Early in the morning, my arrangement of poppies against the sunshine.

This morning I will be sewing heads for soft-sculpt dolls to present at the Cumberland Craft Fair in mid-August. This afternoon I have a voice lesson. I have memorized Hugo Wolf’s Begegnung. After that, Nadia wants to paint.

This morning on Maine Public Radio Suzanne Nance programmed the Liszt Consolation No. 3 in D Flat played by Vladimir Horowitz. She said that we could hear him play it on YouTube. Tonight I listened ~ and watched ~ this beautiful performance. I thought of my Juilliard classmate Francis Schwartz and his admiration for the Horowitz spareness of movement at the keyboard.

The piece has never been part of my music library and I have never learned it, familiar though it is. I was sure I could play it. I found the score online and downloaded it from a fine old Breitkopf & Hartel (I have yet to find the umlaut) edition, with creamy paper and a delicate blue decorative border around each page, both faithfully reproduced by my Kodak printer. The print is a bit pale and the notes small, but my new score is perfectly legible with my magnifying eyeglasses.

I am home alone and it is nearing midnight. I have played through the Liszt “Consolation” several times on my baby grand, grateful for its richly singing treble, grateful for Liszt, grateful for Horowitz. It’s an appropriate piece for the day.

I think I was thirteen years old when I first studied this piece, not hearing the half of it.
Yesterday my student Meghan came back and played it for me on my upright, taking care to play softly. She tried it again on the baby grand but could not slip easily from key to key without ivories. I listened while sitting on the stairs, and noticed that the loud pedal squeaks.
Tonight I gave the Debussy a try, after all these years, and I hear the other half, or enough to make up another half. Who knows what magic lies even farther beyond?
I looked around for sewing machine oil, thinking it might quiet the squeaky pedal. All I could find was Bee Naturals Cuticle and Nail Oil. Oil is oil. I stretched out on the floor under the piano, pressing the pedal with one hand and applying cuticle oil to all the moving metal parts. May all hangnails disappear forever.
That is when I noticed the mechanism for the middle pedal. I’ve had the baby grand for a year and a half and I never noticed that it had a working middle pedal! Now, if I choose, I can hold a single bass note or chord and play a series of unmuddled notes above it! What a discovery when I am about to relearn some Debussy! My upright has a middle pedal but it operates a honky-tonk fake-harpsichord mechanism, dropping down a strip of metal pieces for the hammers to strike against the strings.
After the Debussy I tried a new Chopin Nocturne, the Opus 15 No. 2 in F Sharp. It’s going to require a lot of work.
Music indeed has the power to soothe.
I have been dealing with car problems the past few days, a leaky gasket, and squash bugs attacking my cucumbers out in the garden. The healthiest of the sprouts are now replanted in pots and placed on the windowsill in the sunroom, safe from those yellow and black striped bugs. I am going to rent a car to hear Stephen Manes play Mozart tomorrow night.
Did anybody hear that young musician on From the Top tell his story about obsessive-compulsive disorder tonight? I found it so moving! “Things are going to be all right,” he said.
Things are going to be all right.

In February 2008 I bought a Lester baby grand piano from a Lisbon junk shop for a little over two hundred dollars delivered. The purchase was a gamble. I had no idea whether the instrument could be tuned, but the tone did seem promising. My piano tuner grumbled, pounded in loose pins, and brought the strings up to concert pitch. The sound was lovely.

The finish was in ruins with stains on the lid and strips of veneer coming unglued. I pried off the loose veneer. No desk existed to hold my scores. Ivories fell off in fistfuls. I gathered them together in a sack and gave them to the Hamiltons, who do scrimshaw jewelry. The piano keys I painted white. Crete gave me a piano ivory with a lighthouse on it. I glued it onto the F above middle C. The wood cabinet responded beautifully to sanding, staining, and wax. Hans and I went to Lowe’s, bought a board for a music desk and two dowels to hold open the lid. I stained them to match. From the Victorian Trading Company I ordered a black wrought iron cookbook stand to hold my music books. For a very modest price, Gloria’s Flea Market provided two ornate candlesticks with green glass.

My dream was to learn the Chopin Nocturne in B, Opus 9, No. 3, and play it by candlelight some summer evening, with the window open.

Yesterday I had the piano retuned.

It is summer and time to play Chopin in the evenings, with the window open.

The character Mignon is the creation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She appeared in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, his late eighteenth century novel about a traveling acting company. The daughter of a sister and brother, Mignon did not know her origin or her father and grew up as a wild child. Incoherent in speech, she was remarkably expressive in acrobatics, dance, and song self-accompanied on the zither. She often escaped into nature in the Italian countryside. Eventually she was abducted by an abusive troupe of acrobats and taken to Germany.

There the young actor Wilhelm Meister observed the mistreatment of Mignon and bought her freedom. He then failed to provide for her physical or psychological needs as he pursued his theatrical and romantic involvements. In a predictable role-reversal, Mignon, then twelve or thirteen, slipped easily into the role of valet. She proved to be an alert and heroic caregiver for both Wilhelm and the neglected child Felix through a series of traumatic injuries and accidents.

     Conflicted, passionate, fascinating, unpredictable, cryptic, susceptible to visions, and wearing male clothing, Mignon remained attached to Wilhelm, whom she viewed as Father, Protector, and Beloved. Toward the end of her short life Mignon allowed herself to be dressed as an angel, seeing this as her future role.

The novel contains several poems Mignon recited and sang that caught the imagination of a succession of composers including Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky. One of the most famous of the set is “Kennst du das Land.”

I experience a sense of outrage when classical musicians patronizingly dismiss Mignon as a melodramatic hysteric.

Over the past few years I have continued to study both the piano and vocal setting of four gorgeous Mignon songs composed by Hugo Wolf.