The Nightingale's Sonata by Thomas Wolf

Author:Thomas Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

By the beginning of 1924, Lea was working very hard. Concerts for royalty were all well and good, but there were the expenses of maintaining a family, and Lea wanted them to live in comfort, with a modicum of the old elegance from the Moscow days. Despite a good deal of professional success—she was finally playing with orchestras throughout Europe again and teaching at the Paris Conservatory8—she worried that her career had plateaued. Such thoughts are not unusual from time to time even for a very accomplished musician, but Lea’s were based on concrete facts. Though she was living in Paris, she had not yet appeared at the most important venue, the grand opera house, Palais Garnier. And she had not yet been invited back to America, which, increasingly, was the land of opportunity and big fees.

She decided to give a major recital in Paris in another of the modest-sized halls—the Salle des Agriculteurs—on June 16. She played an old standby, Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata, but she also showed her varied repertoire by selecting works from six different countries, many of which would be unfamilar to Parisian audiences.†

But this still left the much more important question of how to appear at the Palais Garnier, and once again, Lea took matters into her own hands rather than wait for something fortuitous to happen. At almost two thousand seats, even with great effort and with the support of many friends, she realized she could not take on the project of a concert in this venue on her own. Even with the help of a commercial promoter, she knew realistically that she was not famous enough to fill the venue. The alternative was to appear with an orchestra, but so far none had booked her as a soloist there. So she appealed to her old friend Fyodor Chaliapin, who was now living in Paris and was one of the most famous vocalists in the world.

When Lea called on him, he was delighted. They chatted about the past and gossiped about friends and fellow artists. Then she got to the point. With Onissim’s death, she had to play more important concerts and be noticed by the right people so that she could command higher fees. A concert at the Palais Garnier would propel her to the next level. As it happened, there was an open date (July 9, 1924) after the main season finished. She couldn’t pull it off by herself, especially since many concertgoers would be out of town for the summer. But if Chaliapin appeared with her in a joint recital, the event would be a sellout. “I knew full well that he did not need the concert,” Lea recalled in her memoir. “That audiences the world over jammed the doors every concert he played. Chaliapin looked at me and smiled.

“‘For you,’ he said, ‘I do it. We will give a recital in the grand opera house.’”

Lea was thrilled. As so often when she had an important concert, she went shopping. She would never again wear the dress she had worn for the event at Queen Elisabeth’s palace.

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