THE KREUTZER SONATA
By LIONEL ROLFE calclass@earthlink.net
http://www.pzaz.net/lionel/
Photo By Boryana Rolfe
This is a piece from my book, "Death and Redemption in London & L.A.," which is still available from Amazon.com and other such places.
In June of 1999, I returned from London unable to think of anything but Lilly. Lilly became my obsession on that visit to attend the memorial for my uncle Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist. The memorial was held at Westminster Abbey.
Lilly came to pick me up at my mother’s, since she had kindly offered to put me up in her spare bedroom.
Somehow she looked more vulnerable than I remembered her when we first met in February. Seeing her in June, I realized something I had only partly understood when I met her in February. This was a woman in whose company I could easily spend a lifetime.
When we said goodbye in front of her house as the cabby impatiently waited, I only brushed her face, yet felt an intense and indescribable tenderness. I don’t know how big a part of my feelings for her were due to her musical background.
Lilly is a violinist from a highly musical family, and violinists, after all, are a major part of my legend too.
My work in Los Angeles seemed far away and in another world to me then, even though I would be back in that world in just a few hours.
I work in the pressroom at Parker Center, the central police station in Los Angeles, where the blare of the television, the radio, the police scanners, the phones, the fax machine, all combine to produce a grey mood—a mood most opposed to the Kreutzer Sonata, one of my most favorite pieces of music.
The Kreutzer makes me think very utopian thoughts, thoughts highly inappropriate to the place I was returning to. You don’t think utopian thoughts in the press room at Parker Center.
At the time, there had been abundant evidence that something has been awry with police in Los Angeles. Some cops in the gang units in the Rampart Division were selling confiscated cocaine. They also set up and nearly killed innocent alleged gang members they wanted to eradicate. And it wasn’t just Los Angeles cops.
The El Monte police department recently sent its narcotics squad to Compton, another small Los Angeles area city. Early one morning, they busted into an old man’s home, saying they were looking for narcotics. They killed the man and paraded his wife outside with nothing on but a towel they graciously allowed her to throw over her upper body. They found no dope.
I made a wisecrack to a detective I kind of know. Could he sell me some cocaine cheap? I bantered. Back in the ‘60s he used to sit around the coffeehouses and discuss philosophy. After I made the remark, I immediately felt bad. The cop, Ray Mauss, was a cultured man who would not have been out of place at a concert where someone was playing Beethoven. I think this particular man was a pretty straight guy.
Then I realized (with no offense intended to Ray) that the same thing could have been said about some Nazis as well.
Despite the locker room macho humor of many lesser cops than Mauss, Parker Center can be a place of sad grace and humor in the morass of murder and death that is my professional life. One female police officer told me the story of her life as a traffic cop.
It seems that traffic cops are sometimes honored for grace and beauty as well as their efficiency in directing traffic at dead traffic lights. Not surprisingly, shapely women usually get these awards from their male supervisors. I doubt these evaluations are written down in quite those words in the record books. But male commanders do honor the graceful dance qualities of their traffic cops.
One month my friend was honored for her traffic directing and told me she was quite surprised. Normally. she said, in her division this "esteemed" award went to a particular traffic cop who would fraternize with the boys out on the roof of the police station. These roof-top performances out of her clothes, and her uniformed performances in the streets were both critically acclaimed.
Yes, my work is so very different from the family background in which I grew up. My week in London only served to emphasize this to me.
The family legend was formed during the Great Depression when my uncle Yehudi’s name was the butt of the popular refrain, "Who’s Yahoodi?." In the ‘30s this was as common as saying everything "is copasetic." Part of the reason "Who’s Yahoodi?" became such a common refrain was that Jack Benny used it all the time on the radio.
Eventually Yehudi became not just an incredible wunderkind, but an important citizen of the world, one involved in a good many philosophical and political causes. Perhaps it started out when he was a boy and decided he could play Bach’s Chaconne for all humanity so beautifully that this alone would banish injustice and make the world a better place.
My week’s visit to London was intense. This was perhaps due in large part to my uncle’s memorial unavoidably causing me to think of many things, including death. And Lilly made me think of love. It was a week during which I embraced both, and it seemed as if they were one.
