Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from tho novel The Mozart Season by VirgInia Euwer Wolff (©1991 by Virglnia Euwer Wolff).

The hair on a violin bow is the part of the bow, traditionally made of horsehair, that makes contact the strings when the violin is played.

It was a gorgeous June morning and in my mind I heard another voice: "Now that you're warmed up, let's demolish those Vikings.” My softball coach and my violin teacher were overlapping each other.

With my softball coach, it was stairsteps and laps and endless batting practice. With Mr. Kaplan it was eight repetitions of very fast B-major scales and five minutes of octaves. Two weeks after being the shortstop on the team that had lost in the second round of the district play-offs, I was at my lesson, looking for the Mozart concerto.

In the summer I get to have morning lessons twice a week, and I love it. I work best in the mornings. Things haven’t had time to get so cluttered yet.

I put the music on the stand and got ready. With Mr. Kaplan you don’t whine or mutter. It doesn’t help. "We want right notes, not excuses” is what all music teachers say, I guess. He doesn't have to say it very many times; you learn it fast. Mr. Kaplan and I’d been together for seven years, and he was going to know the instant I got to the top of the second page that I hadn't been practicing the Mozart. At that spot there's a fast shift from first finger to fourth finger on the G string, and you have to get ready for it, You can't let a shift like that take you by surprise.

“Straight through. Right, Allegra? Including cadenzas.” A cadenza is the part where the violin plays alone; it's harder than the rest of the piece, and it gets the audience all excited when you do it in a concert. There are three cadenzas in this concerto, one in each movement,

“Right.”

The introduction is forty-one measures long. This time, instead of playing just the last two measures of it on the piano, Mr. Kaplan played the whole thing. He wears half-glasses, and he has a balding head with some blondish-gray hair on the back, and a mostly gray short beard, and he's a little bit slumped over when he sits at the piano. His ears stick out in a funny way. I love the way he looks. The introduction to the first movement, the part the orchestra would play, mostly announces what the solo violin will play when it begins. That way you get to listen to it twice.

While he was doing it, I practiced the G-string shift without making any noise, sliding my hand up and down the fingerboard.

I love this concerto. Mozart only wrote five of them for the violin. The year before, Mr. Kaplan had let me choose which one to learn, the third one or this one, and I'd taken them both home and spun my bow the way you spin a tennis racquet. If it landed with the hair toward me, I'd learn the third, in G; and if it landed with the hair away from me, I'd learn this one. When Mr. Kaplan and my parents found out I'd treated my bow With Such Astonishing Disrespect, they got very alarmed about it.

I'd worked very hard on it for several months, and in February, we'd made a tape of it to send to a contest. I'd worried and fretted and trembled, but we'd gotten the tape made. After that, I'd sort of neglected it. In softball season I'd practically stopped being a violinist.

Mr. Kaplan, who was having fun playing the introduction, got to the BUM-pum-pa-pum part that comes right before the violin begins. I was ready. It starts on a high D and goes on up form there.

I got through the first movement all right, and I made some genuine messes of of the beautiful double-stops near the end of the second-movement cadenza. Double-stops are two notes at once, on separate strings. And I was sure the last-movement cadenza was making it Abundantly Clear to Mr. Kaplan that I hadn’t even seen it for a long time. But the end was fine. The Blip-te-de-bip- bip-bip came out very, very soft and nice.

Mr Kaplan leaned back, smiling and saying a kind of “ah.”Then he turned sideways on the beach."Isn’t this a beautiful song. Allegra?"

“Yep”It is.Mr. Kaplan calls overtures and symphonies and concertos"songs"sometimes. I waited for him to say the rest.

He leaned forward and flipped the pages.“Hmmm. I'm concerned about the articulation in spots, and some of the dynamics aren't at all what they should be and...Hmmm" Then he turned sideways on the bench again, straddling it. "Are you willing to play this concerto a thousand times by September?"

I laughed. That would be more times than I'd brush my teeth by then. He watched me thinking.He started to smile, then he got up and walked across the studio, away from me. Then he turned around. "Your tape was accepted," he said. "For the Bloch Competition.The finals are on Labor Day."