The Soloist (14 page)

“To sum up,” Ms. Doppelt announced, “evidence will show that Mr. Weber suffers from chronic schizophrenia, a severe mental illness.” She looked at each one of us, trying to make personal contact with individual members of the jury. I respected her effort; I could tell she was trying her best to defend her client, but her technique was rough around the edges. Looking at us the way she did was a little off-putting; it was as if she assumed we wouldn’t pay attention unless she kept a close eye on us. Her youthfulness when compared with the average age of the jurors also made this attitude seem awkward.

“The extreme stress of the meditation retreat, with its brutal discipline and humiliating rituals, and the confusing moral environment favored by the Zen religion, aggravated Mr. Weber’s preexisting mental illness and—to put it bluntly—drove him out of his mind. He became utterly disoriented and experienced his first acute psychotic episode. He lost the ability to distinguish between symbolic gestures and real ones, and killed a man thinking that in fact he was only answering a question. An expert witness in the field of psychiatry will testify that my client had no proper understanding
of what he was doing at the time, and still does not. You couldn’t find a better illustration of the legal definition of insanity.”

Ms. Doppelt walked purposefully back to her desk, arranged some papers on it and sat down. In general, I found that I agreed with what she was saying, but didn’t like the way she said it. I felt myself resisting her arguments for the same reason that I don’t like buying from aggressive salesmen. I don’t like being talked into things by ungraceful people.

The prosecutor, Mr. Graham, couldn’t have been more unlike her. Standing up behind his desk and smiling gently—he didn’t need to walk over and stand right in front of us—he said in his pleasing drawl, “I guess the only thing I can say at this point is that the better you understand the legal concept of insanity, the guiltier Philip Weber seems. If he’s going to be acquitted, Mr. Weber has to prove that because of a mental disease or defect he had no idea what he was doing when he killed his teacher. The evidence will show, though, that Philip Weber
did
know what he was doing. So,” he said, patting his belly with his hand, “I move we have lunch as soon as possible so our stomachs don’t drown out the testimony.”

Judge Davis appeared pleased by the prosecutor’s brief statement. The corners of his mouth rose up into not quite a smile, but high enough so that for the first time he no longer appeared to have just swallowed a bad piece of fish. He seconded the prosecutor’s motion and adjourned the court until two o’clock. I thought I saw another scowl pass over Ms. Doppelt’s face; I’m sure she didn’t enjoy seeing the kind of old-boy rapport the prosecutor and the judge had
with each other. At that moment I felt a bit sorry for her, surrounded by her piles of notes and having to defend this unpleasant, destructive young man. Unlike Mr. Graham, she had no charm at all. I made a mental note to myself to try, out of fairness, not to hold it against her.

I asked Maria-Teresa to join me for lunch again, but she had already made plans to eat with Jesusita and Rose. I found a little sandwich shop nearby and ate at the counter, something I hadn’t done for a long time. My debate with Mrs. Friedman was still on my mind.

Von Kempen and Casals were the two great cellists of their generation. During the war, Casals, who was Catalonian, fled to southern France, where he was frequently harassed by the Nazis. For a while no one had any news of him and a rumor spread that he had been killed for refusing to go to Germany to play for Hitler. He had in fact refused just such an invitation, and was nearly arrested, but his life was spared by a German officer who apparently was moved by his integrity. Von Kempen was distantly related to the Bavarian royal family, and since the early 1920s had been the director of the Munich symphony orchestra. He loathed the Nazis, and helped several Jewish members of the symphony escape to France and Switzerland, but felt he himself had to stay behind with the orchestra. “Munich was my home,” he once wrote me, “and the symphony was my life. That orchestra had been an important part of the German musical tradition for over
two hundred years—how could I leave it to those degenerates? They had to fall—they were doomed, those men. No regime like that could last, I truly believed in my heart. I felt an obligation to see the orchestra through those dark times.”

Von Kempen’s prediction about the Nazis proved correct, but after the war he, along with several other prominent German conductors and musicians, was accused of being sympathetic to the Nazis. Some of these men, like von Karajan, tried to continue performing internationally after the war but were booed and in some cases banned on stages around the world, including the United States. Von Kempen was a deeply sensitive man, and could not bear the thought of being the catalyst of such bitterness, so he resigned from the symphony in 1946 and never again gave a public concert as a cellist. He chose Ederstausee as his place of retirement and thereafter practiced for his own enjoyment and taught quietly at home.

For a while, talented cellists quietly slipped in and out of Ederstausee to study with him, but their numbers soon dwindled. His voluntary withdrawal from the stage, which he had intended as a gesture of respect toward those who had suffered because of German nationalism, came to be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Also, he suffered by comparison with Casals, who had vehemently resisted fascism from the very beginning and who also silenced his cello after the war, but for different reasons: Casals announced that he would not perform on stage again until Franco was ousted from Spain. As for von Kempen, when I first met him in 1965, he had fallen into almost complete obscurity, and I was the first significant student he’d had in thirteen years.

Ironically, it was Casals’s idea to send me to him. Like every other young cellist, I had hoped to study with Casals,
but he was busy with his many humanitarian projects and unwilling to take on someone as young as I was. He agreed to hear me play when I was eleven, however, so my mother and I flew down to Puerto Rico, where he spent the winters toward the end of his life. Of course, Mother and I hoped that he would change his mind.

