She had just enough time to warm up. She played her scales, ran through some of the opera’s trickier passages, and repacked her violin for the ride over to Batthyány Square. She would need to call a taxi. It was going to be a mob scene.
Most of Hungary’s so-called Class of ’56—those intellectuals who escaped during that year’s brief anti-Soviet uprising — had come back for museum exhibitions, concert appearances, and every manner of artistic residency. Melanie had seen countless “living legends” of science and the humanities paraded down Andrássy Boulevard, past the opera house and Oktogon to Heroes’ Square, where honor guards and cheering crowds welcomed them home. Hooray for Ernő Rubik and his cube! Harkályi had obviously left earlier, and in tragically different circumstances; his appearance today would mark his first trip to Hungary in decades, his first since he became an international sensation. The government had apparently tried to lure him back for years, since the success of his Symphony No. 4, and he had finally accepted the invitation. He had his pick of any concert hall and any orchestra in the world for the premiere of The Golden Lotus. Why he chose Budapest after all these years, much less the Opera Orchestra, was unclear.
Harkályi’s opera presented few real challenges, but the score did require half of the violinists, including Melanie, to tune their instruments a quarter tone lower. The resulting dissonance could be startling both for an uninitiated audience and for those in the orchestra. Keeping up required a lot more concentration than did their usual repertoire. She suspected that this stylistic device derived subconsciously from his time at Terezín. During the formative stages of his development as a composer, he must have grown accustomed to the tones of rickety instruments and so he based much of his subsequent work on some uniquely personal timbral system emanating from his inner ear. She wasn’t positive that was what had happened, but the theory went a long way toward her understanding of Harkályi’s artistic voice. Maybe that was one reason she didn’t hate this piece quite as much as she thought she would. And one section in particular, in the opera’s waning minutes, truly excited her. At the conclusion of every concert there existed that brief moment when the music had stopped yet the conductor maintained a beat or two of silence before dropping his shoulders or in some way motioning to the audience that they could applaud. Nothing in Harkályi’s oeuvre better lived up to the famous dictum about accounting for the “space between the notes,” or in this case, after the notes. Instead of resolving with the big dominant-to-tonic chords loved so well by the Beethovens and Brahmses of this world, the entire orchestra and the four voices performed around the themes woven in during the first few acts. Those melodies existed, but only as negative space in the music. They were what was absent. Harkályi required his musicians to play in long, glassy circles of harmony, with the occasional quarter-tone flourish appearing underneath the veneer like cracks in a frozen pond.
At the end of the final scene, the instruments, and eventually the singers, would drop out one by one over the span of twelve minutes, until only a timpani and a traditional string quartet remained, just a hair out of tune, to saw over a folk-influenced section that vacillated between a funeral march and a spirited danse macabre, then close with a gentle lullaby. The opera didn’t end as much as slowly, painfully die.
Melanie’s violin, hidden in the rear of the section, would be the second-to-last thing the audience heard before the drums petered out into oblivion and presumably left the crowd enraptured and uncertain. She had been made to understand that she was chosen for the part not due to her abilities, but because her expensive Austrian violin possessed the perfect tone the part required. But so what? That breathless instant of tranquility right before the applause came would justify the endless rehearsals, the harassment and belittlement at the hands of that Napoleon-complexed conductor. Even Melanie had to give Harkályi some credit — the effect was numbing in its gracefulness. At least that was how it had sounded at rehearsal.
5.
The taxi crossed Margit Bridge into Buda but couldn’t get anywhere near Batthyány Square. The speakers immediately behind Melanie’s head rattled with a warped cassette of frenetic Gypsy music, puking up tones no violin should ever be forced to make. The driver pulled to a stop at a makeshift police barricade and lit a cigarette. The stink competed with three pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror. Melanie felt vaguely queasy again. Two bored motorcycle cops in jackets of blue and white leather redirected traffic. The taxi driver rolled down his window for an explanation and a blast of cold air. More resigned than satisfied, the driver punched the meter and turned around with a ticket for 2,500 forints. Melanie handed him a five-thousand, but he shook his head. “No change,” he said. He opened his leather accordion wallet to demonstrate the vast empty vistas contained therein — a common enough ploy among Budapest cabbies. At one time she would’ve let him take the fiver. Instead, she fished out a half dozen hundred-forint coins and handed them over. “Köszönöm szépen,” she said sweetly, and stepped out into the cold. She half-expected him to get out and chase her down, but the bleating music faded behind her.