The Niccodemi Variations - 1. First the news, then Tristan von Aschenbach's Memoir begins.

Washington Globe article (1) dated September 01, 2002

Sensational discovery at the Smithsonian.

The world-famous and celebrated Niccodemi Variations are back in the news and not just musically!

The most famous piano composition ever is back in the spotlight of the musical world and the news with sensational revelations. A hidden text has been found in the overcover of the original score. The controversial truth about the origins and structure of the greatest piano work of all time has finally been revealed.

A few days ago the music world and beyond was rocked by sensational news. One of the scholars in charge of cataloging the immense collection of books and sheet music donated to the Smithsonian Institution (2) by the famous pianist Tristan von Aschenbach made an exceptional discovery.

A text written by von Aschenbach himself a few days before his death, which occurred, as is known, on June 15, 2000, was found in the overcover of the original score of the celebrated Niccodemi Variations.

The text is written in the uncertain handwriting of the nearly 100-year-old Maestro. Recall that Maestro von Aschenbach was a piano virtuoso and a great interpreter of the greatest composers in musical history. Tristan Von Aschenbach was primarily known for his retrieval and making Furio Niccodemi's Variations famous with his unforgettable performances.

The composer of the Variations, the legendary Furio Niccodemi, was born in Ravello, Italy, in 1852 and disappeared mysteriously in 1870, leaving behind a single, outstanding piano composition, for half a century thought to be unfinished. He was a child prodigy, and a sublime performer celebrated in all the Courts of Europe and in the major theaters.

The contents of the manuscript we report are faithfully transcribed, without any commentary, and are available to scholars around the world. The text is indispensable, in its exceptionality, to understanding the history of what is certainly one of the most renowned, perhaps mysterious, compositions in the history of piano music.

What is described and recounted there by Tristan von Aschenbach, even in its eccentric singularity, brings a whole new light on the events that led to the completion of that titanic work and the discovery of the original score.

It is well known that the Niccodemi Variations were considered unfinished until 1920. It was not until that year, and a full fifty years after the mysterious disappearance of Furio Niccodemi, that the original scores of all eighteen Variations that make up the mighty score were found.

Until the discovery we give an account of in this article, it was widely believed that the Niccodemi Variations were unfinished, up to the incomplete Variation No. 17. The complete manuscript was discovered in 1920 by Tristan von Aschenbach himself, who fortunately unearthed the scores of the Variations, including the very famous Variation No. 18 and the last page of the infamous Variation No. 17, as well as other documents.

We assure you that the use of such emphatic adjectives will be evident and well explained in the course of reading the text that follows.

Let us add a few more tidbits of information.

Tristan von Aschenbach donated to the Smithsonian Institution his own immense collection consisting of about one million books, precious volumes, incunabula and especially sheet music. Prominent among the donated works are the original manuscripts of the most important piano works. The great artist, an assiduous and dedicated collector, tirelessly collected over the course of his long and fruitful existence every evidence of the evolution of the piano art, becoming the greatest known collector of original sheet music.

In the binding of what is surely the most famous of these scores was found the puzzling, unbelievable, at times scabrous, testimony that we report below.

The lengthy document contains a confession about how Maestro von Aschenbach himself would actually have come into possession of that sheet music. The conditional is a must, given the nature of the revelations contained in the document.

Everyone knows that the Niccodemi Variations, due to their enormous technical difficulties were considered unperformable for more than half a century. This was the time that elapsed between the author's mysterious death and the discovery of the complete autograph score. Only then could the first of the memorable performances given by the great Tristan von Aschenbach finally take place.

For fifty years, between 1870 and 1920, the Variations were the fear and nemesis of all the greatest virtuosi who attempted to perform them after the death of Furio Niccodemi in June 1870. Until Dec. 21, 1921, when Tristan von Aschenbach performed them in complete form in the historic and memorable concert held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris (3).

Chronicles of the time tell of fainting in the audience during the performance and especially of the mysterious trance-like state into which Maestro von Aschenbach and the entire audience slipped at the end of the performance. At the resounding of the last mysterious chord, that final F, B, D# and G# at the sound of which the whole hall seemed to be left with bated breath. Only when the Maestro opened his eyes again, after a time that the most attentive reporters measured at a full one hundred and twenty seconds, did the hall burst into the most terrifying and memorable applause.

