The memory lapse

It happened one night, about three months ago, in the middle of a concert. My father had a memory lapse. But there's nothing tragic about that, you might say. A lapse in memory is human. Is it really the beginning of the end? How many billions of notes can a conductor have his orchestra play over the course of a career? If he forgets two, three or even ten bars, what does it matter? Why doesn't he look at his score? Well, let me tell you. 

First of all, you have to impose yourself on your musicians. The challenge is not insignificant; a good pianist does not necessarily make a good conductor, however much of a renowned soloist he may be. The pack begins by sniffing him, with circumspection, sometimes showing its teeth, without immediately recognising his position as the dominant male. You have to know how to use charm as well as authority.

Behind this attempt at seduction , there is also an idea in my father's mind that will never be denied: an entire orchestra can and should act as a single soldier since the individuals who make it up are, in the end, one. Nothing or no one should stick out; the ideal group is a tight-knit ensemble, with no stars, no bad apples, working hard in the service of a single man: its leader.

Any potential challenge must therefore be eradicated from the outset. After only six weeks in Berlin, a somewhat egotistical first violinist is demoted to second fiddle. The man will hate my father for the rest of his career, but will not resign. Hate does not prevent submission, on the contrary. The conductor wins this first victory, establishes his sovereignty over the remains of a fallen soldier, a broken instrument. Apart from the now second violin, whose eternal bitterness will eventually be lost in the din of the tuning strings, no one at the Philharmonie will ever again challenge my father's authority.

But that evening, his memory fails him.

This is what he does whenever he came on stage, his modus operandi. Concerto, opera, symphony, the ritual had been untouched for more than twenty years, since he had stopped playing to devote himself entirely to conducting. 

He walks to his podium in a hurry, as if he wants to put the concert hall, the people, behind him as quickly as possible. He does not do this out of contempt or snobbery - but to preserve the mystery, his mystery. The conductor is a man who stands with his back to the audience. He is a figure possessed by his art. The audience is only allowed to see his face, flooded with light and sweat, at the very end, when the last note has resonated. When the applause has begun to crackle, like a rainstorm on the pavement, that triomphant ending, a thunderous roar, spreading from the balconies to the parterre.

He turns his back to the masses and confronts the orchestra. In front of him is the music score, open to the last page. This is how he asks the stage manager to arrange it for him, a habit that has become a myth. He waits, hands clasped behind his back, until the applause stops, taking the opportunity to look each musician in the eye. Staring down his army. The strings at the front, deceptively delicate, the violins and cellos and harpists. The faithful woodwind section, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons fighting for space in the middle. Shoulder to the shoulder to the gleaming brass, the trumpets and the French horns. At the very back, the percussion, from kettledrums to the xylophones, the beating heart of the orchestra.

Then, once the silence has settled, he closes the book, taking care to make sure that the closed page resonates. And, in an absurdly ostentatious gesture, he pushes it to the edge of the music stand so that everyone from the orchestra to the highest seats can see that he is conducting from memory.

I asked him one day (I was not yet six years old) why he made the manager open the score not to the first page, but to the last. It sounds better to the audience, he said. The weight of the pages, you understand. The weight of the notes. This is when the concert actually begins. He had a prodigious memory. He wanted to be the guardian of the great masterpieces of classical music. A relic for the relics. 

But that night, when he lost the thread, for a fraction of second, the orchestra continued without him. He continued to wave his arms as if nothing had happened, but the Berliner Philharmonie, that well-oiled machine, escaped him, a mad train, out of control, deciding on its own what tempo to give, turning its conductor into an emaciated puppet, an automaton in black tie.

No one in the concert hall noticed anything. The orchestra was careful not to reproach him in the slightest, especially as the following evening went off without a hitch. But, between backstage corridors, before the last call in the nearby dive bar, the murmurs had already started. The following week he stumbled again, in a passage that presented no particular difficulty, and for the first time in his career he leafed through his score in the middle of the concert.

At the end of the evening, in his velvet and chrome dressing room, he lost his balance after getting out of the shower. The administrator, in his undertaker's suit, found him on the floor, naked, trembling, glistening like a newborn baby.

He was taken to the emergency room, where he spent the night for observation. The next morning he was given a battery of tests, including a brain scan.

When he called me from his hospital room to tell me about his last twenty-four hours, it was already dark. I was in Paris, coming out of a rehearsal at the Salle Cortot for a radio recording. I had wanted to walk home because the air was mild.

On the phone, he said in a white voice that he had to postpone his concert for the next evening. Sine die.