The Niccodemi Variations - 3. The Talented Tristan von Aschenbach

In front of me, outside the window, the crescent moon dimly illuminated the terrace and the sea was little moved by the breeze. The sky glittered with stars and the scent of the garden invaded the house.

It seemed to me that all those gifts from God should be honored with a worthy offering. I had only my talent of which I was proud.

I closed my eyes and let myself be carried away by a surge of romance, perhaps a bit adolescent, that was quite foreign to me. I had never been a child, or even a boy. But that evening my heart softened. It was perhaps because of a love I had not yet felt. Music was an accomplice and instrument of my unusually soft and gentle heart.

I was sure Furio was there watching me; I hoped he could hear me play. Before I indulged him again I wanted to thank creation by performing a piece on the piano.

I played. And what, if not Beethoven's ‘Moonlight Sonata'(1)? By the time I finished I had my eyes closed, two tears had escaped my lashes, and I was already dreaming of flying over that sea as I tried to catch all the reflections of the moon. I was really moved. Unusually for me and to the point of tears. I thought of all the times I had pretended to be moved on stage. That night I really cried for a love I longed to experience.

"You're good, Tristan," someone said behind me.

"Furio?" I shouted, now certain of who or what was with me. I knew Furio was in the room.

"Yes, I'm here, next to you, but you don't need to turn around, you wouldn't see me anyway! Please play again! Play something else for me!"

A few years after Furio's death, Claude Debussy, a French musician, had dedicated another composition to the magic of moonlight. Perhaps Furio did not yet know it.

I recited in a dreamy voice the first lines of the poem that had inspired Debussy's 'Clair de lune' (2). That was a theatrical gimmick that literally drove my female admirers crazy, even when I was still a child and later, especially when I grew up. At the end of the concert, as the roaring applause resounded, I would stand up and achieve silence with a simple hand gesture. At that point, I would close my eyes and begin to recite my poem in my squeaky child's voice, which then became more serious as I grew older. That fleeting performance of mine as an actor had become charged and colored with even erotic content, to hear the most brazen of my admirers.

I usually used French, but I could also recite it in English, German and even Italian. Having recited those verses, I would reopen my eyes and stare for a long time at the ladies occupying the front rows, then return to my seat at the stool, place my hands on the keyboard and play the 'Clair de lune,' obtaining, indeed, soliciting rapturous applause.

“Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.” (3)

That evening, for the first time, I said those sublime words intending their full meaning and not just to elicit applause and make my female admirers jealous.

"Oh, a French poem. Let's be romantic tonight," Furio said not at all charmed. In short, he mocked me.

"It's a poem by Verlaine!" I explained, almost as if it were a justification. Then, without another word, I began to play the 'Clair de lune'.

What Verlaine's poetry had not achieved, that gentle music did, with the lightness of the chords and the dreamy atmosphere it could create. Everything conspired to capture the attention of my invisible companion and enrapture him, take him away from his sadness. I don't know why, but I was certain that Furio, his ghost, was immensely sad. Inside I felt him quiver and was quite sure that he was crying.

"Tristan, this is beautiful music," he said when I moved my hands away from the keyboard. His voice had softened.

"You don't know it, do you?" I asked.

"No!"

"Debussy composed it a few years after your death!"

"Oh, I see!"

I spoke by making sounds, Furio, on the other hand, spoke inside my head. He was a discreet presence, addressing me almost cautiously. I don't know what language we were using, whether German, Italian or French, but mysteriously we understood each other very well.

I played a few more tunes that he could know and appreciate. I confess that I wanted to show him my skill, I wanted to amaze him. Would I ever be able to do that?

To this end, I used Schumann and Liszt and then went so far as to propose Rachmaninov, but I noticed that he did not appreciate it (4).

I ended with one of my signature pieces, Chopin's Heroic Polonaise (5).

"You're really good, Tristan! I didn't play it much better" Furio said it laughing as I stretched my tired arms out to the sides of the stool.

I was fatigued and happy. If I could have melted there, I would have. Furio's compliment represented the crowning achievement of my concert career.

"Tristan, you are here for my Variations, aren't you?" he asked after I had stopped playing for a while waiting for him to tell me what he was going to do with me, that night, at that moment. And then after that, too. At that moment I realized that I wanted to give myself to him and dedicate my whole life to his work.