For many years, Tristan von Aschenbach was the repository of Furio Niccodemi's artistic legacy and also the only performer capable of performing the work in its entirety. He always did so with immense success.

Only in the second half of the 20th century were there other great pianists who ventured to perform the Variations, but with results never comparable to von Aschenbach's performances. There was always something missing in their performances, from technique to expression to some unexpected and incomprehensible error on the part of otherwise flawless and celebrated performers.

In short, the Niccodemi Variations remained the exclusive prerogative of Tristan von Aschenbach, as long as he was able to shoulder the immense physical labor of performing them worthily.

Without further consideration and leaving it to the readers' judgment, we bring the highly controversial and somewhat questionable text back to the astute eyes of twenty-first-century men and women.

The text was penned by Tristan von Aschenbach himself, we believe with considerable effort, on the very eve of his death.

It should be pointed out that the memorial written by the great Maestro alternates between two points of view, that of Tristan von Aschenbach and, incredibly, that of Furio Niccodemi. Almost as if the deceased musician could actually participate in the writing of a document drafted one hundred and thirty years after his death. As obvious as it is, both views are written in the same shaky handwriting as the centenarian Tristan von Aschenbach.

***

Memoir of Tristan von Aschenbach

Like Faust I have "come on the extreme step of the most extreme age" (4).

But I am not looking for a Mephistopheles to bargain for my immortality. My Mephistopheles I met many years ago and with me he was paternal, benign and generous. Certainly much more than he was to Faust.

The events I am about to narrate happened over eighty years ago, and in all these years not a single day has passed when I have not thought of Furio Niccodemi and his Ninetto who ran faster than the wind (5).

I have arranged that upon my death my collection of sheet music, books, incunabula be donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

If someone is reading this manuscript, it is therefore likely that a scrupulous archivist has begun to study and catalog the scores that will come to that worthy institution upon my death. And it is obvious that, having to choose from about a million texts, books and scores, the scholar began with the most important, the most famous and the most mysterious score. I am certain that his choice fell on the original of the Variations on the Grail Theme from Richard Wagner's Parsifal, composed by Furio Niccodemi in the last three years of his life.

The scholar commissioned by the Smithsonian will have carefully observed the volume that I had bound in precious blue morocco in the workshop of Nicolas-Denis Derome in Paris in late 1922 (6). Even before opening the volume, the librarian will have noticed something unusual about the binding of the score and noted that the front cover is stiffer and heavier than the back cover, even though, miraculously, the two covers are of the same thickness.

At that time the artisan bookbinder carved out, on my order, a slot in the cardboard used for the overcover. Into that slot I will insert these very thin sheets of tissue paper, then diligently glue the cover. Despite my age, I am certain that my hands will not shake. I know, because I have a very firm grip with my fingers and can still perform many pieces decently on the piano. I stopped playing in public a few years ago, but I still play for myself and for all the beloved ghosts who listen to me and appreciate me.

I will hide this manuscript at the last moment, so that it will be found only after my death.

We have made this effort, we have written and told our story, so that in these times, so different from over a century ago, justice may be done to those who have suffered so much and the whole truth may be known, however incredible and irrational it may seem.

***

You certainly already know who I am and what I have done in my life, so I will avoid lengthy introductions. I will just give a few brief facts about my background.

Suffice it to say that I am the son of a fine pianist who played in the theaters and provincial salons of Poland in the late 19th century. My father, Albert von Aschenbach, was the third-born son of a member of the small provincial nobility. We were of German descent, hence our surname, which unfortunately is only high-sounding. In those days, as if we were still in the Middle Ages, the first son inherited the title and what was left of the family property, if anything was left over. The second son followed a military career, seeking his fortune. If there was a third son, he usually became a priest or monk.

My father did not agree to enter the convent and rebelled against his father's wishes. Already as a boy he was a good pianist and so, much to the scandal in his family and in half of Poland, he left his father's house and began his artistic career as a musician at an early age. He soon married a particularly ambitious woman. In 1902 a child was born of that marriage. I know that my father would have liked to name me Frederick, after Chopin, but perhaps he lacked the courage. And so, he fell back, so to speak, on the name Tristan with unknowing prescience.