After I played for him he said to my mother in his delightful accent, “Take your dear boy to Kassel, madam. Have him play for von Kempen. You won’t regret it.”

My mother, who knew all about the collaborator controversy, was shocked. She made a long protest, but Casals, after waiting politely for her to finish, argued that it would be an ideal arrangement. “Johannes von Kempen is one of the greatest cellists who ever lived,” the maestro said, “and he has been thrown away like refuse, another casualty of the Nazi madness. Whether you blame him or not, he has paid a dear price. I can hear in your son’s playing a closeness to von Kempen already; musically, he would be the right choice as teacher. Furthermore, he could devote himself entirely to your son. It would be the last great gesture of his life—especially considering your heritage. Trust me, it is an opportunity too precious to ignore.”

One of many remarkable things about Casals was that he seemed incapable of misjudging situations, musical, political or otherwise. Von Kempen even believed that Casals possessed the ability to see into the future. True or not, Casals’s hunch that the old German and I would make a good combination proved true.

When Mother and I visited von Kempen the first time in Ederstausee, we tried ringing the doorbell to his house but it didn’t work. We had to pound several times on the door before getting the attention of Frau Schmidt, his severe-looking
housekeeper, who led us up a flimsy staircase to Herr Professor’s study. Von Kempen sat slumped on a partially collapsed sofa in a dark room. He wore a baggy, dark wool suit and old but recently polished shoes. My mother squeezed my hand and gestured with her eyes for me to look upward; there were spiderwebs all over the ceiling. The old man must have noticed where we were looking because he hastened to explain that the older he got, the more he hated to kill any living creature or destroy its home, so he had asked the housekeeper to leave the webs alone. Frau Schmidt shook her head in dismay and left us.

Von Kempen stood painfully to greet us, kissing my mother’s hand, then sank back onto the sofa. He spoke only German, but since my parents frequently spoke it at home, I was able to understand most of what he said. He asked me what I would like to play for him, but he had to repeat himself several times; I could barely understand his Bavarian accent, and also his speech contained the sort of elevated, archaic expressions that one finds today only in Thomas Mann novels. I chose the Bach suite in C minor.

Bach, there can be no doubt, brought classical music to perfection. He expressed his musical ideas with devastating precision and understatement. Each piece is like a finely cut diamond: clear, simple and almost mathematical in appearance, but underneath the surface what complexity and structural integrity! The possibilities for interpretation are limitless; just as there are countless ways to project light through a diamond, no two performances of Bach can be the same because each musician’s unique personality has its own spectrum of feelings that can be conveyed freely through Bach’s inventions. If two very different performers play the same Liszt piece, for example, you will still hear primarily
Liszt. But Bach’s musical personality was so expansive, so beautifully transparent, that when you interpret him, his ideas become your ideas, and you feel that he must have known you to have written a piece so close to your own heart.

As I played, the old German master slowly straightened up in his sofa. By the end of the suite he sat ramrod straight, like a Prussian general, his face rigid with concentration. At last he stood up and walked over to my mother.
“Meine liebe Frau Sundheimer,”
he said, bowing impeccably and kissing her hand out of joy and gratitude. Then he kissed mine.

His formality embarrassed me. He asked to speak to my mother privately and had Frau Schmidt take me for a stroll in the back garden. I resented the fact that I wasn’t part of the negotiations. Later that afternoon, when Mother and I returned to our little pension in town, I told her I didn’t want to be “that old German guy’s” student. She asked me to meet with him once more before making a decision.

The next day we went to his house, and instead of asking me to play right away, von Kempen invited us to join him for a picnic. Frau Schmidt drove us, with my cello in the expansive trunk, to an ancient little church in Kassel about twenty miles away, where under a sprawling elm tree we had a delicious basket lunch of potato dumplings and boiled sandwich meats. Then we went into the church. He told me that Father Bach himself had visited this very church to test their new organ. A young rector greeted us and led us to the organ, where von Kempen sat down and played a Bach cantata. He gestured for me to sit next to him on the bench.

When he had finished playing, von Kempen said, “Father Bach sat in this very spot more than two hundred years ago. The original organ is gone, but the echoes of his playing are captured in these walls, these pews, these window panes. His
spirit lives in this building.” He paused to look at me, and held me under his spell for a few long seconds. “Would you like to play your cello now, Herr Sundheimer?”

I felt intoxicated. I took my instrument out of its case and played my heart out. The church had marvelous acoustics; the whole building seemed to have become a giant cello, and I was sitting inside it, feeling it vibrate all around me. It excited me beyond description to think that Bach had sat in this very room, had breathed the same air, and here I was, breathing life into the voices he heard in his mind, those perfect voices. When I finished, von Kempen bowed deeply to me and kissed my hand again. This time I didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

The first witness for the defense was a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeremy Libertson. He must have been in his late thirties, but looked much younger. He had thin blond hair, a neatly trimmed beard and an angelic face. If it weren’t for his briefcase and professional-looking glasses I would have mistaken him for a college student. He even wore a collegiate-looking sport jacket over his narrow shoulders. He was a research psychiatrist at the Pasadena Neurological Institute, and bristled with Ivy League credentials. Like me, he had apparently been something of a Wunderkind; he had finished medical school when he was only twenty years old. After a lengthy recitation of his qualifications, he told us that he specialized in the study and treatment of schizophrenia.