"Yes, Furio, all I ask is to be able to play your Variations as they deserve" why lie, I was there for that.

"Did you know that Richard Wagner composed the Grail theme while he resided at Villa Rufolo, right next door?"

"Really?" I was terribly excited about this confidence. It was well known that Villa Rufolo, the Villa bordering Villa Ginestra, had inspired Wagner during his stay. What Furio was confiding to me was a detail that was perhaps still unknown.

"And the Master dedicated it to me. I kept his autographed score. I know where it is. The pentagram lines are penned by him, quickly, but with his steady hand, and then there are those special, unforgettable chords that have affected me so much."

Furio fell silent, perhaps thinking back to how his life had changed after receiving that unexpected gift from Richard Wagner.

"That night I played for him and other guests. My father was proud of me and liked to show me off. Having Richard Wagner as a neighbor for him was an exceptional event that he obviously tried to put to good use. And it was also unforgettable for me. After I had played, the Maestro congratulated me on how I had conceived and performed a Fantasia of his themes. Then he pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket. It was a score, a manuscript, and he handed it to me. In his stunted French that was almost German, kind of the way you speak it," and here Furio laughed, "he told me that that was a theme I didn't know yet. It was the Grail theme for his new work. He told me that he was appointing me as the guardian of the Grail theme! Think about it, I, when I was ten years old, became the custodian of one of the themes of Richard Wagner's Parsifal!"

I immediately mentioned, shyly, the Grail theme on the piano, and Furio smiled in my head. He caressed me on the cheek. It wasn't a real caress, but it felt like one.

"Oh, Tristan! I took that paper with trembling hands and laid it on the lectern. I met the Master's gaze. My eyes asked his permission to play that paper, and he smiled at me. The Maestro encouraged me with his gaze. I was ten years old when I played it for the first time, and it was at that moment that I began to imagine, to conceive my Variations. The Maestro kept smiling at me encouraging me. I went on, and in the presence of Richard Wagner I had the audacity to vary the Grail theme. I hinted at a couple of variations that came to mind at that moment. When I stopped, in the absolute silence in the room, in this very room, Tristan, my heart was beating so fast I feared it would explode. Richard Wagner might have walked away offended at how I had insulted him by changing his theme, but the Maestro stroked my hair and encouraged me to continue with my studies and make those Variations a memorable work. He told me just that. Memorable, Tristan! I don't know which of us was more presumptuous, but I decided that night that I would honor that theme, but only after Wagner made it immortal."

What Furio was making to me were wonderful and absolutely inimitable confidences. Could it be that I was only imagining that I was having an interview with the author of the Variations who had received the autograph of the Theme from Richard Wagner himself? And that from Wagner himself he had received permission to use it, albeit varied, within such a complex and exceptional piano work?

"You're not imagining it, Tristan, it's all true, I'm here, next to you!"

And to emphasize the statement he gave me a gentle tug, then a very sweet caress and kissed me on the cheek. He caressed my hands. He did this for a long time.

His pianist hands were very similar to mine, I could tell, because I imagined it from his touch, but I could never see them.

"Furio, what are you?"

"I am pure spirit! I am still my soul, but I am only a ghost!”

"Yet you are touching me. I mean, almost touching. I feel you, I think I feel you. How is that possible? Did you really die that night? Why didn't you die completely?" I asked naively.

"I don't know how it happened, but all these years I have understood, why I didn't die completely. Tristan, I stayed behind, because I couldn't leave!"

"What do you mean?" I asked trembling. That interview surprised me, but most of all it scared me.

"When I jumped that balustrade, I was desperate. I smashed into the rocks and, for a split second, I was in excruciating pain, then it was nothingness. I was dead, I think, and fell into oblivion. At dawn, however, I woke up. That is, I thought I was waking up. I was on the rock in front of the villa, the isolated one in the middle of the sea, and I could see the boats looking for me or my dead body that they never found. I was there, but they could not see me. I tried to get their attention and finally realized that I didn't exist for them. I realized that I no longer existed for anyone but myself, for what I perceived of myself. And then I became certain that I was not completely dead. I thought I would have to suffer horribly, because I remembered well the moment I had hit the rocks, how I had fallen, but I saw that I was all in one piece and felt no physical pain! Unfortunately, there was nothing real in me anymore!"

"This is terrible," I said, and I didn't know what to say. The situation was quite unusual.

