On Palm Sunday, 1959, I finished reading The Education of Henry
Adams, a required Great Book my last seminar in the General Program
at Notre Dame, now called the Program of Liberal Studies. Adams
described his German education as a total failure except for his
"only clear gain -- his single step to a higher life." That single
step happened at a music hall "drinking beer, smoking German tobacco,
and looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played
dull music." One day he was surprised to notice that his mind
discovered beauty in that dull music: it was a movement of a Beethoven
Symphony. Adams declared, "Among the marvels of education, this
was the most marvelous."
My own music education had no such epiphany. I was raised on
good music. My father was a gifted, amateur pianist who did justice
to the Steinway 'L' that my mother's father had bought for her
back in 1927. That fine ebony grand graced my parent's living
room for 61 years until my mother's death in 2002. When I was
a youngster, my father played it often. One night I was awakened
by my father playing for company. I found the music to be beautiful
and choose to listen rather than fall back to sleep. I was only
6. Years later I learned that the piece my father performed that
night -- and many times thereafter -- was the celebrated Liebestraum
No. 3 by Franz Liszt.
I was 9 when I began formal piano lessons. At age 16 I played
Debussy's Clair de Lune in recital. I did not play it
particularly well but many of the younger students and their parents
applauded enthusiastically. My father said little. Unfortunately,
meager talent is intimidated by the stage. He recognized that
in me. In the privacy of our living room, with my impassive parents
and indifferent brother as audience, I played reasonably well.
More important for my informal music education, in my first 18
years I developed a genuine love for many of the great but diminutive
masterpieces for piano: the Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes, the
Brahms Waltzes, some of the Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, To
a Wild Rose by the great American composer, Edward McDowell
and many more.
I entered Notre Dame in 1955. When my father asked how I found
my first year of studies, I replied that it seemed like a fifth
year in high school. College Algebra was the toughest, English
Rhetoric and Composition the best, but getting from the Rock --
showered, dried and dressed -- to O'Shaughnessy on time after
a morning swim class was impossible.
At a mixer at LaFortune Student Center I met a Saint Mary's
girl. She was from the province of Quebec, and we began to date.
Saturday nights we'd go to a movie in South Bend. Curiously, it
was after those Saturday dates when my true, music education at
Notre Dame began.
The weekend curfew was midnight. At about 11:30, off the last
bus from South Bend, I kissed Gillianne goodnight, watched as
she ascended the steps of Holy Cross Hall, and then walked back
to Notre Dame. I'd stop at the Grotto for a brief prayer and then
climb the steps to the walkway that led behind and, literally,
through and beneath the rear ventilating shafts of the Main Building.
As I passed lighted windows along the north wall I heard music.
It was serious music: string quartets, violin sonatas, a solo
cello, perhaps. It didn't take me long to learn that this was
Father Hesburgh's office. He worked and read late into the night
and, as he did, he listened to classical music.
Often I paused there, just to the side of the window, eye on
my watch, hoping I could linger for a moment or two and enjoy
the unknown masterpieces that the president of the University
knew so well and was enjoying on the other side of that old, thick,
masonry bearing wall. He must have noticed our dark forms as we
hurried by. But did he ever know that one lowly freshman from
Cavanaugh Hall looked forward every Saturday to spending a few
secret moments just before midnight, hidden in shadow, eavesdropping
on the glorious music this great priest loved?
Early my freshman year I discovered that WSND had a classical
music program weekday mornings. I had a break in my classes and
went back to Cavanaugh to listen. The program's theme music was
unlike any I had ever heard: slow, an adagio, with a dreamlike
melody of shimmering beauty. How I came to know that it was the
third movement of Mahler's great Fourth Symphony I haven't
the faintest idea. Some time later, when I purchased the LP vinyl
recording played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I fell in
love with the entire piece and love it to this day.
