Musical Madeleine

A few weeks ago my elder daughter had her sixteenth birthday.

Sweet.

But bittersweet, too.

On that day seven years ago – on her ninth birthday – my mother (her grandmother) died.

This year we did not celebrate her birthday on the proper day. Why? Her youth orchestra was performing a concert. A piano virtuoso from Russia had been flown in. The piece to be played was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

“You’re going to like it, Daddy,” she said after emerging from the final rehearsal that morning. I was surprised, for she never hypes any of her performances. Usually, you can’t get even the shadow of a sneak preview.

So as I took my seat in the auditorium and the birthday girl took hers onstage, I was prepared to be transported.

And I was. Within the first few measures – the spectacular sprint of a beginning to the concerto – I was in Montreal, in the early 1960s. I was sitting in my shorts, playing with a red firetruck. I was the lone child in the house, as my older brothers now went to school. On the other side of room, standing at the ironing board, my mother, her coal-black hair swaying a little as she hummed along to Rachmaninoff.

The LP was Romantic Piano Concertos. She did housework to the strains of such pieces as Variations on a Theme by Paganini, as I studied and restudied the album cover on the floor, in my dad’s armchair, on the sofa (or chesterfield, as they called it). Slashing, vertical, black and white photographs of pianists in ecstasy.

The piece ended. My mother came back to herself, smiled at me from across the room, her lipstick scarlet.

I was on my feet, applauding my daughter.

Thank you, Sergei.