My hands caressed the keys of the piano, trying to draw comfort.

In all the difficult moments of my life, playing music was always the way I was able to comfort myself, to regain control of myself. I thought about trying to play something, but I did not imagine anything that could be useful or at least appropriate to console and ease Furio's suffering and also to calm my confusion. Then he resumed speaking.

"In that distant dawn I looked at myself and saw that I was whole. I was not wounded, my belly was not torn open, my bones were not broken. And then I was certain that I was no longer a human being, but a sad, immaterial larva. Looking at my body I looked the same as before, but I no longer existed. I was invisible to everyone. At first I could not interact or modify the world around me in any way. I thought that I had been left behind to suffer even in death the atrocious futility of my life. That life from which I had hoped to escape by throwing myself from there," and pointed to the loggia from which he had thrown himself fifty years earlier.

"Furio, why did you throw yourself? Why try to die at that very moment?"

"I was desperate!" he repeated and I felt him quiver, sensed his desperation.

"But you didn't die completely!"

"No!"

"Why, Furio? Why die and why didn't you die completely? How was that possible?" I did not understand and insisted. I didn't know, but I wanted to know.

"I don't know. I still don't know! But I do know that I regretted what I had done! Of everything I had done!"

If a body falls at 9.8 meters per second, Furio had had, perhaps, five interminable seconds to regret his act. It was a terrible thought.

"In those moments I thought of my composition, about the Variations whose triumph I could not have seen. I was sure that the reception would be triumphant. I was so cocky and I still am!” I was about to tell him, but he read my mind and forestalled me "Oh, Tristan, maybe that was also what made me stay behind. And then I stayed to get revenge. Yes, Tristan, I didn't die, because I also had to carry out my revenge!" and in saying that I felt him becoming agitated.

At that time, news reports had been very discreet. Cases of suicide were treated with reserve, with discretion. Without ever speaking openly of suicide, they attributed that act to the passionate and fragile nature of the character of the person who had killed himself. It was also easy for Furio to cite his inability to finish his opera, Variations on the Grail Theme from Wagner's Parsifal.

"For revenge and for love," Furio specified in a whisper, then fell silent.

"Furio, those are such obscure words!" I protested.

"I will explain to you. Oh, Tristan, I'll explain everything. I still can't talk about it, because it was all so horrible. It was bad, Tristan. And when I woke up, if I slept, it was as if I didn't exist. Then slowly I understood and learned to be what I am now. I slowly came back, almost, to exist, to do a few things in the real world. I can affect a little, very little, the reality around me. I have also been able to interact with people, as I am doing with you. And I have been up to a lot of things in fifty years, especially to those who pretended to perform my Variations, without ever being worthy of them. They were all clueless! "

"You!" I shouted "You were the one playing the pranks" then I was seized by a terrible thought "Hey! Did you kill Hoffenstein?" I asked trembling.

"No, that one was already dying on his own. I just gave him a push" Furio said with a carelessness that scared me even more "but you don't be afraid. I care about you!" he reassured me.

"Oh, thank you very much! And you played tricks on everyone, huh?"

"Of course! They all lacked the necessary technique. Some were even inexperienced, that is! And I didn't want them to cripple my Variations!"

"Your composition is extraordinary. You have written sublime music!"

"I know" modesty was not among Furio Niccodemi's gifts "and those who tried to perform it were all incompetent. Besides, they could not conclude them. For all they knew my Variations were unfinished!"

"Yesterday, for the first time they were all there!" I said softly, almost shyly, hoping I wasn't wrong.

Something was not quite right. The Variations were notoriously unfinished, but I was certain that my hands had played the missing part. I had played them all.

"Yes! They were all of them!" Furio confirmed.

"So, I played all the Variations?"

"No! You didn't!"

"Oh, I got it! It was you. You played the complete composition, Furio, is that right? That was the first time, wasn't it?" I said a little incongruously.

"You are right, Tristan. It was the first time in many years!"

I wish I could say that at that moment Furio closed his eyes. Of course I didn't see him, but I imagined he did. He let go of his thoughts, perhaps his memories, then smiled soothingly.

"Yes, Tristan, that was the first time I listened to them all in their entirety! When I composed the last Variation, after I wrote the last chord, something bad, horrible and unbearable, happened!"

