Chapter Text
It was the opening night of the season, and Stede wished he were anywhere else.
Well, not anywhere else.
His esteemed colleagues in the junior class were likely downing six packs at a Villanova frat house, so this beat that experience at the very least. And there was something to be said for familiarity — Stede’s accoutrement over the years had changed (fewer button-up vests and more windsor knots), but his parents’ hadn’t. His father wore tails and shoes that reflected chandelier light. His mother was draped in jewels that dragged along the floor, caught in sidewalk cracks until she yanked the train of the dress to dislodge them and sent them skidding into storm drains. Stede’s parents had their own box at the symphony — the same velvet cushions he’d sat on as a child — and tonight they climbed the stairs toward it in a dull procession. The first half was (thankfully) brief, ending with a Mozart concerto that Wolfgang himself probably didn’t even like, and conducted by an apprentice who seemed liable to collapse into a puddle of sweat at any moment. The hall was packed with velvet and napkins smudged with lipstick and a cold silence that even the orchestra couldn’t penetrate, broken only by the sterile applause of people who took music seriously because they were meant to.
In all the years Stede had accompanied his parents to the orchestra, he saw only fleeting moments of true enjoyment among his fellow patrons. Occasionally someone would burst the seams of propriety, jump to their feet as soon as a piece was concluded and shout “bravissimo!” at the top of their lungs. Stede’s father and others like him looked upon these ne'er-do-wells with thinly-veiled contempt. Stede recognized that look. It had been leveled at him more than once, had silenced him before he had the chance to speak.
All the more perplexing was the praise the box holders would pile onto these performances, even as they frowned over crumpled programs: Incredibly moving. Riveting. Emotionally resonant. He heard the same flat accolades during intermission as he fetched his mother another glass of champagne, squeezing between loud taffeta. A rousing first half, someone said. I so agree, added a disembodied voice. Where was that reverence in their expressions? Their reactions? Because Stede didn’t see it, not in the staid responses when the conductor lowered his baton, not in the moments of crescendo where Stede felt like he might fly out of his seat right up into the rafters when everyone else seemed firmly — inexplicably — rooted to the ground. But that was his story, it seemed, a life spent puzzling over the stark difference between what he felt and what the world allowed, blank pages where color should be.
So Stede clapped along with everyone else at every concert — polite, serene — even when the music swept through him and set his heart racing. Tonight was no different. He was wearing a new tuxedo, just fetched from the tailor’s: pressed and perfect. He struggled to swallow around the tightness of the bowtie. He could see his reflection in his black Oxfords if he looked down, a faded daguerreotype. He passed the bubbling flute to his mother and sat with his back against the plush cushion of his seat, tried to mirror the angular stillness of the crowd around him. Stede sat motionless and unmoved, as if to endure the coming performance instead of relish it. This was a performance, in and of itself. Perfect placidity. Stede was a virtuoso. Even Vivaldi couldn’t break him (take that, Antonio).
Voices came close, though.
Stede saw his first choral performance by happenstance, the year after they moved from Aotearoa. He couldn’t have been more than five or six, and was tagging along with his mother as they wove through throngs of Christmas shoppers at Macy’s and the market at city hall. There was a little stage next to one of the stalls, and while Stede and his mother were waiting in line for hot chocolate, a group of carolers shuffled up in their thick coats and scarves. As they opened their music folders, one of them blew into a little metal device that he produced from his pocket (a pitch pipe, Stede would later learn). There was no conductor, no one to guide them. Just a shared breath and a tiny nod, so small Stede nearly missed it. It was as if they grabbed the first note from thin air, held it together and then in variation, spun it into a familiar tune entirely new.
Stede was transfixed — so much so that he walked straight into the person leaving the counter, spilled hot chocolate all over their wool coat and set off a loud and protracted argument between Stede’s mother and Mr. Spilled-Upon, whose very opinionated Bichon Frisé also joined the fray. The whole affair put a kibosh on the holiday cheer. But Stede never forgot hearing their first chord, the surprise and exhilaration of it. And if he had to work a little harder to tamp down his excitement during choral works in the years since, no one needed to know but him.
His parents weren’t keen on choral pieces, but on this particular night Ein Deutsches Requiem was the entirety of the second half. They couldn’t very well leave at intermission. Stede wasn’t sure what he expected — the setting was so different from the Christmas market all those years ago that he didn’t think of it.
He should have known what he was getting into. The conductor was Benjamin Hornigold — a legendary interpreter of German romanticism, and the kind of maestro that looked perpetually aggravated at the audience, the orchestra, and especially the choir. But Stede’s father touted the man as a genius, used words like “brilliant” and “electric” with as much passion as one might have reading the ingredients from a cereal box. Stede was skeptical until the orchestra began to tune for the second act. The atmosphere was charged even before Hornigold took the podium. The orchestra sat at the edge of their seats; the choir were poised like statues in the loft above. And then the conductor appeared, marched over to the center of the stage, and breathed deeply. Stede felt the hair raise on the back of his neck. His mother shuffling in the seat next to him was louder than an earthquake. When Hornigold raised his baton Stede felt a shift, like a raincloud breaking open. Then the maestro gave the downbeat.