One evening that child, while on his father's lap in front of the piano, stretched his little arms across the keyboard and began to finger, rather than really play. With much effort to reach the right keys, he made articulate sounds that became music. Those present immediately recognized it and were thrilled. It was Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, the very one his father had just finished playing. The child did not play it at all, because he would never have been able to with his small hands, but everyone present recognized those notes and they all exclaimed their utter amazement. It was the same reaction they would have had if it had been a trained monkey playing.

Perhaps there would have been nothing unusual about it, but that child, that is me, was just under three years old. My mother immediately glimpsed the bargain, and from that moment she devoted her existence to making me the Mozart of the 20th century. She hired tutors and music teachers, when I would have needed only a nanny, someone to take care of me growing up abandoned to myself.

My father left us in a hurry a few months later, and my mother was free to trade on my undoubted, precocious and exceptional musical talents. It can be said that, from that moment on, I grew up sitting at the piano stool. Or, it would be more accurate to say, that I was firmly chained to that stool. As one would do not to let the trained monkey escape.

***

My life changed when I had recently turned fifteen. The child prodigy had grown up and was considered by far the most promising pianist of his generation. I had been studying like a madman since the age of three. My mother was the architect of this reckless design and I, up to that time, submitted happily only to make her happy. The notoriety and luxuries associated with being considered the Mozart of the 20th century also dazzled me from an early age and were thus not unrelated to my total dedication to the keyboard. The more and better I played, much more we earned.

Money first. If we had a family coat of arms, this could have been the motto written on the scroll.

The horrific war that broke out in Europe in 1914 did not slow down my career and especially our business affairs very much. When the conflict broke out we took refuge in the United States, proclaiming ourselves Polish exiles, even though we were simply stateless. After all, even Chopin in his time had gone into exile in France. In New York we were welcomed almost as heroes, and from there for four years we toured the length and breadth of the United States and South America with endless tours and recitals. Then the war finally ended and we were able to return to Europe, where my triumphant performances in all the capitals and most important cities began again.

Fortunately, I was never forced to compose anything. Fate benevolently spared me that humiliation. If I had tried the path of composition, it would have quickly become clear that I was not Mozart. Therefore I always remained only a small, graceful performer in the drawing room and concert hall. Even after I grew in age and stature.

To my consolation, much later in my life, I also managed to become and be recognized as the artist and performer I dreamed of being.

In my early years as a concert pianist, my feet would not reach the pedals of the huge grand pianos I found in the halls and living rooms where I performed. I therefore began to perform transcriptions that somehow did not require the use of pedals. Then I used the pedals modified as needed so that, I could reach them with my childish feet.

By the time my feet finally reached the pedals, I was already world famous. I was giving concerts everywhere, frantically performing everything, though not always with good results. I was well aware of the mistakes I was making during my performances, of my technical and artistic shortcomings. The important thing, however, was that I was present in the hall and I was pressing the right keys, shaking my light-colored curls that were always difficult to comb, mumbling disjointed phrases and letting out a few screams of contentment after a particularly difficult passage. In the most romantic and transporting moments, my mother had also taught me to cry with emotion. When the difficulty of the music required it, I could go so far as to roar. At the end of the most tiring pieces, I would slump inertly on the keyboard for a few seconds, then come back to my senses and smile ecstatically to get the most thunderous applause. I was perfectly trained, just like a circus or stage animal.

When I turned thirteen and my feet finally reached the pedals, I imposed myself on my mother so that we would slow down the mad rush we had embarked on. I asked her if I could study seriously, as if the hours I spent at the piano were not already enough to make me a successful performer.

For my sanity, I told her, I needed to deepen my study of my favorite composers. I wanted to study contemporary composers, also perform what I liked and was interested in, not just the eighteenth-century trills and sonatas beloved by the frequenters of the salons where I was invited to play. It was not easy, but somehow I managed to impose my idea.

It was at that time that I first heard about the Niccodemi Variations.