Can one feel the suffering, the immense pain, felt by a ghost? Yes, and that was what I felt. A pain so strong that it ripped my heart open. I brought my hands to my chest, because at that moment Furio's pain became my pain. I feared I would die.

"I couldn't play it anymore," Furio said and for remained mysterious words, "and no one played it anymore! There was no more time! But now, at last, you have come, my Tristan!"

"Me? Why me?"

"Because you are the best! I hope that's enough of an explanation for you. You are the only one good enough to play all my Variations and I have decided to make you a gift of them, but enough talk now. I will explain to you, Tristan! Now play, please. Let me listen to my music again, Tristan! All of them together! I haven't listened to them for a long time. You are the first who can interpret all the suffering and all the love they contain!"

I felt my chest swell with pride. I trembled with the fear of disappointing Furio Niccodemi. Although I was filled with pride because the composer of that sublime work, albeit from beyond the grave, had praised my performance of his work.

"Will I play or will you drive me like you did last night?" I asked, smiling.

"Did you realize that?" he said, also laughing.

"I am a pianist, Furio. I always know what my hands are doing! That's how I express myself!"

"Play, Tristan, the way you know how! I will only help you if I see you in trouble!"

The Niccodemi Variations are probably the most strenuous and arduous piano composition to perform that has ever been written, and I was tired, but I did not think about it for a moment.

Over the next hour I played the first sixteen Variations that I knew. At Furio's suggestion I repeated a few musical phrases and even an entire Variation. In those instances Furio intervened to correct my mistakes or hesitations. He gave me unexpected and original explanations. He incited me and reassured me. They were exceptional and unrepeatable moments.

Finally I played Variation No. 17, the last known one. I reached the last chord on the sheet music and froze. I still didn't know how to continue, then my memory cleared and rescued me and slowly my fingers moved. They grazed the keys playing the fateful chord that was the opening of that last musical phrase. It was that F, B, D# and G#. The very chord that had fascinated generations of Wagnerian melomaniacs (6).

By a miracle I continued playing, closed my eyes and felt Furio guiding me in playing the conclusion of Variation No. 17.

How had I not thought of that? I wondered when, being able to finally follow and understand the music, I realized in what a brilliant and unexpected way the Variation ended. This time I was sure I remembered what I was playing, and Furio gave me a gentle slap on the wrist. He knew that I knew. I had received his first gift.

It was just past midnight and I was exhausted. He noticed.

"Now, Tristan, let me play my last Variation! It's like a love song and it was my love song!" he said and it was another puzzling statement for me.

But it was what I hoped to hear him say and I set about to memorize it. It was a task certainly within my grasp. I had memorized far longer compositions. Furio, however, disillusioned me.

“Sei incorreggibile, Tristan! Ancora non hai capito che controllo la tua mente? Stasera suonerò un’ultima volta con le tue mani e sarò io a suonare! Per il momento, potrai solo ascoltarmi. Però, mi hai convinto te lo meriti, questa volta la potrai ricordare!” sussultai per la sorpresa, gli sorrisi “Sì, questa volta potrai ricordare la Variazione n. 18 e forse sarai in grado di suonarla ancora per conto tuo! Vedremo!”

Furio played and fascinated me one more time. If possible, even more so. That last Variation was aesthetically perfect, at least as perfect as was the Liebestod, the conclusion of Wagner's opera 'Tristan und Isolde.' Like the Liebestod, Variation No. 18 was music of love and death that took me to heaven and hell. I performed it silently and faithfully. My hands, lent to Furio, performed the music that perhaps they would soon be able to repeat. I really hoped I could render all the grandeur and unusual sweetness of those notes.

My hands played and I listened entranced.

When the concluding chord resounded in the ghostly silence of the empty house, because my mother had gone who knows where to blow off her anger and itches, Furio stroked my cheek.

"Thank you, Tristan. You played divinely, but now you're tired. Go to sleep."

And I, obediently and silently, still trembling and my cheeks wet with tears, got up and headed for my room. I kept my eyes half-closed so as not to dispel that feeling of peace and love that had enveloped me at the conclusion of the Variations.

How was I to regard that entity dwelling in my brain, possessing my mind and heart, using my hands to draw such intense sounds from the piano?

Fifty years earlier, when he had died, Furio was the same age as me. Now perhaps he was a septuagenarian whose life experience I had to regard and respect. What had been his existence for the past fifty years. Life or death?