The low pulse of the first measure was almost inaudible, a single note more felt than heard. Stede watched the violists prepare their bows, then listened as they joined the french horns in a mournful cascade that seemed to roll like gentle hills, dipping briefly to meet the steady thrum of cellos. Each instrument picked up where another left off, building inexorably toward a tremulous moment of dissonance in the strings, forte and strident, before receding like the tide. Then Hornigold raised his left hand, just slightly, and the choir inhaled together, beginning the music before a note was sung. When they entered — a capella, pianissimo — Stede thought of dawn, and the slow change from the chill of night to the warmth of day, grass unbending as dew lifted. It seemed like they were singing right to him, a hundred people on an almost-whispered chord so delicate that Stede worried the smallest movement might break it.
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen
Stede’s German was rudimentary at best, and he didn’t dare open his program for the translation lest he rustle a page. He found that he didn’t need to. He read the words in the singers’ faces, felt them translated in timbre. Mercy. Hope. Wonder. The sound almost frightened him, like the choir was voicing something forbidden. It was certainly forbidden for him. Stede studied music insofar as it was a noble academic pursuit worthy of polite conversation. He dutifully attended piano lessons despite a real lack of finger dexterity, simply because playing a duet at a dinner party would please his mother. But these singers were immersed — unabashedly so. Stede couldn’t recall a time when he’d been immersed in something and not been scorned for it.
Denn sie sollen getröstet werden
A flute began a new motif, simple quarter notes sliding above the staff and suspending there briefly before the lower voices joined it, affirmed it. Getröstet. Comforted, Stede remembered. But this wasn’t comfort offered out of pity, the kind his mother offered him when his father wouldn’t let Stede keep the stray kitten they found under the porch, or the apologetic looks of teachers who turned a blind eye to the “pranks” he was subjected to (which were probably actual crimes in hindsight) and the cruel indifference it had become. This was comfort given because the comforted were deserving of it, entitled to something other than an upheld palm that told them to stay silent. The sopranos crescendoed on a high G, and Stede felt deserving.
Die mit Tränen säen
Then a lush, full freefall into tied quarter notes, like tears smearing fresh ink. It was going to be okay, he thought — he felt. He couldn’t remember if anyone had told him that, at any time in his life.
Werden mit Freuden ernten
An exuberant march toward resolution, toward joy, led by the tenors and basses — men, Stede assumed, who were allowing the notes to move them, to lift their voices with an abandon that Stede was sure would invoke his father’s disdain. He glanced over at the man himself, who Stede could barely see behind the voluminous tufts of his mother’s skirt. Edward Bonnet looked for all the world like a disenchanted corpse, tolerating the unseemly histrionics on display at its wake. It was how Stede saw him in his mind, when asked to think of his father. It was how he was expected to behave, especially as the only son of a Bonnet patriarch. Detached, unmoved. Stede wondered where it all went, the energy that he’d been not-so-subtly told to tamp down since before he could form full sentences. Did he swallow it down? Was it waiting somewhere, like a coiled snake?
Sie gehen hin und wienen
Or was it unspooling now, as Stede sat here listening to what Hornigold conjured from the people before him? Because he could feel it building as the violas moved in rivulets of three, as the voices echoed one another: cry, cry, cry.
Und tragen edlen Sammen
Und kommen mit Freuden und brigen ihre Garben
The sopranos led a charge up the staff, asking the other voices to follow. And Stede felt suddenly desperate, like he had to decide what path his life should take before the next note arrived. He felt as if the box they sat in would collapse, scrap paper crumpled and tossed, inescapable. Freuden was tinged with the same hysteria that Stede sometimes woke up with in the middle of the night, his chest burning. I have to get out, he thought. How do I get out?
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen
Denn sie sollen getröstet werden
The opening chords returned, this time with a steady beat from the cellos that Stede felt beneath his feet. This comfort was a demand, emphatic, perhaps the last opportunity for Stede to reach out and take it. Sollen swelled on a suspension held across the voices and the instruments, and it’s what finally made Stede grip the armrests of his chair for dear life, like he might run either onto the stage or out of the theatre screaming at the top of his lungs. The world seemed to hinge on that word, a coin that could flip and land him mired in expectation or lifted to some new possibility. Getröstet werden floated above plucked harp strings as the flutes resolved the piece on A and F, sustained in gentle polyphony. The choir had stopped singing, but Stede still heard them, somehow, felt them spinning up into the high rafters and out into the night.
Hornigold’s baton stayed aloft, as if it held the memory of all the music it had evoked, all the music still to come. Stede felt his heart beating fast. Everyone knew you weren’t meant to applaud between movements, and Hornigold would give the downbeat for the next one at any moment. But Stede was clapping before he could stop himself, was halfway out of his seat and nearly raised his hands higher before his father reached across a shocked Mrs. Bonnet and gripped Stede’s forearm tight.
“Be silent,” Stede’s father said. His grasp had the weight of years behind it.
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen
Stede could feel eyes on him, could hear faint whispers that felt like thunder. Stede sat without a word, pushed his hands into his knees. The moment should have been utterly and completely mortifying. But there was a thrill that buzzed beneath his skin, simmering there at low volume. Stede wondered what would happen if he cultivated it, drew it out to forte in a major key. He wondered if, one day, he might stay standing.