In 1915, on a summer evening, I played in a very refined salon in Boston. At the end of my applauded performance, some gentlemen quite advanced in years were conversing and telling each other about the endless concerts they had attended during their adventurous lives and the travels, Grand Tours they called them, they had taken. In particular they reenacted a concert they had attended when they were young. They relived it enthusiastically as they talked about it. I approached and listened to them enraptured by what they were saying to each other. They were almost whispering, because, as I quickly realized, that topic was forbidden, even ominous, execrable. But nonetheless fascinating.

The concert they whispered about had been the last one they could remember in which this unmentionable composition had been performed. It was the legendary Niccodemi Variations. They talked about it, but they did not even want to mention the name of the composer of the piece, because it seemed to be bad luck to even mention it. During the concert they were telling about, the pianist had indeed died performing the last known chord of these mysterious Variations that were perhaps also unfinished. Those snippets of history, heard in that living room, intrigued me beyond words, and from that day on I lived with the sole purpose of learning more and especially of getting my hands on that score. Knowing and performing those Variations became my fixation. But there was war in Europe and I had to be patient.

I was able to find out something else, however. So I learned that it was a really unfinished composition, very difficult to perform and had a very bad reputation in musical circles. It was said to bring evil, horrible misfortune to anyone who performed it in public, even to anyone who only mentioned it or who mentioned the composer's name. In my time and even now, this sinister fame was enough to keep the composition away from keyboards and stages. To prevent any mention of it.

Finally, some time later, in a New York library, I discovered the author's name and some fragments of his story.

Furio Niccodemi was born in Naples in 1852 and had composed his Variations around 1870, but left the work unfinished. The Variations, on a theme from Wagner's Parsifal, should have been eighteen.

The number of Variations planned was supposed to be eighteen because the composer had often stated his intentions to his admirers and many chroniclers of the time reported this in their articles.

In particular, a reporter for the influential music periodical Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (7) reported Furio Niccodemi's words regarding the number of his Variations.

If I had not also been fifteen years old, an age close to Niccodemi's when he made this statement, I would have recognized in those words all the incongruous boldness of adolescence.

"They will be Eighteen, because the number Nine is a symbol of completeness and fulfillment, and the number Eighteen is twice for the same reason. A person under the influence of Nine, and therefore Eighteen, is capable of all kinds of things. And I will twice be able to challenge the whole world!"

Sixteen completed Variations had always been known since Furio Niccodemi's death, No. 18 being believed never composed and No. 17 inexplicably unfinished.

Niccodemi had mysteriously disappeared at the age of eighteen and was never heard from again. Apart from his reputation as an outstanding performer, only his sixteen Variations had remained, which were difficult and almost impossible to perform. Therefore, defying even the bad reputation, many, the best pianists tried their hand at it, even though the work was evidently unfinished and surrounded by sinister fame.

Just like me, Niccodemi had been a prodigy pianist, a pupil of Liszt, even a protégé of Wagner. His undisputed worth had been recognized by the great pianists of the time, even by Thalberg and Alkan who were usually stingy with compliments especially toward possible rivals. Niccodemi ran around the known world giving concerts and performing all kinds of compositions on the piano. He was a prodigious pianist and was considered the Mozart of the 19th century. So there was more than one similarity between his life and mine. There was enough for him to attract me in every way.

How could I not be fascinated by his story? How could I not feel attracted to that one mysterious work of his? How could I not fall in love with him?

The Niccodemi Variations had been performed for years by all the greats, until the sixteenth variation seemed to somehow end coherently. All the artists had refrained from performing Variation No. 17 because it was considered unfinished because of the way it ended almost without warning. And because of the obvious lack of the 18th Variation that was supposed to be the work's crowning achievement.

Then there was the bad reputation that surrounded Niccodemi's work. In the years following his death, it began to be noticed that when an artist performed those Variations, something unpleasant always happened in the theater. From minor incidents on stage or in everyday life, to the death of the great Hoffenstein at Covent Garden in the summer of 1890, in the very concert those gentlemen in Boston were telling about.

Hoffenstein suffered a heart attack. He was sitting at his piano stool concluding Variation No. 17, which he had decided to perform, despite the fact that it was unfinished and was known to bring great misfortune. Performing the last known chord, the great Werner Hoffenstein collapsed on the keyboard producing a strongly dissonant sound worthy of dodecaphony, which had not yet been invented.

