She was an elegant old women, always dressed gracefully with the gentility of a descent musician. In her early years, there had always been rumours about her and those young men (mostly undergraduates from her college) escorting her every where, although she had been rather polite but aloof to them.
She was young, talented and charming, just like a dripping rose. Many had expected her to marry a young composer of dignified birth and moderate talent, spending her life performing for famous orchestras in Chicago and socialising at spectroscopic parties. She would shine, they thought, but quickly diminish after giving birth to two or three children, just like most young, talented and charming female pianists at that time.
Never would have they thought that she would be single till now, and never would have they expected she to devote her entire career to one single piece — one archaic baroque piece.
Sitting at the centre of the Goldener Saal, feeling the clapping and whispering of the crowds slowly faded away, she took a deep breath and gently placed her hands on the keys.
Black and white, golden and grandiose, dignified and solemn — the purified world of Bach awaited her behind the sheer floating veils.
She had been playing the Goldberg Variations for more than sixty years now, and it had truly become part of her life. She always kept the pace extravagantly slow, but somehow she still had the capacity to keep the music flowing vigorously. Like a constantly streaming rivulet, the phrases just flowed out without resistance, as if they were born to be in such homogeneity.
She was quite stubborn. Instead of adding modifications according to the pianist’s own understanding, as most of the pianists of her age did, she tenaciously followed every notation that Johann Sebastian Bach had left on his first manuscript in 1741. For many times, she imagined Gottlieb Goldberg playing this before her, as if she could hear every note, every layer and every phrase of the music coming together into this ever flowing river of life.
It was like a continuously repeating pentameter, varying every time, and specific notes were twisted a little bit to where they just perfectly fit. It was magic, she thought.
Immersing herself in the flowing of the music, her mind was liberated to the vastness of space and time. She could easily recall the first time her mentor introduced her to Bach. It was an ordinary Thursday afternoon, and her mentor came to their apartment in downtown Chicago as usual. He was a Javanese-born Dutch, with tan skin and shiny silvery hair. Not only did he teach her about piano, but also harpsichord and some exotic Javanese instruments. She liked him, as he was a good natured man who treated her genially and always brought her interesting gadgets from those tropical Asian islands.
That Thursday, he brought with him several pieces of newly printed scores and asked her to play for him. She was practicing Chopin’s pieces at that time, and her mentor wanted to make her try something new.
The scores were somehow hard to read, and it required both hands to play several melodies simultaneously. However, as she sorted out the first few lines and had a vague idea of the pace, the rest just came out automatically, without receiving much command from her brain. She made quite a few slips, and was a little upset. She expected her mentor to frown a bit, and then make some comments, but when she finished, her mentor said nothing.
“Sir?” She reminded him.
“Yes. Rosalyn, you played well. Would you be willing to try another piece?”
And she played. Again her mentor said little. He was weird today, she thought.
When her mentor was leaving that day, he told her father, a lawyer of Turkish descendent, that her daughter was “highly talented in playing Bach”. And from that day onwards, he taught her Bach only. No more Javanese gamelans, no more Chopin, only Bach.
Somehow she felt, deep down her mind, she was a peer of Bach. She did not belong to this age, but the ancient time when people held their faith firm and when the solemn earth was illuminated by heavenly music.
She spent her high school years in Chicago. One friend of hers, an unusually slender boy, told her once when they were having lunch that she would never gonna to marry anybody.
“Your love for that archaic musician is different. It is fanaticism, if I’m gonna say.” said Saul Bello, the befriended boy.
She realised that herself. She had a shocking resonance with Bach, and she was able to revive the spirits hidden behind the dead scores. The flow of the notes, the streaming of the melodies and the amazingly harmonious layers of structure went alive in her performance, and the doors of that dignified world were open to her. She promised, back in her mind, that she would devout all her life to it, lighting up the already gleaming flame on the altar.
Half a century had past since that unusually slender boy told her about something she recognised herself, and now that boy had become a Nobel-Prize winning novelist.
Sixty years had past since she was introduced to Johann Sebastian Bach, the great archaic musician who wrote the BWV988 Goldberg Variations and built up the entire world of hers. And here she was, sitting at the centre of the Goldener Saal, preparing to light up the fire on the altar.
She felt the flame floating with the music like water. How bizarre was that? “Flame floating like water.”
But since she was now the flamen of Bach, she had the power to let the flame float, just like water.