I locked the door to my room. I did so mechanically without even thinking about it. I undressed completely and got ready for sleep.

I knew Furio was following my every move. Was he happy to see me naked? I asked with a hint of flirtatiousness. And he let me know that he was pleased. That he found me fascinating. In the darkness of the room I blushed violently, and Furio stroked me on the cheek that must have been on fire because of how excited I was.

"You are handsome! You don't have to be ashamed of that."

Out of caution I laid a towel on the sheets and fell asleep hopeful. Or is it more accurate to say that Furio turned off the light in my head.

"Alone at last," he whispered to me from who knows where, a moment before I went into another world where he greeted me with a smile.

Accounts of the time and the few pictures of Furio Niccodemi that had reached us described him as a good-looking boy, taller than his contemporaries, with black hair and raven eyes. A well-groomed goatee adorned his face in the last years of his life, as was the custom in those years among boys of our age. It was the first beard, it was called the honor of the chin, and everyone groomed it as best he could. I would never have a beard because of my fair complexion.

One chronicler described Furio's eyes as fierce and blazing. I still remember every word of that enthusiastic review.

"Furio Niccodemi leapt onto the stage rather than climbing its steps. Throwing his white kidskin gloves to the floor, he bowed deeply to the audience, which suddenly went from absolute silence to such adoring and thunderous applause that it shook the hall. Furio, as his name well says, opened the concert by playing the Hammerklavier with wise fury. Pardon the oxymoron! His performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106, Hammerklavier (7), was both sublime and mind-blowing."

The journalist dwelt on Furio's piano technique.

"A spectacular demonstration of the range of the instrument on which Niccodemi plays notes that spread to form music filled with an intense and violent beauty, something unheard of, an absolute novelty, even a bit shameless. Many female spectators experienced fainting spells during the young pianist's performance. Particularly in the third half of the Sonata, that "Adagio e sostenuto, Appassionato e con molto sentimento," which held everyone with bated breath. It was at that moment that the ladies, perhaps the most sensitive, felt the most discomfort. A few screams and countless sighs threatened to disturb young Maestro Niccodemi's performance."

It was the spring of the year 1870 and Paris was about to be besieged by Prussian troops. Furio Niccodemi was touring Europe, and in that memorable last concert he was to perform Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata and his first ten Variations.

"At the end of the Hammerklavier, his famous blazing eyes embraced the Salle Pleyel, the temple of concerts in France and throughout Europe. Some ladies had already recovered, others were waiting for the continuation of the concert to return to consciousness or faint again. Furio Niccodemi seemed to electrocute everyone with his gaze of intense fire. Without getting up to say thank you he placed his hands on the keyboard and began to play again."

The reports of Furio's concerts around Europe were all of this sort, and I somewhat envied him that unconditional success, that devilish aura he had taken from Niccolò Paganini (8). It must have been a gift of Italian performers to be able to bewitch the audience at their concerts.

"Ignoring the applause that was still roaring, Niccodemi resumed playing. And absolute silence suddenly burst into the hall. Those who had been waiting for the Variations were satisfied. A flood of notes swept through the hall and enraptured it. That music did not help the breathing of the ladies present, many of whom fainted another time. Unexpectedly, Furio Niccodemi did not stop at the tenth Variation, but continued. Everyone counted spasmodically at each pause, waiting anxiously for the novelty of the conclusion. He performed sixteen in all, one more challenging than the other. There were those who, never satisfied, waited for all eighteen Variations to be performed, but were disappointed. When it became clear that the last Variation would be the sixteenth, a frenzy of applause broke out. Many in the audience shouted to demand that the conclusion with the last two Variations finally be unveiled, but Niccodemi turned his head to look toward the hall. He darted his flaming eyes as if to tame the enthusiastic audience, then, as if exhausted, gathered himself. He waited for silence. He asked for peace!"

I understood how much those interpretations cost Furio. How much I understood him!

"Once again a concert by Furio Niccodemi ended in absolute triumph, but without the coveted last two Variations. When he got silence, after a time that seemed endless, punctuated by the audience's delirious applause, came the encore. The only encore was a sublime 'For Elisa' by Beethoven (9). Those consoling and pacifying notes were his kind tribute to all the sighing ladies. The final applause, as always swirling, exhilarating and of uncontrolled enthusiasm, was worthy of the best success! Thus also ended Furio Niccodemi's tour! Never had we heard anything like it, never had we been in the presence of such a brilliant, passionate, demonic temperament, which one moment whirled like a whirlwind and the next poured forth cascades of tender beauty and grace!"(10)

This was Furio Niccodemi to his contemporaries.

