Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Read online

  Sydney was far more open now that I’d showed up on this job, which many considered the inner sanctum of classical freelancing. She mentioned her favorite shopping haunts and the European tour she was hired to do. She even told me about breaking up with her boyfriend. He was moving west, but Sydney decided to stay in New York, because it offered more musical opportunities. I was surprised she didn’t want to compromise, because I thought they’d been such a tight couple.

  I wanted all of Sydney’s beauty and success. My imagination went wild. If I hung with Sydney, I’d learn to dress right and imitate her confidence, poise, and grooming. Maybe soon I’d be playing concerts every night, enjoying my pick of admiring men. My checks would pile up, just like hers. Then I’d leave the Allendale to find a better apartment. That must be how this worked. There was so much work to be had, Sydney didn’t even have enough time for practicing anymore.

  Halfway up 99th, I could hear loud plodding scales coming from the Allendale. Some new pianist with annoying practice mannerisms had moved in.

  Rounding the corner into our lobby, we heard Betty screaming. She had cornered Carlos, a violinist from Colombia, by the mailboxes. Poor Carlos had done his laundry on Betty’s dime—quarters, really. From what I could deduce, Carlos had found the coins orphaned on the folding table and fed them into the dryer to start his own load. When he returned, Betty started to berate him. Her roar peaked as she followed Carlos to the mailboxes: She would never hire him for Basically Baroque again. Brunhilde appeared on the lobby balcony to see what the fuss was about.

  Sydney rolled her eyes. It was one of Betty’s bad days, probably fueled by a hangover. Yesterday, she had been overly sweet. With such personality swings, staying in Betty’s good graces was one of the Allendale’s challenges, if you wanted her to hire you.

  As Sydney and I waited for the elevator, I listened to the mishmash of piano, flute, and trumpet practice. Faintly, I could hear Jimmy Madison practicing drums in the insulated booth he’d built inside his apartment. I felt warm and secure, living at the Allendale for four years now in a community of offbeat people just like me. We epitomized New York’s artistic community. Everyone had passion but little money, and most behaved like eccentrics. In a few months, I would graduate from college and be a full-time member of the club.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The Rite of Spring

  “BLAIR, WAKE UP.” My new roommate, a pianist named Elizabeth, poked me. I changed roommates at least once a year, and it took a minute to remember her name. The clock read 7:05 A.M. “The Philharmonic’s on the phone.”

  Like most musicians, I had recurring performance nightmares. I was onstage as a soloist but held a violin, or I performed a recital of unfamiliar music. This particular dream was an old one. I was drunk at a bar halfway across town five minutes before the concert.

  As I struggled to wake up, I realized it was no dream. It had been a late night. Why not? I’d thought, when my third martini arrived at 1:30 A.M. I’d just skip class tomorrow.

  Now, a very mature voice on the telephone was telling me I wouldn’t just be cutting solfège but playing second oboe in the New York Philharmonic this morning. Their regular second oboist was sick and my teacher had told them to call me, even though I was only twenty-two. I didn’t feel so great, and my reeds sucked.

  I rooted through piles of the jeans I usually wore to school. Finally, I found the black jacket, which looked somewhat respectable and pinned my long hair into a barrette. My head throbbed as I took the elevator to the lobby. I could hear Sydney practicing a Vivaldi piccolo concerto.

  The stench of urine on 99th was worse than usual. My shoe slipped on a condom. On Broadway I passed Sloan’s grocery and a few boxes of rotting produce in front of iCaramba! Mexican restaurant before disappearing into the 96th Street subway. Crammed on the local train with New Yorkers going to their mysterious jobs, I felt nauseated until the train finally stopped at Lincoln Center. I escaped out the 66th Street exit beside Juilliard and reached Avery Fisher Hall’s stage door at nine-forty-five, where the guard absently waved me in without asking for ID.

