Johannes Changes Trains

Johannes Brahms in 1853. Public domain photograph from the Wikipedia Commons.

In the dream I was standing in a beautiful, high-ceilinged, book-lined private salon the size and shape of Grand Central Station’s Campbell Apartment. In the middle of the room sat a gleaming grand piano. Somehow I intuited that the sound filtering through the thick stone wall was that of a passenger train pulling into the Wien Nordbahnhof.

In waking life I had spent the previous weeks subsuming my own creative voice, consciously giving over to the unambiguous genius of Johannes Brahms’ musical mind in order to undertake for conductor Alexander Platt a new orchestration for his orchestra of Brahms’ great Opus 34, the final iteration of which (after the original quartet version had been withdrawn and turned first into a sonata for two pianos before being recast a second time for piano quintet) was premiered in 1866.

I reached down to the keyboard and tentatively picked out DO FA SOL LA-flat FA RE-flat FA DO. As though in response, through the door strode a handsome man of thirty-three with straight, shoulder length blond hair combed straight back from his high forehead, exposing steep widow’s peaks.

“I’m on my way to Leipzig,” he said, running his hand through his hair as he barreled down on me. His eyes were a brilliant aquamarine. “I’m sorry!” I said, reflexively snatching my hand away from the keyboard and, to cover the movement, extending it out toward him. He shifted his portfolio from one hand to the other. The sound of a train leaving the station. “Mein Gott, ich brauche ein Bier!” he laughed, gripping my hand.

“Am I in your head; or, are you in mine?” I asked, pleasantly. “Yes,” he laughed, “why else would I be here? You are orchestrating my opus 34, yes? We play it in Leipzig tomorrow at the conservatory. How is it coming along?”

It’s a balancing act, I thought: you push the dissonant passing tones in the winds (as in bars 42-55 of the second movement) and it sounds like Mahler; you make the arpeggiated passagework in the strings too repetitive (and leave out the two-against-three that gives us a proper romantic sturm und drang rhythmic churn, say in the coda of the first movement) and it sounds like Harmonielehre; alternate instrumental choirs of the orchestra without enough timbral connective tissue and it sounds like Stravinsky; populate the lower octaves and Mussorgsky comes to mind.

“It sounds like it is you who could use a drink,” he mused. “I don’t drink anymore,” I sighed. “That’s good. It will make you fat,” he observed. But I was on a roll: add bass drum (as in bars 392-3 of the fourth movement) and you’ve got the Verdi Requiem. And then there is Death and the Maiden lurking in there, waiting to burst out—but you kept that under control, didn’t you? “It was hard to resist,” he admitted.

I impulsively picked out FA FA SOL-flat, the first three notes of the visionary “Poco sostenuto” opening of the final movement. “What is that?” I asked, excitement making me brash. “Is that some sort of ‘muss es sein?’ or something? Which century are you in there? What’s going on? It all makes sense contrapuntally—Dr. Lallerstedt would approve—but it’s Late Beethoven, or is it the beginning of Haydn’s Creation, a lucid couple of bars of Gesualdo, or a transitional passage in Mozart? The harmonies don’t add up: you’re a madman, a seer there; it’s like you’re looking into the future. It’s like you’re between trains: one’s headed backwards and the other forward; another keeps you here in Vienna and you end up maxing out with Gurrelieder!”

“Ahem,” he said, pulling out a few pages of manuscript from his portfolio and spreading them on the broad expanse of the closed piano lid in a surprisingly graceful, balletic manner. I’m working on a requiem of my own right now, which I’d like to show you. And don’t mention Gurrelieder: I can’t imagine what Arnold was thinking adding xylophone to my opus 25 when he orchestrated it. You’re not thinking of pulling any specious batshit moments like that, are you?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t look at the sketches of your Deutsches Requiem right now—I simply can’t bear it,” I said. I can’t without thinking of Borges and his short story, of how the magnificent chain of secondary dominants triggering a fall one to the next like dominos in the last movement that once thrilled me also make me think now of how Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination triggered the fall of dominos that led to the Great War in 1914, and how my country played geopolitical post-colonial dominos in Southeast Asia when we took the French government’s place at the table after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. I just don’t seem to be able to escape the weight of history.

“That history is not in my head,” said Brahms, quickly retrieving the manuscript pages and putting them back into the portfolio. “None of that is in my head. You’ve brought all of that here with you. I can hear my train pulling into the station. I’ve got to go.” Brahms turned away and began walking briskly to the door.  “Did you know how dangerous the political situation already was when you wrote this Piano Quintet of yours?” I asked his back. “In only thirty years, your friend Dvořák will pen his glorious New World Symphony, but, at the moment we Americans were in the middle of our Civil War, inventing faster and bloodier ways of killing more people than ever before.”