I first met Mozart in an alcove, still early my freshman year
when I was 18 and he an ever-young 199. A student from Taiwan
introduced us or, more precisely, he presented Herr Mozart on
an old mahogany grand that resided on the second floor parquet
of LaFortune. It had an undercarriage with wheels so it could
easily be rolled around that large ballroom. When there was no
formal function it was parked in the northwest alcove where anyone
could sit down and have a go at it. A friend and I were walking
back to Cavanaugh, an all-freshmen hall then, after dinner at
the South Dining hall, but I wanted to stop at LaFortune to play
the piano. As we entered the front door we heard the old piano
singing a beautiful, poetic song set against a tense, tremulous
bass. What music is that? I wondered. We bounded up the stairs
and could hardly find the face of the small figure behind the
music rack. We approached and he stopped playing. I said something
like, "That was great." He smiled. This Chinese student told us
that when he was a little boy, a Christian missionary had passed
through Formosa, as Taiwan was then called, and taught him to
play the piano. She must have lingered awhile, I thought, because
this pleasant chap played very well indeed. When I asked what
it was, he showed me the distinctive, yellow, front cover of the
well-worn Schirmer score: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 17 in
G major, K-453. He had brought it with him from Formosa.
Mozart! I never liked Mozart. But now I felt impelled to get
to know him better. I worked numerically up and down from the
Seventeenth. Each new Mozart piano concerto amazed me. The great
British musicologist, Sir Donald Tovey said of the Mozart 9th
Piano Concerto that it was the first unequivocal masterpiece
in that genre. Mozart had literally invented the modern piano
concerto at the age of 21.
That first fall semester I made the Glee Club as a bass. I met
tenors and baritones as well as basses. Blend those voices together
and it was another new and wonderful revelation. Our director
was Dean Pedtke: a true gentleman, kind but rigorous. He taught
us -- wonder of wonders -- to sing in four-part harmony. What
a joy that was! We learned the triumphant chorus All Hail the
Guardian of Brabant from Wagner's Lohengrin -- my first
encounter with Wagner -- and the brilliantly clever Conspirators
Chorus from Verdi's Rigoletto: Zitti, ziti moviamo a
vendetta:
Hush come quickly, revenge now our father,
Take his daughter away in the night.
It was to be sung softly, with staccato accents and dramatic
crescendos. I loved singing it. In the drama, the kidnappers believe
Gilda to be Rigoletto's mistress, but for the sake of our innocence
the Dean had us sing "daughter."
In the early spring of my freshman year, 1956, I attended a South
Bend Symphony Orchestra concert at the Navy Drill Hall. It sat
on land that stretched almost to the present site of the Hesburgh
Library. Back then it served multiple functions: a drill hall
for the ROTC programs, a ballroom for large dances and proms and,
on occasion, a concert hall for the South Bend Orchestra. It was
cavernous with a clear-span, arched roof resembling a high-class
Quonset hut. On that Sunday afternoon, though, it became a palace
of high culture. It was the first symphony concert I ever attended,
and it remains an indelible memory. The stage was at the east
end of the vast hall. Perhaps a thousand folding chairs were set
up in straight and unvarying rows, like a battalion ready to parade.
I sat near the middle and eagerly awaited this new experience.
The program began with Grieg's Holberg Suite, a delightful
piece whose melodies charmed me. Next was Edward Lalo's Symphonie
Espagnol for solo violin and orchestra. The program closed
with Beethoven's magnificent Seventh Symphony. A conversion
occurred on that spring afternoon; I became a life-long symphony
concertgoer. The love that I have for the great orchestral works
played by large, modern symphony orchestras began, unforgettably,
in the now-defunct, nondescript Navy Drill Hall.
My sophomore year I roomed in Morrissey with a boy from Buffalo
who liked music. He just didn't like any music written before
about 1940. Father Thomas Engleton, our second floor rector, loved
classical music, just about everything from Bach to Shostakovich.
He had a fine stereo in his room, and occasionally he'd invite
me in to listen to something. In those days I was fond of Rachmaninoff's
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He told me there was
a new recording of it by the American pianist, Leon Fleischer.
A few days later I went into South Bend and bought it. Father
Engleton listened to the piece impassively. At its conclusion,
he flipped the record over and said, "Now I want you to listen
to this!" It was a piece for piano and orchestra unknown to me:
The Symphonic Variations by César Franck. Not
terribly impressed, I returned to my own room and offered to play
a snippet of the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody for my roommate,
the famous 18th Variation. He would have none of it. His ears
and mind were sealed shut against any exposure to classical music
beyond what he had to sing in the Glee Club.