  I slipped into the second oboe chair, where the cacophony of eighty musicians warming up made me even dizzier. I was relieved to see Jayson sitting in the first oboe chair instead of my teacher, who must have called in sick as well. Robinson would have been on my case from the beginning, making me even more nervous. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony blurred on the stand. It had only been eight hours since that third martini, and I wondered if I smelled of gin. This morning’s rehearsal should have been an exciting triumph for me, but instead I slouched in shame.

  Klaus Tennstedt strode smartly across the stage and opened his score. I tried to become more alert. Defecting from East Germany ten years earlier, Tennstedt had quickly earned respect in Goteborg, Hamburg, and London, working his way west to the United States. On his debut with the New York Philharmonic, he received rare attention and cooperation from the musicians. Filled with some of the world’s finest ensemble players, the orchestra showed most visiting conductors no mercy.

  I’d never played Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. In the andante movement, Philip Myers’s ecstatic horn solo floated above the strings, and Stanley Drucker’s clarinet tone wove soulfully around it. I’d never felt this sensation: being physically part of such a glorious sound. It was fabulous. I desperately wanted to feel every second of it, in case this was my only chance to sit in the middle of the New York Philharmonic.

  Yet I was terrified. These confident musicians knew one another well and played together like a precision machine, each one adjusting to the others. I was a good student, but not nearly as seasoned as these musicians. I tried to fit my tone underneath their timbre and finally started to relax in my anonymity.

  Then I saw it: the low C-sharp, naturally a loud nasty sound the oboist must wrestle into the submission. It was marked pianissimo—supersoft—at the end of a long exposed phrase. Guessing that everyone would be able to hear me clearly when the moment came, I stuffed a piece of cloth up the bell on the end of my oboe in an attempt to muffle the tone.

  The work’s texture began getting thinner. The brass dropped out and then the violins, until the music became very soft with just a few musicians playing the delicately orchestrated passage. My hands shook, and my forehead was clammy with sweat. I couldn’t breathe, and my stage fright worsened. My low note, not even part of the melody, must come out cleanly, softly, in tune, and with a dark tone. I sucked the extra saliva out of my reed.

  Journalist George Plimpton once described this sensation as the most frightening thing imaginable. Already known to have tried everything from pro football to bullfighting, Plimpton had convinced Leonard Bernstein to let him play triangle and gong during Mahler’s Fourth, documenting his insider’s view for the Bell Telephone Hour. “The music is rushing along, you have to come in at a certain moment, and if you lose your place it becomes even more acute than physical pain,” he told The New York Times in 1968.

  Plimpton let his audience in on a few secrets. Behind the scenes, he said, oboists make reeds for thirty hours a week yet hate the results. Also, orchestral playing looks easier than it is. Plimpton quaked, playing in a rest, lagging behind the beat and producing a harsh tone. “One of my major problems was that I found myself staring at the music instead of Lenny,” confided Plimpton, who hung on to the score like a life preserver. If it’s right, no one cares. Play something wrong, and everyone knows—as Plimpton discovered when even Bernstein literally applauded his resounding bong, played too loudly and in the wrong spot, from the podium.

  I didn’t know about Plimpton at the time, but his words describe my experience as the music’s mood turned devotional. Slowly, the chorale faded. The winds were ethereal, perfectly balanced. I hung on to the long-tone A, which was not such a low or recalcitrant note—good, good, almost done. This reed sounds pretty nice, I told myself.

  “When I hit this clout,” as Plimpton had described his bombastic gong, �
�it made all the musicians in front of me jump up like beans on a griddle.”

  My mouth muscles were tiring. I was losing control. And I was scared out of my mind. I braced for the low C-sharp, knowing I needed to blow slightly harder and open my teeth a little farther apart. That way, the reed would vibrate just enough to attack the note delicately.

  “Spleeeee-YAHHHHHHH!”

  Tennstedt stopped, glaring. Starting with the second violins, heads rippled in my direction. In cutting my musical fart, I’d also quacked a spectacular wrong note. Tennstedt raised his baton again. When repeating the passage, the winds sounded beautiful but this time I was too frightened to play anything at all.