To me, who had seen a few old daguerreotypes kept in the library of the house, he was also a handsome fellow and was certainly charming. The portrait taken of him by Gustave Courbet (11) in 1868, a copy of which hung in the hall of the Villa, did not do him justice. In my judgment it aged him, but in those days I was unable to properly evaluate the pictorial art. That is a love and interest that arose not long afterwards.

The Furio who appeared that night in my dream, or wherever we were, was certainly the boy I had imagined looking at the daguerreotypes made fifty years earlier, not the one in the painted portrait, nor the devilish creature he played on stage. He was a boy saddened and disappointed by the life from which he had run scared. So terrified that he ended his existence in such a dramatic way.

Many years later I came across another painting by Gustave Courbet, considered by most to be his self-portrait and titled 'Desperate Man' (12). It was a thunderbolt for me, because the boy in the portrait was Furio, with his flaming eyes, his well-groomed goatee. In that boy's eyes one could read the terror of the life that awaited him. The one portrayed by Courbet was inexplicably Furio at the moment when he had decided to end his existence.

That night, in the darkness of the room that had been his, in that dream that was so real and true for me, we did not say many words to each other. Furio was certainly much more experienced than I was. I, in my entire life, had had only two experiences, both unedifying, however formative.

I had my first experience when I had recently turned fifteen, with the piano tuner's son. We met in a Chicago theater while his father was setting up my piano.

My mother and her secretary at the time had left me with the piano tuner who had to tune my precious piano. I was hopelessly bored that day. And I also remember that for some reason I was very excited, perhaps by someone I had seen. The two things together ended up pushing me to let myself go and do something I had never done and didn't know could be done. Involuntarily, because I didn't know you could do something like that, I made eyes at the boy accompanying the piano tuner. I later found out that it was his son.

While the father was readjusting the strings of my piano, the son who was perhaps my age was giving the pianist a tune-up. We ended up in a recess of the stage, already with our pants down. It was almost dark and I sharpened my eyesight to compare my jewel and especially to see my seducer's. It was absolutely my first experience, certainly because I had never attended my peers or any kind of school in my entire life.

I was absolutely ignorant about those matters, while the boy seemed comfortable and quite uninhibited. I had long since begun to struggle with my nocturnal pollutions, but I had not yet discovered the true joys that a teenager can bring to himself. And how could I if my only intermediary with the outside world was my mother? Who, moreover, did not accept that I was no longer her sweet, inexperienced child. My physical development did not accord with her idea of me.

After we had scrutinized and appraised each other for a while, Abel, that was his name, tried to caress me and immediately the inevitable, the irreparable, happened. I copiously wet the hand with which Abel was stroking me. I miraculously managed and suppressed my moans, but not the reaction to what I was feeling.

I naively imagined that it was all over, as if it were a pollution, however much better than the ones I was experiencing in my sleep, but it was not. Abel had other plans, counting on my availability.

Still in the utmost silence, my casual lover took my hand and accompanied me in movements I did not understand and could not decipher. Nor could I explain myself. I remained astonished, silent, but attentive. I tried to perceive every sensation. What was happening to me was far too fascinating to be reduced to the idea of force or violence. I was certainly not forced to do anything I did not want to do, even for the short time it lasted.

Then the tuning father called us. Fortunately, the call reached us at the conclusion of that mysterious act. We quickly got dressed, without exchanging a word or a glance. I would have liked to ask him for some explanation or at least thank him, but I didn't get the chance. My mother paid the tuner, and I asked her to also give a copious tip to her son who had deserved it. So it was he who thanked me.

I carried with me the memory of that fleeting and clandestine adventure. The recollection of those few moments did not leave me for a long time. For a long time, every night I would fall asleep with the memory of those fleeting moments and in the morning I would find tangible traces of the dream I had had. Much to the disappointment of my mother who saw her innocent child irrevocably grow and mature, at least physically. She saw me transforming into a man who, ungrateful of her sacrifices, would turn against her. That was the accusation she made during our awkward, almost daily discussions about my alleged nocturnal activities. All this brought me immense sadness that soon turned into genuine disaffection toward her.

