in the shadows, ready to slash me to ribbons. A hot wind was blowing in over the bobbing heads in the front; their forked tongues wagged angrily as they coiled slowly. I could almost see the sand whipping across the dunes. They were pretty damp dunes, though, since it was a rainy night. I could feel the intense humidity in the breeze. The conductor gave a nod, with a broad smile in our direction, and the orchestra struck up with the soft introduction.
I panicked at first, shooting my eyes across the page of music, trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing. Where was the first page turn? I couldn't even remember how to read the little black dots. The page took on the look of an obscure foreign document splayed out across the music stand, filled with incomprehensible ink blots. It was a Rorschach test for the incurably insane. The whole scene was backed by the restless, peering faces of the audience. I closed my eyes briefly, trying to calm myself. I snapped them open immediately, however. If I had my eyes closed, I would miss Jenny's signal. If that happened, I knew all would be lost for certain. I'd be laughed off the stage, and she would be ruined before she had even begun.
Only an eccentric maniac like Rossi the Terrible would have picked "Harold in Italy" for the finale of a Christmas concert. It's not seasonal in the least—what was wrong with something seasonal that didn't require a viola solo? But I guess, the orchestra was ready, Jenny was ready—maybe under his mop of stringy and vaguely European hair he thought it would be an exquisitely quirky touch to perform it for Christmas instead of waiting until spring.
The first few page turns passed without incident, and my heart-rate steadily decreased toward normal. She nodded knowingly at just the right instants, and I managed to turn the pages without spilling everything all over the floor or uttering a primal scream. After that, each page turn became easier, and I found that by the time we were well into the piece, I was breathing again, and I could follow the score. I began to get cocky too, and took a few glances at the audience out of the corner of my eye. I could feel the rapture, starting up out there somewhere like a wisp of cool air. She was playing beautifully, passionately. Mr. Rossi was conducting as brilliantly as he could—at least his expansive gesticulations looked fervent. I had heard the piece so many times—the solo passages anyway—that I knew it by heart. But hearing it then, pouring from Jenny's viola backed by the shimmering of Berlioz' orchestration, it took on a sublime quality that I had completely forgotten. It had been a long time since I had really listened to "Harold in Italy", and all the old memories started to come back.
The second movement has a quality like a caravan painted in broad, colorful strokes. It starts out very softly, and builds up as the caravan approaches, passes by the listener, and then eventually recedes into the distance. It's a striking section, and personally I think it's the best part of the whole work. By that time, I was alert again, and was trying to gauge the audience reaction. I had started to recognize individual faces, and remember where they were—I had been turning pages for more than fifteen minutes. I kept track of where people were looking, whether they folded their hands, how they tilted their heads at certain points. I didn't hear a lot of coughing and shuffling either. As my eyes grew accustomed to looking at them, I could see further, beyond the first few rows. They really were—I suppose a Victorian might have said "transported"—by the music. I flipped the page again at Jenny's nod.
I had noticed previously one rather large woman near the front row. She was all dressed up with several long strings of pearls and a long dress of medium golden-brown shades with lacy white frills and a high collar. She had pale, white skin, and her brunette hair was tied up in a hideous bun and topped with a white flower. The whole outfit made her look like an overdressed turkey dinner with all the trimmings and those little white caps on the drumsticks. She seemed for a long while to be even more "transported" than anyone else. I could see the rouge on her cheeks; her lips were parted and she bent forward. The next time I chanced to look her way, near the end of the second movement, she was crying into her handkerchief.
At that moment, as the caravan was fading into the distance, I had a kind of revelation that I'll never forget. This is what it's all about, really, I told myself. This is Jenny's life, and the kind of emotions she can evoke in an audience are her special gift. Maybe I had never really come to terms with the direction she had chosen. I started to feel tingly and blurry eyed. If she, with her playing, could bring tears to even one large woman in a worse-than-average audience, she must also be bringing joy to another, and at least some feeling to someone else; maybe everyone else. If she really wanted to do that with a viola instead of a violin—bringing a new kind of life to a little regarded solo instrument—I felt I could finally accept it. Somehow, over the past three years, my opposition to her taking up the viola had completely blinded me to the fact that she was actually succeeding. It felt like her destiny beginning to unfold. I was sitting on stage with my seventeen year-old daughter, actually participating in her debut as a soloist. How many fathers have that opportunity, I wondered. I felt a growing sense of privilege attending the event, and I was elated by the time the third movement was over. Jenny would fly away from me, of course, into some concert career, climbing ever higher—the inevitable result of a child growing into an independent woman with a great art to unleash on the world. Whether she ever became a famous soloist or not, I thought at that moment, was irrelevant. It was really the ambience that she lived for; not only the brief moments of performing, but also the people around her—the friends with whom she played and passed her time, the practicing, the dedication; even Mr. Rossi, whether I really liked him or not. I could hardly keep tears out of my eyes long enough to turn pages through the end of the fourth movement.
When the music finished and the last blast faded into the walls, there was fully ten seconds of absolute silence in the auditorium. What happened to all the tiny tots? I almost wondered if the audience had gone to sleep! The applause began from the front—the large woman held her handkerchief between two fat fingers, and was applauding wildly, ecstatically, leading the crowd. I had never seen such fervor in a spectator. She was shaking her head, back and forth—I could see the tears glistening on her cheeks—she threw kisses. In an instant, the applause grew to a tremendous roar that crashed against the front of the stage... and then the audience, en masse, were on their feet. I could almost not believe it—a standing ovation for "Harold in Italy"? No, it was all for Jenny.