THE NIGHT I MET ALBERT EINSTEIN
When I was a young man, just beginning
to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York
philanthropist, Lady Jane Vanderbilt. After dinner, our hostess led us to an enormous
drawing room. Other guests were pouring in. My eyes set on two unnerving
sights. Servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, straight rows. Up
front, leaning against the wall, were several classical musical instruments.
Apparently we were in for an evening of symphony music. I use the phrase “in
for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf. I was born with
poo hearing and became almost totally deaf in my left ear at age eight when I
contacted a mastoid infection in my left middle ear. Only with great effort can
I carry the simplest tune.
In those days, symphony musicians had long
hair, hence, I called their stuff ‘long hair;’ they played violins, piccolos,
trumpets, clarinets, and such. The drummer’s clash the symbols, and pound on
the timpani drums, gongs, gourds, triangles, cow bells, and so forth. Over and
over all evening long, no vocals--guitars or drum sets, just instrumentals.
It’s all guaranteed to wave me to sleep and then wake me up at the crescendos.
High notes and low points for classical music I avoided attending symphony
concerts as if my life depended on it. Very few times have I been forced or
trapped, as in this situation, to be here in the first place.
So, what I have learned to do (out of
desperation) is bide my time until the tuning stops, the conductor raises both
arms, stops the tuning, brings his arms down which starts the musicians. With
the audience now comfortably seated, I start fixing my face in what I hope has
an appearance of intelligent appreciation of the music. I close both ears from
the inside and tuck my palm under my chin for support-usually my right palm as
I am right handed. Next, I begin the process of what I call “first stage dream-hand
submergence.” Practiced as I am, it takes but a few moments, and those nearby
who happen to look my way observe only a contemplating lover of the arts with
his eye lids hanging partly open. On this occasion there must not have been
enough crescendos.
Suddenly, the audience was on their feet
clapping. It was intermission. I had slept through the first half. I quickly
stood up, embarrassed and afraid I had snored or worse? Just then I heard a
gentle, accented voice on my right say.
“You’re not fond of Ravel?”
I knew as much about Ravel as I did about
nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with
his well-known shock of untidy white hair and piercing eyes. I was standing next
to Albert Einstein.
“Well,” I said, hesitating uncomfortably.
I had been asked a casual question so all I had to do was be
equally casual in my reply. I
could see, however, from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary blue eyes that
their owner had no intention of merely going through the perfunctory duties of
elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I might place on my part in the
verbal exchange with this man, his part mattered very much. Above all, I knew
this was a man to who you did not tell a lie.
“I don’t know anything about Ravel,” I
blubbered out. “I’ve never heard of him.”
A look of perplexed
astonishment washed across his mobile face. “You have never heard Ravel?”
He made it sound as though I
had said; I'd never taken a bath. “It isn’t that I don’t want to like Ravel,”
I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m
tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and actually I’ve never really
enjoyed this stuff.”
A look of concern came upon his face,
“Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come
with me.”
Einstein took my arm with one hand and at the
same time placed his famous pipe at the side of his mouth. As he led me down
the hall and across the crowded foyer, I kept my eyes fixed on the carpet. A
rising murmur of puzzled speculation as to who I was followed us. Einstein paid
no attention to it. Resolutely, he led me up some stairs to the floor above. He
opened the door into a book-lined messy study, drew me in, and shut the door.
“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile.
“You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”
“All my life, the fact that I don’t enjoy
music isn’t important. I wish you would go back downstairs, and enjoy the music.”
He shook his head and scowled. “Tell me,
is there any kind of music that you do like?”
“Well, I like songs that have words and
the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”
Einstein smiled and nodded. “You can give
me an example perhaps?”
“Well, almost anything by Bing Crosby or
Ray Charles.”
He nodded briskly. “Good!”
He went to a corner of the room, opened
the cover of a phonograph and started pulling out records from a cabinet. Soon
he beamed. “Ah! Bing Crosby’s, White Christmas,”
He put Bing’s record on the phonograph,
lowered the needle arm onto the edge of the record. In a moment his study was
filled with the relaxed lilting strains of White Christmas. He grinned at me,
as he kept time with the stem of his pipe. After four or five stanzas, he
stopped the phonograph.