He stopped, one hand outstretched, holding the door open. I heard “Fahrkarte, bitte!” from outside. “How close are you to having the orchestration finished?” he asked, not looking at me. “I have it in my head,” I answered. “I finish tomorrow.” His arm dropped to his side as he turned to me. From across the room, quietly, he asked, “Do you remember the day thirty years or so ago when a colleague who had written another octatonic orchestra piece asked you why the chords “glowed” in your orchestral music when theirs didn’t and you said it was because all you have to do is look at Brahms to see that a D-sharp is sharper than an E-flat?”

“Yes, maestro,” I said. He shook his head. “That wasn’t kind, was it?” A beat. “No, it wasn’t,” I answered quietly. Another beat. The train for Leipzig was being called. “Go home,” he said. “You are no longer welcome here.” Shostakovich silence after the door closed behind him. I had never had the chance to thank him for the honor, to express my respect. And then I woke up.

Farewell to Little Pete's

Little Pete's Restaurant. Cash only. A Philadelphia treasure, in October 2014. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

Closure #1: OCTOBER 2014

This is a piece about Closure and the closure of Little Pete's, a belovéd greasy spoon across the street from the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. A wrecking ball is set to fly through Little Pete’s. Progress commands that a 300-room hotel must take the place of the parking ramp at 219 South 17th Street in whose corner nestles one of Center City Philadelphia’s treasures. We’re not talking Bookbinder’s (which is now, ignominiously, an Applebee's), chock full of tourists and overpriced, or the smattering of trendy boutique restaurants that surround Rittenhouse Square like hipsters lounging on the margins of a poetry reading. We’re talking about a Genuine 24-Hour Greasy Spoon, Home to Collars Both White and Blue, an Insomniac’s Oasis in the Night, a Caffeine Addict’s Last Resort, a Trusted Purveyor of that mysterious mélange of grill top odds-and-ends, Scrapple. We’re talking about Little Pete’s, for Pete’s sake. I'm afraid that the news is grim.

I’ll forever associate Little Pete’s with my youth, not just as a composer coming into his own, but also as a person whose world was opening up in one Big Bang. My life as it was then, almost impossibly full, was discussed, vivisected, celebrated, dreaded, and mourned at Little Pete’s.

Autumn 1981. This Wisconsin Boy, a tender nineteen years old, had only just moved to Philadelphia. The Grace of Whomever had handed me a lottery ticket in the form of an invitation to study at the legendary, preposterously intimidating Curtis Institute of Music. I was a Brooks Brothers shirt and blue jeans sort of guy. I grooved to Stockhausen more than Rorem, Berio more than Barber, and Bernstein even more than the Beatles. 

Little Pete’s was the setting for countless post-lesson symposia. During my lessons, my mentor Ned Rorem casually dropped priceless aperçu and dry, acerbic criticisms while slashing through my compositions, his pencil waving this way and that like a rapier. Afterwards, a bit shell-shocked by the enormity of Ned’s self-assurance, my best friend, and fellow Rorem pupil Norman Stumpf, and I would head for Little Pete’s, where we would debrief. “Did he tell you that you succeeded in being boring?” I asked Norman, over Pete’s wretched, perennially burnt Joe, one afternoon. “Not this time,” Norman replied. “But he told me that William Flanagan wrote my song better in the late 50s.” “Who was he?” I asked. “That’s what I said,” replied Norman. I already knew what Ned’s answer had been: find out.

I didn’t yet have a telephone in my apartment. I’d use the payphone in Little Pete’s to call home for reports of my mother’s gradual submission to cancer back in Wisconsin, and then drink with a cellist friend until four or five in the morning, attempting to slake the thirst for silence in my head. I cannot recall how many dawns I greeted, my body still young enough to absorb the alcoholic gut punches dealt it during the previous hours, doing my counterpoint exercises at Pete’s lime green counter, “scrambled eggs and“ a few inches away, untouched, the dread of disappointing Ford Lallerstedt in class a few hours later by presenting mediocre work pulling me back from the edge.

I celebrated my first critical triumph as a composer at Little Pete’s; I also received my most gratuitous wing clipping by a music critic there. In 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s august music critic, Daniel Webster gave my string orchestra work, Prayer for Peace, which William Smith had just premièred with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a glowing review in the paper. I’ll never forget my brother Kevin, who had come to town for the performance, spreading the newspaper on the table between us, skimming it before reading it to me, so that, if necessary, he could spare me the worst bits. Seventeen years later—a lifetime, really—my alma matercommissioned a piece to celebrate its 75th anniversary called Much Ado. Made careless by the standing ovation the piece had received the night before, I spread the Inquirer out on a table at Pete’s expecting at least a casual nod from the critic. Instead, my frothy showpiece was dealt a pasting. Composers do read reviews. Well, I used to—until that day, anyway.

