First Contact: (Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s apartments. A musical salon.)

Abstract

First Contact(Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s apartments. A musical salon.) Rita Dove I hear he’s a wild man, a proletarian who forgets to shave and rejects tutelage; who’ll dare nobility to trespass wherever he decides to take his constitutionals but at the keyboard a wonder. So I am exactly where I need to be, tuning my instrument with Vienna’s finest on a sun-blown April afternoon. I’ve made the rounds, Baron to Count to Prince, had my letter of introduction passed on tray after tray like an after-dinner drink. It’s all a bit dizzying— the lilting queries, coifed heads bobbing in murmured goodwill; I watch late light soften the stucco into creamy arabesques as polite chatter swirls around me, whirls and dips until I feel I’m being slowly stirred by a celestial coffee spoon. At last! Schuppanzigh moves toward the foyer, maneuvering his gut past a mahogany secretaire and two nattering poufs to welcome—too late!—his friend who bursts into view, a squat invasionary force not quite as dark as me—in coffee-speak [End Page 688] a Kleiner Goldener, Small Gold to my Big Brown—but pocked, burly; a dancing bear who’ll refuse to entertain, who’d ignore the yanked chain until they slit him for a coat. He’s clapping shoulders now, shaking hands, moving forward as the room expands, laughing. And why not? This is his party, after all; we are here to play him––this ugly, flushed little man everyone calls “The Moor”— although not to his face nor, I suspect, within my earshot. [End Page 689] Copyright © 2008 Rita Dove