“Now will you tell me, please, what you
have just heard?” The simplest answer seemed to be to just sing the lines. I began
quietly, but desperately trying to stay in tune.
“I’m dreaming of a White Christmas just
like the ones I used to know. Where the tree tops glisten and children listen
to hear sleigh bells in the snow.”
The expression on Einstein’s face was
like a beautiful morning sunrise.
“You see! You do have an ear,” he cried
with delight.
I mumbled something about this being one
of my favorite songs; I had heard it hundreds of times, so it didn’t think it
really prove anything.
“Nonsense! It proves everything. Do you
remember your first arithmetic lesson in first grade? Suppose, at your very
first contact with numbers your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem
in, say, long division. Could you have done so?”
“No, of course not.”
“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant
wave with his pipe stem, “It would have been impossible and you would have
reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division. As a
result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible that
for your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division, or maybe
the rhythm of time in the universe. Who knows what would become of you at that
impressionable age?" The pipe stem went up and out in another wave.
“But on your first day no teacher would be so
foolish. You would start with elementary things. Then, when you had acquired
skill with the simplest problems you would be led up to long division. So it is
with music.”
Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record,
“This simple charming song is like simple
addition or subtraction. You have mastered it.”
Next came Ray Charles’s, “Born to Lose,
I’ve lived my life in vain. Every dream has only brought me Pain. All my life
I’ve always been so blue. Born to lose and now I’m losing you.”
“Now we go on to something more
complicated.” He found another record and turned on the phonograph once again.
The golden voice of John McCormack singing The Trumpeter filled the room. After
a few lines he stopped the phonograph.
“So! You will sing that back to me
please?” I did with a good deal of self-consciousness but for me a surprising
degree of acceptability. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I
had seen only once before in my life. That was on the face of my father when I
graduated from college.
“Excellent! Wonderful! Now this, “Caruso.”
I managed to reproduce an
approximation of the sounds of that famous tenor, and a few more
followed. I couldn't shake a
feeling of amazement, of being here. He was completely occupied by what we were
doing. Recordings of music without words came next which I was instructed to
follow by humming. When I reached for a high note his mouth opened and his head
went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came
close enough in my humming, for he turned off the phonograph.
“Now young man," he said, putting his
arm through mine…pipe in his mouth,
“We are ready for Ravel.”
As we returned to our seats in the drawing
room, the musicians were tuning up for the final selection.
Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring
pat on the knee.
“Just allow yourself to listen. That is all.”
For me, it wasn’t really all. Without
the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger, I would never have
heard as I did that night for the first time in my life, Ravel’s “Sheep May
Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever
tire of it, because I never listen to it alone. I sit beside a small man with a
shock of untidy white hair, a pipe clamped between his teeth, and yes, all
that’s contained in those blue eyes in their extraordinary warmth, beaming
through the wonder of the universe. I had been given a passport to the universe
of music.
When the concert was finished I added my
genuine applause to that of the other patrons. My feeling that this was going
to be an Armageddon had disappeared. I seldom again felt lost in the rhythm of
universal music.
Suddenly, with an icy glare at me our
hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein, that you missed so much of
the performance tonight."
Hastily Einstein came to his feet. “Don’t
be sorry, my young friend here and I were engaged in one of the greatest
activities man is capable of.”
She looked puzzled. “Really? And what
is that?’
Einstein smiled and put his arm across my
shoulders and said, what for me at least became an endless debt.
“We were opening up yet another fragment of
the universal frontier of the original rhythm of beautiful music in the
universe. Oh, please forgive me, then turning to the man on his right, “let me
introduce you to Robert Ravel."
Now several years later Einstein has passed
away 1997, and I humbly give my recognition through him to: Mariusz Kwiecien,
the 39 year old Polish baritone, who injured a disk during a dress rehearsal of
Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Met Opera underwent surgery and was back onstage just
two weeks later.
And my Puffiest Chest award to
Kansas City for opening the Kauffman Center for the Performing Art a source of immense
civic pride and beauteous new home of the town’s orchestra and opera companies.
A close runner-up is Montreal which opened a new concert hall for the Montreal
Symphony Orchestra, and let me not forget the Lindquist preforming Arts Hall in
Ogden, Utah.
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S. To
read more Karl Wallace stories go to:
www.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