As the months passed that second year at Notre Dame, I began
to listen more and more to the Franck Symphonic Variations,
which I eventually came to regard as highly superior to the Rachmaninoff
Rhapsody. It delights me to this day. Therein lies a
simple lesson: as in everything in this life -- whether its music,
wine, novels or Notre Dame football teams -- some prove, with
time, better than others.
In my junior year -- 1957, '58 -- everything was just about
right. Juniors feel comfortable at the University; they know the
ropes. I lived in Sorin Hall with a friend from Baltimore, a classmate
in the General Program. Our second-floor room had a fine view
of the Dome and Sacred Heart Basilica. I was inching towards my
21st birthday and felt amazingly content to be at Notre Dame,
which I loved now passionately. The only bump in my road was Catesby
Taliaferro's Rational Mechanics course, a five-credit course that
traced the development of celestial and terrestrial mechanics
from Ptolemy to Einstein.
Once Dr. Taliaferro commented to me that he thought Berlioz
a fine composer, much underrated. I knew nothing then of Berlioz's
music but at home at Christmas I discovered a record my father
had bought of favorite pieces by Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic.
On it were three excerpts from Berlioz's opera Romeo and Juliet.
I liked them. I found his Romeo and Juliet superior to
the Romeo and Juliet Fantasia that Tchaikovsky had composed.
Then I discovered another composer's vision of Romeo and Juliet.
It was Prokofiev's brilliant score that finally and completely
satisfied my understanding of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.
Prokofiev captures the hatred between the Capulets and the Montagues
with a relentless musical force that overwhelms the human heart's
desire for peace and understanding, and he laments over the young
lover's love with melodies that transcend ephemeral romantic bliss
with a shadowy foreboding of doom that intensifies the passion
of both body and soul.
In March, 1958 the Julliard String Quartet came to Washington
Hall. With several friends from Sorin I attended my first chamber
music recital. The blending of the four string voices was analogous
to the four-part harmony of the Glee Club; that's easy enough
to grasp but the music -- no simple, pleasant tunes -- demanded
total attention. I didn't recognize then the beauty that I hear
now, but as the years passed I grew to like chamber music more
and more. The important thing was that my interest in chamber
music, just like in symphonic music, was kindled at Notre Dame.
During the second half of the program, my mind began to wander.
On the back of my plain white paper program I sketched the grouping
of the formally attired musicians. It was an amateurish effort
but sufficiently well done that a young woman seated behind me
tapped my shoulder at the end of the concert and asked if she
could have it. I gave it to her cheerfully.
On Sunday, March 23, I walked over to Saint Mary's new Moreau
Hall to hear the South Bend Symphony. I asked some friends to
join me, but no one did. Gilliane had left at the end of the first
semester of our sophomore year. It was bittersweet to walk that
gray, romantic road knowing she was gone. The concert opened with
the Egmont Overture by Beethoven and closed with the
Piano Concerto in A Minor by Robert Schumann. The soloist
was the American pianist, William Doppmann, only 24 years old
but he looked, in his white tie and black tails, mature and distinguished.
I wrote my father that he should add that piece to his record
collection. At home, in June, I found the recording by Artur Rubinstein.
The Schumann Concerto is one of those sublime works I
have never tired of.
My senior year I lived in Alumni, in a single sandwiched between
a history major who seemed tolerant of all music and a commerce
guy who was as passionate about rock and roll as I was about classical.
He had a television and every afternoon he watched Dick Clark's
American Bandstand. He was a considerate guy, though,
because if he was playing the music a little loud I'd ask him
to turn it down and he always did. I did the same for him.
My parents gave me a handsome, wood-cased AM-FM
table radio the Christmas of my junior year. I didn't take it
to Sorin but I did bring it to Alumni. When I turned the FM on
I got nothing. Ninety miles west were several Chicago classical
music stations, but there wasn't a single 19th century note to
be heard. On the back of the radio were two leads for an external
antenna. Maybe, I thought, if I had an antenna I could corral
those Chicago stations into my room.
In South Bend I found a television rabbit ears
antenna at a second-hand shop. I connected it to my radio, turned
it on, and heard some faint noises that I hadn't heard without
the antenna. Clearly, my only chance at having the classics in
my room would be to mount this thing high up, outside and pointing
towards Chicago.
