And After the Fire Page 5

  Sara’s father, the owner of this palace, was Daniel Itzig, “the King’s Jew,” as he was called. He had served as the king’s banker and Master of the Mint. He had investments in silver, ironworks, and God alone knew what else. Considering that Sara’s grandfather had been a lowly horse trader, her father was, above all, a financial genius. Rumor held that the Palais Itzig included a synagogue, although Friedemann had never seen it. Also rumored was a room with a detachable roof for use in some type of primitive holiday celebration.

  “And no mistakes in the second part, either!” she said, as if daring him to contradict her.

  He did not respond to this outburst. He kept his face impassive, like the proper pedagogue he was.

  Today Sara wore a satin gown covered with intricate embroidery. Her leather shoes shone with their softness and polish. He’d never seen clothes like hers. These were not the type of clothes worn by his sisters, or by his wife. His sisters, of course, were the children of Kantor Johann Sebastian Bach, a Lutheran minister of music, somber and serious. And Friedemann’s wife was, well, she was his wife. Friedemann dressed in his very best on the days he came to the palace. He made certain that his clothes were clean and that he didn’t give off a foul odor. The Palais Itzig was said to harbor that absolute height of luxury: a bath. No one, neither family nor servant, gave off a foul odor here.

  He stared at the finely wrought lace that covered Sara’s bodice, and he sensed, with a tingling on his fingertips, her developing figure. He sighed. As usual, Madame Goldberg, Sara’s prunelike governess, sat in the corner next to the window, clutching her needlework while she glared at him.

  Friedemann hadn’t known what to expect when he was first invited to the Palais Itzig to hear Sara play. He’d never visited a Jewish home. From their initial meeting two years before, he’d recognized Sara’s talent. In Berlin, he taught no students but her. No one else was worthy of him, not even Sara’s sisters, too numerous to recall, all of them playing musical instruments and engaging in family recitals for their private amusement. The two mornings he spent with Sara each week were the organizer of all his doings. He wished she had more time for him, but he knew her extensive study schedule. Tutors educated her in history, the sciences, and languages. He gathered she was the tenth among fifteen surviving children. He assumed there were others who had not survived. He himself was one of twenty children, of whom only ten had survived, so he understood her bustling family life with its undercurrent of loss. He was able to imagine how she filled her days when he wasn’t with her.

  At the conclusion of each of their lessons, a footman arrived with coffee and cake. Sara, Friedemann, and the governess would sit together at the small round table with dainty legs that perched itself near the windows. Sara would pour the coffee. Speaking French, they’d discuss Sara’s studies. Her French was exquisite, fully equal to his. Friedemann had been to university, so he was able to ask questions appropriate to their conversation. He took pride in Sara’s erudition, which made her especially worthy of his musical pedagogy.

  “The fugue is difficult,” she admitted.

  “You’re playing it well. Don’t stop.”

  “Never stop,” she said, mimicking one of his performance rules.

  Soon after he undertook the instruction of the Itzig girl, his friends at the tavern had asked him what Jews were like. Surprisingly, he could truthfully respond that Jews were much like everyone else. He’d seen Sara’s father many times during the past two years, and Friedemann reported to his incredulous friends that if you happened to chance upon Daniel Itzig on the street, you’d believe him to be any other man of wealth and position. No beard, no head-covering, no special clothes. Blue eyes, even. No tail or horns, so far as Friedemann could ascertain. You’d never suspect Daniel Itzig of being what he was.

  “Steady,” Friedemann cautioned Sara. “Don’t pick up speed simply because you want to get through it.”

  She nodded. She approached the coda. He’d embedded a little trick at the end. Would she notice it?

  At the moment of the stretto and inversion, she gave him a split-second grin. Yes, she’d caught it. Naturally. She was his darling.

  “You tried to trick me, Monsieur Bach. But you didn’t succeed.”

  “No talking!”

