Adagio for a simple clarinet

By Stephen Downes

While rummaging in a cupboard one day, the narrator of 'Adagio for a simple clarinet' rediscovers his father's clarinet, forgotten for years on a high shelf. Finding the instrument arouses in him long-buried memories and the childhood passion for music that his father had thwarted. Unable to make peace with his father before he died, he now finds himself compelled to learn more about the clarinet -- its sounds, its workings, its history -- and to teach himself to play it. He chooses the 'Adagio' from Mozart's clarinet concerto, one of music's most-loved pieces. Can the haunting notes of a long-dead composer somehow provide the key to atonement? Thus begins a poignant journey back in time and a pilgrimage to Eastern Europe in search of the clarinet's origins.
'Adagio for a simple clarinet' is a deeply moving novella dealing with obsession, retribution and redemption through the extraordinary power of music. The writing is as fine as the best post-modern prose and the story is hypnotic, trapping the reader in a whirlpool of emotions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Downes
• Release date: Dec 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311061508

Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is the author of ADAGIO FOR A SIMPLE CLARINET, a narrative that involved musicology, biography, memoir, Nazi history and an interview with Mozart. A writer and journalist who wanted to be a concert pianist, he has ‘collected’ for decades live performances by some of the world’s greatest pianists, including Sviatoslav Richter, Daniel Barrenboim, and Julius Katchen. He has a significant collection of piano recordings. He is the author of several books, including BLACKIE, the story of a pet cat’s treatment for a brain tumour and his unfortunate demise, which was met with considerable sales and now translated into three languages.

Book preview

‘Adagio for a simple clarinet is as humanly rich, thought-provoking and deftly structured as anything I have read in a long time.’

Michael McGirr, author of Bypass and fiction reviewer for Meanjin and the Sydney Morning Herald

Adagio

for a simple clarinet

Stephen Downes

Copyright Stephen Downes 2014

Smashwords Edition

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I

A NEED TO PLAY the clarinet stalked me for years. Not any clarinet, but a particular one that had belonged to my father. I would scarcely be aware of it for months on end. Then I would notice a mild itch or ache. At other times, it was like being nuzzled by an invisible animal. The muzzle of a large dog, say. At first, I was unable to tell what it was. What it meant. What it wanted. It was just there, something that goaded me. Do it, it urged. Do it. Do what? I asked.

One afternoon in a Melbourne winter – a sad season, the air mostly damp grey – I was looking for something in a high cupboard. Nothing important was ever stored in this cupboard, and I cannot recall now what I was looking for. The cupboard contained an old heat lamp, which was bought to alleviate the pain of an aunt’s breast cancer forty years before (it hadn’t worked), disused hiking socks, a decorative carton that once held a bottle of what is said to be the world’s best champagne, a quartz clock in black plastic made to resemble a giant wristwatch, a disused Super-8 movie camera in its case bought in Hong Kong in 1972, sundry old pullovers and a hessian fish sack that has never contained even a single thrashing trout. And then I found my father’s clarinet.

Or rather the case, a long and gently tapering box of fraying black leather with an arching handle in the same fragile hide. I took it down and scraped off thick dust. It was closed with a strap and buckle and I undid them and looked inside. A thin pliable partition of leather separated the case into two compartments, the instrument into two parts. I took both out, weighing the black heaviness of each. One had a mouthpiece. The other was flared. Each had ornate keys of a strange powder-grey alloy, silver in less-worn places.

The act of holding the clarinet moved me instantly in a curious way. My father had been dead for eighteen years, and I had inherited the instrument when my brothers and I went through my parents’ belongings after my mother died in the winter of 1997. None of us particularly wanted it. It was a curio. We smiled at it. I had formally taken music farther than the others, so I should guard it, we had agreed hastily, like a company board deciding on a lowly agenda item. So in the sorting of remnants that follows a last parent’s death, the clarinet ended up in my basket. I put it away in the high cupboard. Never to be taken down, perhaps. Kept securely, of course. After all, it might inspire memory if memory lapsed, a form of insurance against loss of the past. Yet in recent years it had probably assumed a responsibility that would ordinarily be reserved for humans. From the high cupboard, it was becoming a go-between and provocateur, inciting me to act.

I can’t tell if at the precise moment that I saw the case in the cupboard I also envisaged my father’s clarinet as a psychical connection with him – if I thought, even subconsciously, that I could reach him in some way through this tube of heavy black wood. But as I assembled the instrument I was overcome by a powerful desire to learn to play it. All at once I made several decisions: I should play it and I should teach myself to play it. And play it well. Also, I should set myself a relatively easy target. At my age and with my work and family commitments I could never put in the hours to become a virtuoso. What was perhaps possible, though, was that I could learn to play a short phrase well. I would strike ‘one clear chord’, as Oscar Wilde anguished in his poem Helas. It would be a fine piece of clarinet music, though, not a symbolic sound. That would be my goal. I would never become a real player. But I would learn to perform a chosen phrase in a manner acceptable to my amateur but demanding musical ear. I might even ask others if they approved of my playing. It would be a challenge. But why I chose to challenge myself in such a way I wasn’t quite sure.

I put the clarinet down and retreated to my office at the back of the house where my family wouldn’t hear me. I needed to laugh out loud in isolation. Very loud. I bellowed and shook. Could it be, I asked myself, that my father was turning the knife? Was he getting at me through an ancient woodwind? Was he still somehow able to assert his overbearing magnificence from the grave? After all, he had taught himself to play the clarinet, one of his many triumphs.