I courted my girlfriend for months by walking her each day from Curtis to her train at Suburban Station. The day that she allowed me to carry her violin for her was the equivalent of moving from “vous” to “tu.” Afterwards, a little giddy, downcast, yet hopeful — the way you can be when you are in your early ‘20s and in love and have time and health and just enough money to get by, I bought the Daily News and the New York Times and worked my way through them at Pete’s until I felt the urge to compose percolate up within me like a welcome fever. Then, a man with a mission, I’d head for a practice room at Curtis and spread notes on music paper like jam on bread. God, that felt good. In time, the love affair sputtered. Music did not.

This morning, an old school chum posted the news on Facebook that Pete’s shall soon be no more. The comments following her post were lovely, and they’re still coming in. I shouldn’t be amazed by how much the place meant to all of us. 

No more sentimental reveries over crab cake sandwiches when I return to Philadelphia for the occasional master class, performance, or lecture. One less skein of memory holding me to one of the few places on the planet, and one of the few times, when I was able to summon both the elegia of James Agee and the earnest and callow drive of Thomas Wolfe. “Aw,” a Philadelphia-based friend told me on the phone just now when I called him to confirm the news, “just drive on, old friend. It was inevitable. It had to happen. And it all began the day that they let people throw up buildings taller than William Penn’s hat.”

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At "Little Pete's" on 27 February 2017. The restaurant got a reprieve, and is now scheduled to close in May 2017. (Photo by Neil Erickson)

Closure #2: February 2017

Fully three years after I first contributed the article above to the Huffington Post, still accepting "cash only," the diner holds on. The final closing date has been officially announced and accepted by management, and a steady stream of customers has been coming in to say goodbye for months, said the owner when I stopped in this morning.

Enough time has passed that the Warwick Hotel across the street has passed back into private hands and out of the clutches of the chain that had demolished its once elegant lobby and replaced it with a hideous, Euro-trashy, neon-blue fishtank affair.

My wife and I had checked into the Warwick the day before, our two sons in tow. I'd returned to Philly to hear a performance by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia—Michael Ludwig had given a lovely account of the violin concerto I'd written for him a few years earlier. After Michael's vivid, glowing performance of my concerto with Dirk Brossé and the orchestra, I'd dined with my belovéd writing mentor (whom I'd first met as a student at Curtis in 1982) Emily Wallace and her husband Gregory and discussed my memoirs; I'd enjoyed a quick brunch with my good buddy, rising composer and Curtis faculty member David Ludwig, at Pete's the next morning.  I'd even taken a moment to stretch my legs out before me in a favorite chair in the Common Room at Curtis for a few moments before walking to Little Pete's, spreading the Inquirer out on the green formica countertop, and reading a respectful review of my concerto by the same critic who had panned me all those years back. 

June 2017. The original Little Pete's is literally no more. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

A few nights before, I'd sung my "Elegy for Ray Charles" at World Cafe Live in University City, a few blocks away, putting over my good friend Stephen Dunn's lovely words breathily into a hot mic and accompanying myself publicly in this town for the first time since the last time I touched the keys as the lounge pianist in the Barclay Hotel lobby in fall 1982. Then, I was about to make my Curtis debut, conducting my music with the Curtis Orchestra next door, Mother dying of cancer, my life just beginning. The other night, my wife and young sons sat at a nearby table. First, she took the stage and rocked the joint with a spiritual, and then rocked it again by singing the trumpet part(!) of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question in an arrangement by local composer Andrew Lipke. When Gilda and I laid down my new arrangement together of John Henry, I knew that I'd finally licked my ghosts in this town. 

I was awakened this morning by the sound of my son's voice: he was singing the trumpet solo of the Ives as he relieved himself in the bathroom. I knew at once that it would be a good day. After checking out of the Warwick, we celebrated by visiting Little Pete's a final time. The four of us squeezed into the booth in which I first sat tha September 1981—the night I first hit the east coast— and ordered breakfast. The waitress who had presented me with a free piece of blueberry pie and said, "Welcome to Philly, honey," has long since passed away, and the boy I once was has become a man who can no longer eat most of what is on the menu. I couldn't resist introducing my eldest to the mysteries of Scrapple.

I love him anyway.

This essay originally appeared in its original form the Huffington Post on 31 October 2014. Click here to read it there.