  She laughed at his order. The truth was he adored Sara’s disobedience. His own daughter, Friederica, the only one of his children to survive, was disobedient, too. She was several years older than this angel. But Friederica’s disobedience was mean-spirited and immoral.

  No. He must put Friederica out of his mind. When he was at the Palais Itzig, he must never let his thoughts drift to the difficulties he confronted at home. At the Palais, he entered a better, more elevated way of life.

  She completed the final cadence. She let the last chord resonate in the air, as he’d taught her. She turned to him with a blissful smile. “How was that? Have I made you happy?”

  “Indeed, you have.”

  Pride came into her expression, her chin rising. He adored her pride, too, even as he tempered it: “Nonetheless, the fugue was a bit muddy at the C-minor entry.”

  Outrage ensued. “Muddy? In what way muddy? Show me.”

  He exchanged a glance with the ever-glaring Madame Goldberg. He pulled a chair over to the harpsichord, placing it close to Sara’s chair but not so close that his leg would touch her flowing gown. Forever considerate, she leaned away from him, alas, to give him more room.

  “You played it this way.” He exaggerated her faults. “It should be played this way. Exploit the virtues of the instrument.” He played it twice, once for her to hear and understand, and once for himself, to indulge himself in the astonishing textural clarity of this harpsichord.

  Sara responded not with words but by playing the relevant measures over and over. He didn’t need to instruct her to do so. She knew to do it. Repetition was the only way to achieve an effortless flow. Those particular measures, until . . .

  “There.” She lifted her hands from the keyboard. “It’s perfect now, isn’t it?”

  “It’s better. Let us not put more faith in ourselves than may be warranted. You are good, for a fifteen-year-old. Talented, even. For a fifteen-year-old. How you play at eighteen will be our goal. Perform the piece again, from the beginning, with my corrections in mind.” He stood and returned to his place some five feet away, to listen and observe.

  She began at a proper tempo and fitting affect, playing with a combination of fluidity and sprightliness. She played as if her outstanding technical gifts were an aside. Her love of the music glowed upon her face.

  As Sara brought the piece to life, he experienced a quivering sense that his own life had in fact been worthwhile. This notion went against the general opinion outside the palace gates. He knew that his peers viewed him as a wastrel. Years ago he’d been called the greatest organist in Germany. In all of Europe. He’d been a composer of renown. His skills at improvisation had once been considered miraculous.

  Had once been. Years ago. The litany of his life. His real trouble was that he didn’t have a gift for pretending that idiots were smart. He didn’t defer to his intellectual inferiors, no matter what their place in society. Because of this, he’d been forced to move from position to position until finally he could obtain no position at all. He enjoyed teaching, but he could bring himself to teach only those who were worthy of his gifts, like Sara, so his students had been few.

  He’d lived to see his sanctimonious prig of a younger brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel, surpass him and be praised for compositions that were—Friedemann regretted to say it—trivial. Emanuel’s compositions were Berliner blue: they faded. Naturally Emanuel now held the prestigious position of director of music for the city of Hamburg. Meanwhile Friedemann’s music was criticized for being old-fashioned, more in his father’s tradition of counterpoint and fugue than in the modern galant style. Friedemann refused to create frivolous work, and if as a result his work was dismissed by frivolous men, so be i
t.

  How did he support himself? A host of ways. Upon his father’s death twenty-six years before, Friedemann had inherited many of his father’s musical manuscripts. He’d sold them one by one when he needed funds. Some he’d sold to Daniel Itzig. The Itzig family showed proper appreciation for the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Friedemann knew he was criticized by many among the local Besserwisser, know-it-alls that they indeed were, for his lax methods of preserving the manuscripts he still retained. Did they think he was a librarian? He wasn’t a librarian.

  His Sara. What would become of her, and of her talents, when she grew up? Fifteen was old enough for marriage, but thank God, he’d heard no talk of that for her. Not yet, at least. He hoped she wouldn’t be buried away in an arranged marriage followed by pregnancy after pregnancy. He prayed she wouldn’t suffer an early death in childbirth. She was skilled enough even now to perform in public. He wished for her this opportunity, scandalous as it was considered for a woman, especially of her high social position.

