Toby nails the complicated patterns, the zigzag of counter-rhythms and nasty transitions, his jaw tight and shoulders hunched, bronco rider taming the beast.
When he finishes, giving the final chord ample time to ring, he lowers his hands.
Someone says, “Holy shit.”
There is a smattering of applause and even laughter.
Jon Smyth’s eyes burrow in on him. “I know you.”
Toby recoils. This is not what he expects.
“I remember this bloke.” He points at Toby, then glances around at the gathered crowd.
Toby squeezes the guitar into his chest — body armour.
“Paris,” Jon announces. “You went off the rails. But first you ambushed everyone in the semis. After hearing you play, I nearly packed it in.” He’s extending a hand, and Toby understands he’s meant to shake it. “I offer you this work for your repertoire.”
Toby remembers to smile — a dragonfly lighting up at this moment, wings shot with gold. He’s always known this about himself, that he’d rise higher, faster, translucent.
The composer must have sat at this window looking down at the bustle of St. Lawrence Boulevard, working at this beat-up desk, really just a table with a drawer. The room is small but bright, and Leopold Hirsch was already feeling the effects of the osteoarthritis that crippled him in later life. His last couple of decades before dying of emphysema were spent back in Europe where he scraped by thanks to earlier achievements. Didn’t he conduct a regional orchestra in the Netherlands?
Toby is alone in the museum room except for Lucy, who cranes her neck to read the titles on the top row of the bookshelf. He runs his hand over the bumpy surface of the table despite a sign that warns: do not touch. But he is here to touch, to inhale, to enter the life of this man.
Leopold Hirsch, born 1900, lived in this third-floor apartment with his family for close to twenty years. The notebook splayed under glass was fashioned by the composer, heavy paper sewn roughly into leather covers, and it’s clear by its concave shape that he must have carried it around in his back pocket. There’s a scattershot of notes pencilled on hand-drawn staff lines, the stems unanchored to note heads, flags tiny as commas. This is the man’s mind in action, untethered, the actual record of his musical thoughts as they tumbled out. The label describes the journal as being “preliminary fragments” of what became “Triptych for Guitar and Orchestra” — here, a gleam in its creator’s eye.
Toby can feel the weight of the man’s arm as Hirsch leaned over the desk, while elsewhere in the flat his wife cooked up a batch of sauerkraut as she ducked between roughhousing children: “Shhh, your father is working.”
Toby’s head jerks up.
Did someone speak?
Just Lucy who is still on tiptoe, reading. “They’re all in Polish or German,” she says. “Beautiful bindings. He must have brought his library with him on the steamer. And look, Toby, this toy is handcrafted. Do you think Hirsch made it for one of his children?” She holds up a small wooden tugboat painted red and black.
Toby hears but doesn’t listen. His heart has tapped open. He’s fallen back into time and can smell the long-vanished bakery below with its old-country sweet buns, and when he pulls at the sleeves of his jacket, it’s the ratty suit coat that Leopold Hirsch wears in the photograph above the desk. Another richer fragrance of pipe tobacco permeates the room after all these years. Hirsch got his favourite brand shipped to him from overseas, except during the war years when he lost track of most of his relatives, some of whom moved here for weeks or months, crowded into the bedrooms, rolling cots up the narrow staircase.
The room is a blur. Toby tastes salt, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he stands helpless and watery, half drowning in his own fluid.
Lucy notices and quickly reaches to touch his hair. “It is your great luck to feel deeply. Which is why you play like you do.”
The book of études was composed earlier, back in Europe when Hirsch was still a student at the conservatory, but the gorgeous “Triptych” was formed in this room. The work begins with that lush romantic melody, and you think you’re in for a good time, then it kicks open and you don’t know where the hell you are.
Lucy drops her hand and nods toward the corner. “Do you suppose there’s a real guitar in there?” she asks. A battered instrument case leans against the wall. “Or is it just for show?”
Toby says, “One way to find out.” He strides across the room. Leaning to snap open the case, he suddenly stops himself. He doesn’t want to know. If this case is empty, a sham, better that it stay shut. He rises to his feet and backs off.
“While he was beavering away at his scores, his wife was peeling potatoes and caring for the mob of children,” Lucy says. She slips into the hallway where the walls are decorated with photographs and framed programs going back to the late 1920s.
Swiping his face with his sleeve, Toby composes himself — what an odd turn of phrase.
“These must be his parents,” Lucy calls back. “Fine old gent with heroic sideburns. His mother looks like an unforgiving creature, sucked-in cheeks. Mind you, photography was a big deal in those days.”
When Toby doesn’t speak, she pokes her head back into the studio. “His mother’s family was in the shipping business back in Poland.” She stares for a moment when he doesn’t respond.
Toby practised for four hours this morning. His hands are supple as heated putty.
Hirsch wrote that music came to him as dictation from a mystical source. He studied the kabbalah and other texts and even met Krishnamurti one summer.
“They held salons for artists and musicians on the last Thursday of each month,” Lucy says, returning to the hallway. “Here’s a tiny drawing by Paul-Émile Borduas that must be worth something. Madame Hirsch, quote, ‘cooked massive stews for the hungry children and artists.’ I bet she did.”
Leopold might be out in the park with the children when sound came to him, sidelong, like the cranked-up music box of the ice-cream vendor or pretzel sellers. He could work anywhere at any time, because, as he famously wrote, music emanates from the world around us, from trees and sky to machine noise and the whirr of telephone wires. To receive these sounds, Hirsch trained his ears and mind to enter a state he termed the Receptive Cone.
Toby has experienced it in himself, a sensation both glorious and unnerving. He feels the enchantment grow in him now, so close to the master.
Lucy cries with delight. She’s found the nursery. Reluctantly, he leaves the studio with its moist smell of tobacco and old books. Lucy stands in the middle of a room with a sloped ceiling and a mitred window that looks onto a brick-and-glass building that wouldn’t have been there in Hirsch’s day. A rough-hewn cradle sits on the floor, plaster doll tucked under its miniature quilt. She picks up a pint-sized hairbrush from a shelf and slowly whisks it across her forearm, then lowers herself onto the rustic bed, perching next to a teddy bear, minus most of its fur.
“The little ones are so dear,” Lucy says, glancing up at Toby as if waiting for him to echo her sentiment.
When he doesn’t respond, she appears almost cross, an expression Toby recognizes: Jasper gets this way when he thinks Toby should act more interested in what is going on around him.
Lucy asks, “Do you know who else lived here?”
“Relatives from the old country.”
“Polish and Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms, escaping their ghettos before the Nazis blew through.”
A cold snake enters Toby’s gut. He knows this change in tone. Usually, it comes from old people. To this point they’ve been cordial, but once they discover he’s got measurable cc’s of German blood in his veins, he’s implicated in the crimes of