Of course once back in L.A., the London intensity dissolved. A lot of my good friends were around—the only good upon my return. Otherwise, summers in Los Angeles are nightmarish, when everything is permeated with a sickly yellow that mocks even the chemicalized midday sun. It was no different on this particular summer.
I confess that I have always felt a curious ambivalence to Los Angeles, even though at times I have been its Town Crier. My books, "Literary L.A.," and "Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles," were all attempts informing Los Angeles of its cultural and historical roots.
Back in Los Angeles I stopped feeling a connection with the strange tradition of the musical prodigy – the child who appears to be a wise old man – that Yehudi represented. What is the meaning of a rural mystical myth against the hard-edged reality of my Los Angeles police beat where I spent at least half my waking hours?
I bet even Yehudi, whose life was so resonant with the myth, especially when he picked up the bow, felt betrayed by it at the end.
I don’t know if it’s the same archetype, but I get this feeling of connection even in Los Angeles. It comes to me on those rare occasions when I’m on the Golden State or Santa Monica Freeway, and I turn on the radio and someone is playing the Kreutzer Sonata. I cry from the disconnect of it all. Because I know I am intensely missing something that can never be again – if ever it was. Los Angeles is a terribly discordant place where smog, clanging steel, electrical wires, gas pipes and cauldrons of bubbling chemicals are used equally for the manufacture of food and toys.
Of course, you have to consider that I grew up turning pages for my mother Yaltah, Yehudi’s youngest sister, when she played the Kreutzer with violinists like Szigeti or Israel Baker. When I was a kid, we used to go to Szigeti’s house where the great maestro and my mom would lovingly caress every note of the Kreutzer. I remember so clearly lying in bed at home listening to my mom play it with violinist Israel Baker. My strong memory is of Beethoven’s intense melodies floating up and mingling with the summer sun that streamed through the palm and jacaranda trees into the patio just outside my second-story bedroom door.
Alienation is banished when you hear the Kreutzer that way. There’s only hope and thoughts that soar to the stratosphere. The Kreutzer transcends even Los Angeles.
The Kreutzer is like a great love affair. After all, the great novelist Tolstoy wrote a story called the Kreutzer Sonata about just this thing. My wonderful selected childhood memories of hearing the Kreutzer in Los Angeles remain sublime to me. I suppose if I lived in London it might become less exalted because it would be more common. But in Los Angeles a group of musicians playing the Kreutzer should make the 11 o’clock news because they are performing a very special mitzvah. But this, of course, would never happen.
A telling thing occurred in London when my daughter Haila and I emerged from Angel Station on the Northern Line going to visit Willa Woolston. Willa lived on a boat in a canal in Islington. On Upper Street a gentleman, who looked like he had been drinking too much for a long time, greeted us. He was playing a violin and had a basket on the ground in front of him for gratuities. But his Kreutzer was wobbly – very wobbly. You almost thought he might have once been a violinist, perhaps a teacher in a high school, but it was hard to tell because of how wobbly he had become. Before I was able to contemplate the scene more, I heard a man whistling behind us, someone whistling the Kreutzer Sonata, perhaps as a way to help the tangled old alcoholic violinist.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone whistling the Kreutzer Sonata on a Los Angeles street. This alone certainly made me think I lived in the wrong town. Los Angeles is mostly dreary tract homes and boob tube reality for its denizens. It’s the noise-polluted reality of blaring radios and televisions and movies and plastic-metal things. Of course you can argue it is entirely possible to hear the
Kreutzer in an intensely Southern California moment, for didn’t I just describe one? But Szigeti is dead, and his mansion in Palos Verdes where we used to go to eat and play music is gone.
I suppose good music still happens, even in L.A. Hopefully there are other pianists, other violinists, and other moments of music making – in the same way as there are memorable moments of lovemaking, unfortunately also forgotten, but maybe destined to be relived some day. At least real music – if not real lovemaking – appears to be a diminished thing in Los Angeles.
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Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, including "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather," "Literary L.A." and "Fat Man on the Left."