  These Jews, however . . . one never knew what they’d accomplish, or what rules they’d break. Perhaps Sara would manage somehow to devote her life to music.

  At this thought, he experienced an unfamiliar emotion: happiness. Whatever he’d done and not done with his many wasted years, through the jobs his father secured for him and which he could not keep, through his days and nights at the tavern—all this was redeemed, because it had led him here, to this music room, in a palace overlooking the Spree, where this lovely girl embodied the music that he himself had written for her.

  He felt tears in his eyes. Tears gliding down his old, wrinkled skin.

  She finished the piece flawlessly. She turned toward him. “Monsieur Bach?”

  He didn’t respond. He couldn’t.

  “Are you sad?” Concern filled her face. Concern for him. He couldn’t remember when last he’d seen concern for him on the face of anyone.

  “Yes,” he managed. “No,” he corrected himself. He wouldn’t admit to her the reason for his tears. He begged himself to stop these tears, but he could not. They were as disobedient as she. “Not sad. Merely overwhelmed by the beauty you have created.”

  Hearing this, Sara treated him to a long smile filled with mischief, innocence, and grace. “It’s because of you, Monsieur Bach, that I am able to create it.”

  How he loved her.

  Chapter 5

  On a Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a cold September rain, Susanna stood under her umbrella on Central Park West and read a sign posted outside the Church of the Holy Shepherd.

  * * *

  BACH VESPERS! TODAY AT 5 P.M.

  CANTATA 100, “WAS GOTT TUT, DAS IST WOHLGETAN”

  (“WHAT GOD DOES IS DONE WELL”), BY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH.

  PRE-SERVICE LECTURE BY PROFESSOR DANIEL ERHARDT OF GRANVILLE COLLEGE, 4 P.M.

  * * *

  Hanging above the sign, stretched between the arches of the church’s entryway, was a banner proclaiming BACH! The top of the banner curled over from the weight of the rain.

  The time was 4:15. Susanna was on her way to the subway station at Columbus Circle. She’d spent the afternoon at a celebration for a colleague who’d recently become engaged.

  She glanced at Central Park across the street. The leaves were deep green, without a hint of the autumn to come. The heavy rain made the air smell fertile. When she and Alan lived in this neighborhood, only several blocks away, sometimes on Sundays they’d take a morning run in the park. They’d stop for coffee at the model boat pond, where they’d watch the children (and many adults) sailing miniature radio-controlled boats. Afterward, they’d—enough. All that was over and done with.

  Susanna turned and walked up the church steps, closing her umbrella and shaking off the rain. She opened the heavy door and stepped into the shadows of the Church of the Holy Shepherd.

  An usher whispered a welcome and gave her a program. The center pews were full, so she found a place to sit on the side aisle. Among her New York friends, she didn’t know anyone who went to church or synagogue, except after they had children and even then, mostly on holidays, or if their children were preparing for a special ceremony. She had been raised as an atheist, and what went on in churches and synagogues was mostly a mystery to her.

  The Church of the Holy Shepherd was old-fashioned and lovely, with traditional Gothic arches and a vaulted ceiling. On this rainy day, the stained-glass windows were dark.

  Professor Daniel Erhardt stood in front of the pews, but not at the altar. Tall, with blond hair, he wore black jeans and a blue button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, without a tie.

  “In the years before writing this cantata,” Professor Erhardt was saying, “Bach, like many German composers, caught what scholarly types now call ‘Vivaldi Fever.’ It’s comparable to Disco Fever, or so I’m told by those who suffered from that disease in the 1970s.”

  Some of the parishioners laughed.

  “Vivaldi’s musical style revolutionized Bach’s work. Vivaldi alternated rhythmically driven ritornellos, performed by the entire ensemble, with so-called episodes, performed by a soloist or a subset of the group.”