I am deeply aspiritual, but that I had to laugh off these notions in private shook me a little. Improbable spectres can disturb even the most cynical of us. Was it just by accident that I had rediscovered the clarinet case? Why was I so moved by it that I wanted to open it, get out the instrument and play it? I could have hypothesised on a high plane about these questions, but I certainly didn’t then. The conjectures would have been beyond testing, in any case. Coincidence was more logical. I remembered a brief newspaper article I’d recently noticed. A radio station had canvassed its listeners about the short ‘swoon’ pieces it broadcast to fill in vacant minutes before a news bulletin. One piece was by far the most popular, the most loved; the middle movement, the Adagio, from Mozart’s clarinet concerto. And there was a second coincidence. Some months before, I had bought a compact disc of Mozart selections precisely because it contained the Mozart concerto. I had no recording of the piece, but I also thought it might help me to relax while I drove; it went into the stacker of my car. I am sometimes lukewarm about Mozart’s music. (His genius radiates for all to see, of course.) It was different when Glenn Gould was alive. I had an ally, a musical mate. Gould, the great pianist who died at fifty-one of heart failure, called Mozart a ‘right-hand’ composer. He meant that Mozart was obsessed with the soprano line, the melody, the songs music makes. It was the lode he worked. By contrast, Gould championed the works of Bach and Haydn, but especially Bach, who constructed amazing musical edifices by weaving all the voices available, from the lowest to the highest. They were stupendous creators, founding their genius on precise and extremely complex engineering. Their music was often more of the head, where Mozart’s is of the heart. (Both Bach and Haydn could nonetheless invest their works with the most poignant sentiments.)

For all that, the clarinet concerto, especially the Adagio, was so beautiful that whenever I heard it I made immediate artistic and emotional concessions to the right-hand composer and listened in rapture. I often wonder if Gould did the same. When he retreated in the coldest months to his grey lonely shack of fir slabs by the edge of a vast frozen lake in northern Canada, did he secretly slip out a vinyl long-play and put it on? I imagine he had no electricity in the hut. His gramophone, I imagine, was powered by batteries. I can see his balding skull, gaunt and monkish, protruding from the upturned lapels of the dark-grey overcoat he habitually wore. I can see his half-closed, needle eyes, head like a turtle’s. The grey tartan scarf looped around his neck. The thick char-grey woollen gloves baring each finger to the second knuckle. He stoops, as seemed his stance, and holds the record carefully in those long fingers. He can do it easily without touching the tracks. He could hold basketballs upside down. He places the needle carefully. Earlier, he has chosen the purest icicle growing under the eaves, broken it off, and let it melt through a fine chinois into a glass jug he has himself first rinsed. Then he has passed the icy water through filter paper. He examines a glass beaker for its cleanliness and fills it with the water he has melted from the icicle. He sits on a strict wooden dining chair in the middle of the hut. Perhaps it’s one he has sat on while playing Bach. He sips and listens. Alone, of course. (Glenn Gould, the transcendental artist, was never really ever with others.) The only unclear portion of the image is the expression on his face. Does it concede the loveliness of Mozart’s clarinet concerto? Does his face take on the transfixed and ethereal calm it assumed when he played the Goldberg variations for Canadian television? Did the Mozart clarinet concerto ever thrill him? Who knows?

The Adagio, a slow nine minutes (some musicians play it quicker), is addictively beautiful. In the months before I found my father’s clarinet, I began to play and replay it constantly whenever I drove. As soon as its last note faded I would jab at the replay button to resume at the first. I would repeat the process even in dense or fast traffic until I arrived at my destination. If a car trip lasted twenty-five minutes, I would hear the Adagio in its entirety almost three times. I would regret having to leave the car before the third hearing had finished. If I had the time, I would simply park and sit in the car and wait for the end. It was sacrilegious to turn off a piece that wrings the last drop of beauty from music as Europeans have made it over centuries. Its simple melody is embellished with a few flourishes in the middle of the movement, then repeated. And that’s about it. But a master is at work. Not a note is out of place. There are neither too few nor too many of them, and all are designed to move us to extremes.

Take the first two notes. Every piece of harmonic music has a home tone, a pitch that anchors it, that feels as secure and warming as the hearth. We know instinctively what that tone is as soon as the music begins. When we are away from it – hearing notes of other pitches and chords of other keys – we yearn for the home note, or the tonic of the key in which the music is written, to put it technically. It is a tonic. We desire it. The clarinet part for the Adagio is written in the key of F, so F is its home note. (The orchestral part is written in the key of D and the Mozart concerto is played with an A clarinet, which sounds notes three half-tones lower than the written music. The clarinet part is written in F, and I am aware that this is all very confusing.) Mozart starts the piece below it, at C, at any rate. The C is quite a long note, running a third of a full measure, and as it is blown, soft and beautifully by the solo clarinet against the orchestra’s tonic chords, we yearn for F. And Wolfgang delivers it with the next note, which is half as long again as the C. He knows we desire it, and he extends his grace generously. The next three notes are shorter and higher and make an exquisite arch that returns us again to the F. That’s why the Adagio is so beautiful. He takes us home with it. (Paradoxical, too, is its stately funereal pace, which is written in waltz time.)

When I found my father’s clarinet, it was ready to play, a reed already fixed to the mouthpiece. From somewhere in the past or watching others, I had a rough idea that you curled your lips over your teeth as you blew on the mouthpiece. You made like a toothless vagrant and made a quick ‘t’ to produce the sound. I tried. Air hissed out from many places. It came out between the joints. It came out the holes. It seemed to escape from everywhere. I blew harder. The air hissed louder. My father’s clarinet reminded me of a submarine in a war movie springing unpluggable leaks. Then I noticed a little metal rest on the bottom joint. It had to be for the thumb of the right hand, which