  I rushed home, humiliated by what seemed to me my miserable failure. Yet neither Jayson nor Tennstedt were in a position to hire me. The personnel manager had promoted me to the top of the list based on Robinson’s recommendation, and a few hours later, the Philharmonic called to hire me to play third oboe in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with Leonard Bernstein.

  I felt as if I was dreaming. Bernstein had been a hero of mine ever since his televised children’s concerts, which introduced the boob-tube generation to Mozart. Bernstein had also had a late night before his Philharmonic debut in 1943. Assistant conductor of the orchestra at the time, he partied after his new song cycle, I Hate Music, premiered at Town Hall. Soon after dawn, he got the call to step in at Carnegie Hall for an ailing Bruno Walter. Without any rehearsal at all, Bernstein conducted a live concert that was broadcast nationwide, featuring Schumann’s Manfred Overture, Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger, and Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote. Expecting the twenty-five-year-old conductor to follow the orchestra instead of leading it, Philharmonic musicians were astonished to find themselves swept away by Bernstein’s musical spirit. The audience, warm enough at first, rioted with cheers by concert’s end.

  Bernstein defied the highbrow crowd, turning newcomers on to Mahler. As a composer, his music crossed ethnic and class lines, from the Chicano gangs of West Side Story to his soundtrack for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. An American Jew, Bernstein’s affiliation with the Vienna Philharmonic spoke deeply about how musicianship can transcend ethnic conflict. Tom Wolfe chronicled his relationship to the Black Panthers in Radical Chic, adding to a thick FBI file detailing political views written into his Mass. He crossed other boundaries too. Writing a bisexual role into his 1983 opera A Quiet Place, Bernstein himself became openly gay once his wife died in 1978.

  As I waited with the orchestra at the Rite’s first rehearsal, I studied my unusual sheet music part, one of a set the Philharmonic kept just for Bernstein, its complex meters repackaged into neat bars of 3/4 and 4/4. Bernstein strolled onstage thirty minutes late. On the podium, a cough rattled him for minutes, wracking his distended belly. He was in his sixties, and his body showed the effects of an exuberant lifestyle. Still, Bernstein lived for music.

  Although the Rite’s shocking images of human sacrifice, jarring dissonances, and irregular throbbing rhythms had outraged audiences at its 1913 premiere, the piece has become part of a standard repertoire. Not Bernstein’s version, however. Lenny’s Rite was primitive, sexual, exhausting, and thrilling, an orgiastic feast. Even the most apathetic musicians rode his raw energy as he clutched emotion from thin air, dancing like a drunken sailor, moaning and snorting. The performance was more than just the music. It was an orgy that threw the heart, the soul, and all the senses into a superhuman sphere. When it ended, a boy stood backstage and toweled the maestro off between bows, keeping a lit cigarette for him to puff in the wings. The players blushed at their white-hot abandon, and Bernstein burst into the woodwind section, embracing the players. Reaching the oboe section, he kissed my ear. The Times raved:

  Finally, The Rite of Spring [was performed], which Mr. Bernstein likes to play for all the cataclysmic shock it can possibly deliver. This was an explosive performance of the sort that is alleged to have brought the following sardonic review from Stravinsky the first time he heard it: “Wow!”

  [Bernstein] evidently wanted, and certainly got, great crunching, snarling chords from the brass and thundering thumps from the timpani. One could argue that the work can make its Corybantic effect with something less than a frenzied approach of this sort, but Mr. Bernstein has always sinned, when he did sin, in the right direction. The essence of The Rite of Spring is its solar heat, which this performance brought out, even at the expense of orchestral finesse.

  After a week like that, I was hooked. Sometimes the phone rang just before 8 P.M., like the night second oboist Jerry Roth, dad of CNN’s Richard Roth, suffered an accident involving a roller-skating waiter, scalding hot soup, and his lap. I sight-read the concert; he recovered.