The rest of my love life, that is, my second and last memorable experience, lasted a few minutes longer and fortunately revealed capabilities to me that I had ignored up to that point.

It happened the following year, in New York. My days were all the same, as befits an automaton programmed to perform a certain set of actions. The ultimate purpose for which I had been created and instructed was to provide my mother with the money she needed to maintain her life of luxuries. To do this, I had to play my grand piano with precision and expression, in different places all the time, for an audience that had to adore me and pay more and more to hear me play, see me and be moved at the right moment. Even though I was no longer a child prodigy, I was just a good, young pianist.

Ours was a nomadic and somewhat inconvenient life, very strenuous because of the necessity we had to move from city to city, from castle to palace, from hotel to hotel. Even though we lived in the most unbridled luxury.

I performed in the drawing rooms of the best society and in the major theaters. We usually stayed in the homes of those who hosted my concerts, or in the most luxurious hotels. Because of a sudden bereavement that year in New York, we could not find hospitality in the Carnegie home, which had hosted and endured us in the past. And so my mother was forced to make reservations at a downtown hotel.

My day always consisted of piano practice, two hours of massage and re-educational gymnastics to straighten my back, study with preceptors and meals. Finally, in the late afternoon or evening, I would perform recitals. On evenings when I was not playing, we would attend theaters and music halls to see operas or concerts and recitals by other artists. Nothing else was going on in my life. At sixteen it is little to live and survive on, but I was not complaining, not knowing the rest of the world, hidden pleasures and the suffering those pleasures could conceal. I did not know what one can do by living one's life.

In massage and gymnastics, as in studying and practicing on the piano, I was followed by teachers and tutors who tortured me for hours. In each city my mother selected those who were to give me lessons and help keep my back straight.

In New York we met a stern and obnoxious former army instructor who did not show up one day because a providential carriage had run over his foot. In his place came his son.

Kurt was a little older than me. He was sturdy and strong, though he was still little more than a boy. And, alas, he was also very handsome, enough to irreparably inflame my senses.

His father had explained my routine to him, and we started right away. I wore wool tights, he wore leather boots, breeches, and a shirt that was too small and perfectly outlined his mighty chest.

Kurt had me lie on my stomach and began to massage my back. It felt good to be touched by him. He was good, but also charming, and it happened that my interest in him quickly became apparent. It remained my secret as long as I lay on my stomach, but when Kurt asked me to turn around, he noticed it too.

I flushed, he smiled at me. I smiled back at him. We were alone in the hotel room and no one would disturb us. We were just like two mischievous kids about to pull a big prank. Kurt wasted no time.

He grabbed my jewel and began to massage it.

"Master Tristan, is this how you do it, or should I change the motion?" he asked me all serious, as if he was still massaging my back. Instead, he was voluptuously rubbing my precious toy with infinite delicacy, thus giving me the most incredible sensations.

"What do you mean, Kurt?" I asked with a sigh, because I just didn't understand. I was sixteen years old, but for that topic it was as if I had been eight.

Kurt was referring to something I was supposed to know, but it was unknown to me. I think I blushed. Fortunately he understood my gap and my embarrassment, but he did not laugh. He became serious.

"'Master, you don't do this yourself, do you?" Kurt was in disbelief, but I was quite certain that I had never tried.

"No," I whispered, and without asking any more inappropriate questions, Kurt continued to the glorious conclusion. His movements followed the accelerations of my breathing, and when I quickly reached the goal I was fatigued but content.

Only then did Kurt give me some, shall we say, hygienic and medical explanations. And I treasured his every word. From that moment a new world opened up to me. At 16, it was perhaps a little late, but I accepted it for what it was. It was a gift for which I was forever grateful to that strutting, charming boy.

The next day his father returned, albeit with a limp, and to my disappointment resumed my painful daily routine.

I preserved that memory even more jealously than the first. Along with all the notions I had learned and that had accompanied me up to this moment.

And now I was deeply asleep, on the bed that had been Furio's.

I was dreaming and yet I was somewhat conscious. I remember feeling like a virgin bride on her first night as I lay trembling and waiting for the ghost of Furio Niccodemi.