  He spoke without notes, pacing from one side of the pews to the other.

  “Bach uses this form in Cantata 100—and not surprisingly, Bach being Bach, he does something unusual with it, thwarting our expectations when he reaches the moment at bar seventeen . . .”

  Susanna lost the thread of Professor Erhardt’s argument.

  “Let’s turn to how the chorale plays out in Lutheran theology. Luther, as you all know, constantly rails against works righteousness . . .”

  Susanna stopped even trying to follow what he was saying. When he finished his presentation, the audience applauded, and he walked to the back of the church.

  After a short break, the Vespers service began. A young man wearing a flowing white robe lit candles along the aisles and upon the altar. The candlelight created a soft glow in the sanctuary and illuminated the altar’s Art Nouveau–style mosaics of angels and apostles. The golden mosaics shimmered in the flickering candlelight. The minister and his assistants, also dressed in white robes, chanted as they walked down the center aisle.

  The service consisted of prayers and hymn singing, followed by more prayers. To avoid giving offense, Susanna paid attention to what the others were doing. She stood when everyone else stood, sat down when they did, and opened her hymnbook when necessary, following along. The minister was a big man with white hair and a heavily lined face. He looked sad and burdened, charged with duties that he was forever unable to fulfill.

  He took the podium and turned on the reading light. “Today, let us reflect upon Luke 10:27, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.”

  Susanna wondered, did people really believe that, as more than a theory or an ideal? Believe it enough to obey it? History revealed plenty of not loving one’s neighbor by God’s people. This was a Lutheran church, and Germany was primarily a Lutheran country. Because she didn’t practice a religion, Susanna perhaps naïvely assumed that people who did so were committed to obeying its tenets. But she’d never heard about German pastors instructing their parishioners to love their German Jewish neighbors as themselves and save them from the Nazis.

  “Let us ponder the crucial phrase, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. How do we go about doing this, in our daily lives?” the minister asked.

  To Susanna, the most important phrase surely had to be the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself.

  She looked around. Some parishioners gave the minister their full attention. Several kept their eyes closed and moved their lips in silent prayer. A few older men were slouched over. Some younger people checked their phones and sent text messages. Susanna’s wet feet began to feel cold. Her clothes had become damp through her trench coat, adding to the chill creeping over
her.

  With nothing else to do, she read the program notes, which included a biography of the lecturer, Daniel Erhardt. He’d attended Wisconsin Lutheran College and had a PhD from Yale. He’d taught at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and for the past ten years he’d been a professor at Granville College. He was the author of three books, published by university presses, on various aspects of Bach studies. He’d been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and at Vanderbilt. He did consulting work for universities and music groups.

  Perfect. A few weeks ago, when she brought Uncle Henry’s music manuscript back to New York, she’d taken it to her local Chase branch and rented a safe deposit box for it. In order to figure out what to do, she needed to learn more. She wondered whether, after so much time had passed, she could be accused of harboring stolen property. She’d reviewed websites that listed art and other objects lost or stolen during the war, but she’d found nothing like the music manuscript. She’d also searched the websites of Columbia and NYU, looking for scholars she might talk to, but no clear path had presented itself. Until now.

  When the minister concluded his sermon, singers and instrumentalists gathered in front of the pews. The players tuned their instruments. When they finished setting up, the conductor walked down the central aisle of the church. He tapped his baton against his music stand and raised his hands. The music began.

  And everything changed. The horn flourishes wove in and around the other instruments, in and around the voices, riveting her attention. No longer was she sitting with cold, wet feet and a soggy coat in a shadowed church. She felt an absolute alertness, as if this were the first time she’d been truly awake all day. She didn’t need to know what the cantata was about, to feel its transcendence. The music was both ethereal and breathtaking. Even though she wasn’t a believer, the music touched her spirit in a way that felt like an epiphany; at least that was the word that came into her mind to define it. It was like a spiritual wave passing over her.