  Over the next year, I played with European and American stars who guest-conducted the Philharmonic, including Andrew Davis, Erich Leinsdorf, and Pierre Boulez. The Czech conductor Raphael Kubelik brought Les Janáek’s grim opera From the House of the Dead to America for the first time, and Giuseppe Sinopoli made his New York debut conducting Mahler’s tragic Sixth Symphony, looking exactly like the composer himself.

  I could barely believe my good fortune. Just four years earlier, I had predicted a grim future for myself, and here I was substituting with one of the world’s great orchestras. My success was not only a résumé entry but, more significantly, a source of great spiritual growth and delight, a unique high that eluded words.

  Roth nursed his ailing wife for much of my final year in college, often calling the Philharmonic at dawn to cancel an evening’s concert or an entire week. Playing classical masterpieces with the world’s best musicians was terrifying and enthralling at the same time. Learning on the job, I began feeling more at ease onstage with the Philharmonic; rushing to Lincoln Center after school soon became second nature.

  After playing with the Philharmonic for a number of weeks, I needed to transfer my union membership. In North Carolina only a couple of hundred musicians belonged to the union local, which operated from someone’s kitchen table in Raleigh. The New York City chapter of the union was housed in a four-story building. It published an inch-thick directory of members that represented 10 percent of the hundred thousand union musicians nationwide.

  “Two hundred eight dollars,” said the old man behind the glass divider as he scratched his mottled, flaking face. I wrote the check, while the man trumpeted his bulbous nose into a handkerchief and inspected the result. I took my new union card and pushed my check toward him, making sure our hands didn’t touch.

  LOCAL 802, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS read the little card. I peered over my shoulder, where old men sat at every desk behind the payment window. I felt conspicuously young and female.

  I headed back to the union’s front door, where jazz music was starting to spill out from the 52nd Street clubs during happy hour. The exit route was circuitous and skirted a gallery that overlooked the Roseland Ballroom, which was once used as the union’s exchange floor. Back then, dues were $24.

  Roseland’s dance floor was still as a tomb, with the sheet covering some amplification equipment lending a ghostly touch. In the 1950s, this room would have been bursting with action three days a week. Hundreds of men jostled for engagements in the afternoon and contractors hiring for various fields each gathered in a different part of the cavernous room: cruise ships, high-end club dates, scrappier nightclub gigs, recordings for commercials and Muzak, and single-engagement classical concerts. Yorkville restaurants hired three to eleven sidemen, paying $90 a week. A bank of pay phones lined one wall, and a switchboard operator in the center paged musicians next to a booth selling black or white bow ties.

  Since then, the focus of employment for musicians had shifted. Local 802’s exchange floor had shut down in the 1970s after LPs, radio, television, and rock ’n’ roll acts gradually replaced big bands, many club dates, and other once-popular genres of live music. The union was representing musicians’ interests better than ever now by negotiating contracts, organizing fo
r benefits, and lobbying for musician-favorable public policy. However, it was more practical for its members to find work through auditions and personal networking efforts than the old-school exchange floor.

  A typical 1950s International Musician, the union’s national paper, ran 5,000-word features detailing music in every part of the country. The stories focused on groups filled with community residents who were also part-time musicians. “Music in Idaho” revealed a state bustling with Basque folk musicians, cabaret acts, and the Boise Philharmonic, photographed showing teachers, bankers, farmers, and other workers holding violins and wearing their Sunday best. In these communities, classical music wasn’t a rarity, but few people expected to make a full-time living playing it.

  Around the United States, postwar European immigrants were eager to hear concerts in America and perform as amateur musicians themselves. The most influential landed at American universities. Paul Hindemith taught composition at Yale, Igor Stravinsky in Los Angeles, Kurt Weill at Juilliard, and Nadia Boulanger at Harvard. Most were less famous but kept music alive wherever they lived, by playing for free or supporting their musical life with a day job.

  Savannah lured musicians to its twenty-week season with a “wonderful winter climate,” and sought those “able to accept other employment.” At the same time, the Norfolk Symphony—established for forty-four years—was hiring strings, oboes, harps, bassoons, and French horns who could fill local vacancies, including teachers for civil engineering and history, a secretary, and a mechanic.