It was the end of spring, summer had not yet arrived, but the air was already warm and the smells of the garden, the flowers, the grass were all already there, heightened by the moisture of the night, buoyed by the breeze rising from the sea below us. It was like a dream within a dream. The flowering orange blossoms in the citrus garden that surrounded the villa gave off effluvia and smells that stunned.

The window was open, the curtains were drawn, and a moonbeam illuminated across the room. This was the light of that dream, incredibly vivid. But what my eyes saw was even more detailed.

Furio's statuesque body, his hairy chest, his dark nipples, his flat belly, his vigorous masculinity of which, when he was alive, he had certainly been proud. I could distinguish everything, albeit in the dimness of the moonlight. So did he see my diaphanous, snow-white, slender body, my smooth legs, my long arms, my large hands.

I waited for him, lying on the cool sheets, and he wrapped me in his embrace. We exchanged countless affectionate caresses and kisses, as our hands ran over each other's bodies, to touch him, to know him. I had never made love, but that night, albeit in a dream and with a ghost, was my first time and it was a glorious experience.

"I never cheated on him," he then said, speaking to me in his mind and without breaking away from a long kiss.

"Who haven't you..."

"I will explain it to you. It is necessary for you to know and love as much as I have loved!"

"Those are obscure words, Furio!"

****

(1) Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, more commonly known as the 'Moonlight Sonata,' is Op. 27 No. 2 in Ludwig van Beethoven's catalog. It was completed in 1801. Beethoven dedicated this work to his favorite pupil, the 19-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he had been in love.

(2) The Suite bergamasque is one of the most famous piano suites written by Claude Debussy. The composition, begun around 1890, was finished in a first version in early 1891 and revised finally in 1905. The third movement of the suite is the famous 'Clair de lune' in D-flat major, probably Debussy's best-known piece. The title is inspired by Verlaine's lyric of the same name, which in its opening stanza perhaps gave the composer the cue for the name of the entire suite.

(3) Your soul is a select landscape / Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go / Playing the lute and dancing and almost / Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

(4) Schumann and especially Liszt were composers of piano pieces whose technical difficulties were always very challenging for performers. Rachmaninov, equally difficult to perform, was active between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

(5) The Polonaise in A flat major, Op 53, known as Eroica, for piano was written by Frederick Chopin in the fall of 1842. It is the best known and most performed of the composer's Polonaises. It is one of Chopin's most powerful, heroic, epic compositions. This piece is very demanding from a performance point of view, in fact it requires great piano skills and considerable virtuosity to be played with a high degree of proficiency.

(6) The chord I refer to repeatedly throughout the story "F, B, D# and G#" is actually the famous Tristan chord. It is composed as all the manuals state by "an augmented fourth, augmented sixth, and augmented ninth above the bass note," whatever that means. It is so called because it is heard at the beginning of the opera Tristan and Isolde and is the Leitmotif of the protagonist. It has been used in many compositions by Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Brahms, among others.

(7) The Piano Sonata No. 29 Op. 106, called Hammerklavier, was written between November 1817 and March 1819 by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's longest sonata and one of the most complex harmonically and in terms of technical commitment.

(8) In Europe between 1828 and 1833, a tall, thin, black-clad Genoese man with long, messy hair wandered around with a violin under his arm. The violin was a 1717 Guarneri del Gesù. The man would appear on the stage, begin to play, and all the spectators would be enraptured, mesmerized by the sounds and effects coming out of the four strings on which the fingers of his left hand and the bow would vehemently strike. And if a string broke, he continued undaunted. His name was Niccolò Paganini, a man of many souls, wild, histrionic, lover of excess, shadowy, shrouded in mystery, charismatic. He was a damned, cursed and demonic figure, the violinist par excellence, the man who, it was said, had learned from the devil himself the art of playing the violin.

(9) 'Für Elise' is a short characteristic piano piece in A minor by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is an isolated piece, a simple salon Klavierstück in A minor composed in 1810. It is usually classified as bagatelle No. 25 or Albumblatt, WoO 59.

(10) Only the first and last sentences of this review, otherwise written by me, were written by an enthusiastic Vladimir Stasov who had attended a Franz Liszt concert. The Russian music critic recounted and commented in those impassioned words on one of the concerts given by Liszt in St. Petersburg in 1842.

(11) Gustave Courbet was a 19th-century French painter and portraitist.

(12) The painting described really exists and is titled 'Desperate Man.' The same subject is portrayed in Courbet's painting entitled 'Wounded Man’.