I then began a careful observation of Alumni Hall.
On the north roof there was a dormer directly above the room across
the hall from me. The roof was steeply sloped and made of slate
tiles. My room was the second door from the chapel in the northwest
corner of the building. The attic stairs were at the far southeast
corner. I checked every day for a week, and one day the door to
the stairs was open. I entered the attic expecting to find a maintenance
man but there was no one. I hurried toward the dormer on the north
roof; cranked the window open and looked down at the passing students.
A splendid view of the Dome and Sacred Heart's lovely steeple
rose above the yellowing trees. I would be able to mount my antenna
outside, but how, I wondered, could the antenna be anchored? Wind
at that height would be fierce.
At a television store downtown I purchased 100
feet of antenna cable and a small spool of galvanized wire. Back
at Alumni, the wire in my pocket, the antenna and cable under
my London Fog, up I went. I stabilized the antenna by tying two
pieces of wire back to brackets on opposite sides of the window
frame. Then I pointed the slender, telescoping, metal ears toward
the Windy City. Next I attached the cable to the leads on the
antenna. I buried the cable in the frothy insulation above the
third floor ceiling, passed it below the catwalk, beneath more
insulation, up to the opposite dormer and then dropped about 50
feet of cable over the sill of the casement and down the outside
of the building to the window of my room. With my fingernail scissors
I cut the rubber insulation off the low voltage wires and curled
them around the antenna leads on the back of my radio. I tightened
the small, knurled nuts, pushed the dresser against the wall and
turned on the radio. Nothing but a low hum. I turned the dial
slowly -- searching -- and then it was there.
I can't recall now the first music heard, but my
little antenna, high up on the roof of Alumni, was catching those
magical beams streaming out from Chicago, high above the steel
mills and refineries of Gary, racing above the toll road and the
Indiana landscape, ever weakening as they neared Notre Dame but
still strong enough that they could be caught and amplified and
fill my little room with the music I yearned to know.
In February -- it was now 1959 -- Andres Segovia
visited Washington Hall. I went early with a group of friends
to get seats close to the stage. When Mr. Segovia appeared, applause
acknowledged his reputation as the world's greatest classical
guitarist. He took his chair at center stage and waited until
every distracting cough and stirring had ceased, waited until
there was almost perfect silence in the antique auditorium. Then
he began to play. The sounds that he drew forth from the six strings
were haunting. He played transcriptions of keyboard works by Bach,
Scarlatti and Albeniz. Pieces that were written for the broad
range of the piano were condensed into the range of the guitar.
But nothing of the melodies, harmonies and counterpoints was lost;
all of the profound beauty was preserved and presented. It was
an unforgettable experience and I have loved the classical guitar
ever since.
My last spring at Notre Dame was idyllic. The weather
was sparkling and warm, the campus lush with life. Near the Main
Building I snipped a lilac blossom every other day and put it
on my desk just to have that fragrance near. Classes weren't tough
anymore. All my friends and I were going to graduate on time.
Nothing seemed tough so long as I didn't think about my future.
After the day's last class we'd hike south several blocks to that
old pizza place on Notre Dame Avenue. We ate pizza, drank cold
beer, talked and occasionally glanced at the Cubs' game on television.
Then we'd stroll back to campus. We'd have our supper, as late
as we could, and then stroll over to Saint Mary's Lake to pester
the swans and watch the sun slip behind the trees along the far
shore. What a brief, sweet month that last May was! Alone in my
room I had the classics from Chicago to accompany me as I read
the last required text of the last seminar and completed my prosaic
senior thesis, my final paper. On June 7, 1959, we graduated.
Father Hesburgh gave me my diploma. It was the only time I ever
shook his hand, the only time I ever thanked him. Within two hours
I was driving away from Notre Dame with my parents just as I had
driven with them towards Notre Dame four years earlier.
I had earned a degree in Liberal Arts from the
University of Notre Dame, which I have always treasured for the
education, experiences and persons that it represents. I also
had a music education that Notre Dame proffered to all, but few
seized. Both were starting points for a lifetime of learning.
Victor Hugo wrote, "Music expresses that which cannot be said
and on which it is impossible to be silent." At Notre Dame I learned
that lovely, ineffable language.
* * *
(June 2004)
