Now that he had no bad rap of lightness to overcome, Jonah often soloed with orchestras. The reviews adored how he could make even the most complex, thickly layered twentieth-century textures feel airy and audible. He soloed under the same conductors whose recordings we’d grown up on. He performed Hindemith’s Das Unaufhörliche with Haitink and the Concertgebouw. He did the tenor solo in Szymanowski’s Third Symphony— The Song of the Night — with Warsaw, standing in for the ailing Józef Meissner, who let the understudy do the role only twice before racing back to reclaim it. The French critics, suckers for discovery, praised the still-little-known piece as “voluptuous” and the increasingly visible singer as “floating, ethereal, and almost unbearably beautiful.”
But Jonah’s new signature piece was A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett’s haunted wartime oratorio, the present’s answer to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. Only Tippett’s protagonist was not the Son of God, but a boy abandoned by all divinity. A Jewish boy, hiding in Paris, enraged by the Nazi persecution of his mother, kills a German officer and touches off a pogrom. In place of Bach’s Protestant chorales, Tippett sought something more universal, more able to cross all musical borders. His material reached him by chance, on a wartime radio broadcast: the Hall Johnson Choir performing Negro spirituals.
Here was the hybrid piece Jonah was born to sing. How the Europeans connected him to the music — what they heard or saw — I can’t imagine. But over the course of a few years, my brother sang the massive work with four conductors and three orchestras — two British and one Belgian. He recorded the piece in 1975 with Birmingham. It made his name, everywhere except in his own country. In the wads of newspaper clippings he sent me, often with not even a note, he was depicted as a still-young voice pushing outward, threatening to become a secular angel.
He’d called me from Paris, back in 1972, in tears at the news of Jackie Robinson’s death. “Dead, Mule. Rickey threw the poor bastard into the cauldron and wouldn’t let him do anything but hit the ball. ‘I want a man who’s brave enough not to fight back.’ What shit is that, Joey? A lose-lose situation, and the man won.” I couldn’t tell why he was calling. My brother knew nothing about baseball. My brother hated America. “Who’s hot now, Mule?”
“You mean singers?”
“Ballplayers, you bastard.”
I hadn’t a clue. The Yankee broadcasts were hardly on my daily diet.
Jonah sighed, his breath echoing down the transatlantic delay. “Mule? It’s a funny thing. I had to move here to learn how hopeless I am. This whole City of Light crap? Total fabrication. One of the most smugly racist towns I’ve ever lived in. New York makes this place look like Selma. They want to see a birth certificate before they’ll sell me cheese. I got beaten up by this guy down in the Thirteenth. Really beaten. Don’t worry, bro. I’m talking six months ago. Went at me with fists. Broke a molar. I’m sitting there slapping him like some gonad-clipped castrato, thinking, But they don’t have a Negro problem here! I’m thinking Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Jimmy Baldwin. I’m telling this guy, ‘Your people love my people.’ Turns out — the accent, the heavy tan — he thought I was Algerian. Punishing me for the revolution. Jesus, Mule. By the time we’re dead, we’ll have paid for every sin on earth except our own.”
Riffing for me. But who else would buy this performance? Paris was no better or worse than any capital. What crushed him was the loss of his would-be hideout. He’d dreamed of total self-reinvention, a home that would grant him a permanent reentry visa. No place on any implicated continent would ever give him that.
“I don’t know how much longer I can live here, Joey.”
“Where would you go?”
“I’m thinking maybe Denmark? They love me in Scandinavia.”
“Jonah. They love you in France. I’ve never seen such notices.”
“I’m only sending the good ones.”
“Are you sure that leaving Paris is smart, professionally? How will I reach you?”
“Easy, fella. I’ll be in touch.”
“Do you need cash? Your share…your account with the money from the house…”
“I’m flush. Let it ride. Play the market or something.”
“It’s in your name.”
“Great. So long as I don’t change my name, I’m in business.” He made a quick accelerando—“Miss you, man”—and hung up before I could miss him back.
The longer I composed, the more fraudulent I became. My notes were going nowhere but backward. Even I couldn’t abuse Teresa’s arts grant forever. Unfit for any honest work, I advertised for piano students. I worked forever on the ad: “Juilliard-trained”—I never claimed to have graduated —“concert pianist, good with beginners…” It amazed me to think how the words concert pianist still conjured something in this country, long after concerts ceased to draw.
Sometimes parents jerked when they met the man behind the ad. They let their child take a token lesson. Then they apologized, explaining that their child really wanted to study the cornet. It never bothered me. I wouldn’t have studied piano with me, either. I couldn’t see why anyone wanted to study piano anymore anyway. In another few years, we’d all be replaced with Moog synthesizers. To the electronic future, the best musicians already proclaimed, Those of us already dead salute you.
But somehow, I managed to draw students. Some of them even seemed to enjoy playing. I got eight-year-old working-class kids who hummed over the keys. I got middle-aged recidivists who simply wanted to play the “Minute Waltz” again in something under a hundred seconds, before they died. I taught natural talents who got by on an hour of practice a week and earnest acolytes who’d go to their graves trying to play those lines that taunted them in their sleep, floating just out of reach of their fingers. Not one of my students would end up onstage except at their school’s talent show. They or their parents were still victims of that discredited belief that equated playing a little piano with being a little more free. I tried to fit the student to the path, to have each one pick his or her own way through the centuries of overflowing repertoire. One little middle-class Mayflower descendant caught fire with his father’s old John Thompson method, striving to play every poky folk tune at flat-out prestissimo. The daughter of two Hungarian escapees who came over in the wake of ’56 giggled her way through Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, screwing up her face at the gentle dissonances in the contrary motion, hearing some dim echo that wasn’t, any longer, even racial memory. I had no blacks. The black students of Atlantic City studied in some other classroom.
I worked to make the dying notes come alive. I had my students play at glacial speeds, doubling the tempo every four bars. I sat next to them on the piano bench, playing the left hand while they played the right. Then we switched and started over again. I told them this was an exercise in developing two brains, the clean split of thought needed for independent equal-handedness. I tried to make them see that every piece of music was an infant uprising that stumbled onto democracy or died on the page.
I taught one girl, a high school junior, named Cindy Hang. She wouldn’t tell me her real first name, her birth name, although I asked her several times. She said she was Chinese — the answer of easiest resort. Her father, a loan officer from Trenton who’d adopted her, along with a younger Cambodian boy, said Hmong. Her English was a soft-pedaled mezzo piano, although her grammar already ran rings around her native-born classmates. She spoke as little as possible, and when she could get away with it, not at all. She’d come to the piano late, starting only four years before, at thirteen. But she played like a crippled cherub.