From that moment on, no one wanted to perform the Niccodemi Variations in public.

It should be noted that in Italy, the homeland of Furio Niccodemi, the number seventeen brings bad luck, just as it is for thirteen in Anglo-Saxon countries.

I read all the accounts I could find of that tragic evening that had caused such a stir at the time. As the easily excitable teenager that I was, I read all those reports trembling with fear and excitement. I decided that I would be the one to return to perform the Niccodemi Variations worthily in public, but only when I felt ready to do so.

And so, more or less thirty years after the last known performance, there was a new little Mozart, cocky and unconscious, who tried to bring the Niccodemi Variations back to life.

I, Tristan von Aschenbach, to serve you!

In the meantime, I had turned fifteen and was crazier and more impulsive than ever. What else to call myself? I was a boy who had spent most of his life virtually chained to a piano stool. Long hours of piano practice, interspersed with gymnastic exercises to straighten the back that would otherwise grow curved. And then overexposure to the most unbridled luxury, to the hypocrisies of European and North American high society. Exhausting myself every night on the keyboard to get endless distracted kisses from queens and princesses. Shoulder pats and dignified handshakes from kings, princes, presidents and governors. I was an automaton built to perform piano pieces and bow politely in thanks for applause. I didn't know how to do anything else. I earned a lot of money that my mother cheerfully spent.

I was a small, graceful, well-functioning automaton when I finally began to study the Niccodemi Variations.

Those pages written by another automaton, much like me, were an enlightenment and gave purpose to my life. I immediately admired Furio Niccodemi's qualities as a composer, his ability to express himself with such originality.

Furio created a composition, seemingly unperformable, but full of pathos, suffering, love, tenderness. It was a work that might bring bad luck to those who tried to perform it, but I didn't care. I would have braved all the misfortunes in the world in order to perform it worthily. What better way was there to intrigue the scatterbrained and absent-minded, romantic and unfulfilled little boy I was in those days?

I screamed and screeched, stamped my feet, demanded to have, to be able to own that sheet music. In teenage melodramatic excess, I went so far as to threaten my mother with cutting off my thumbs. She finally agreed and unexpectedly managed to find a copy of the music sheet in a New York print shop.

I eagerly began to study it, against my mother's warnings, against her prohibitions, her impositions. I studied those notes and realized that I had never known and performed anything like it. I who at the age of fifteen already possessed the magic touch and hands large and agile enough to perform Liszt and Rachmaninov and all the known composers.

Those variations were true music of the devil. I was thinking about what Friedrich Nietzsche had once said about Richard Wagner's music. Perhaps indeed Wagner had contaminated Furio Niccodemi as well. I was also excited by the idea that Niccodemi as a child might have known Richard Wagner in person.

I had met many of the most important and living musicians during those years. I had even gone to greet Sergei Rachmaninov the day after his arrival in America in November 1918 (8). Rachmaninov was on the run from Russia after the October Revolution. When he saw me among the other guests who were there to welcome him, the man, almost two meters tall, embraced me and almost squeezed me with his strong, long arms. Then he murmured something in Russian, for he spoke only that language. Fortunately, I spoke a little Russian myself. The great Rachmaninov confided to me how much he appreciated my performances of his compositions. He had read newspaper articles about me and was looking forward to hearing me live. I cried with joy that day.

Then, encouraged by that confidence I took his huge hands between mine, which immediately seemed small. I studied them carefully. For the first time in my life, I felt small. Yet I was already very tall and my hands were already able to play Rachmaninov's compositions.

Perhaps Furio Niccodemi had also been embraced by Richard Wagner after playing something on the piano and then cried with joy.

I immersed myself in studying and evaluating the Variations, every note of that work. The Variations immediately fascinated me enormously, but frightened me beyond words because of the technical difficulties they contained. I studied every note and every chord, immersed myself in the author's intentions, as I had never done before for any of the compositions I performed with such arrogance.

My musical skills and memory have always been excelled and praised throughout my long career. They enabled me to passably perform any score even on the first reading. A second and third reading managed to give me the right measure and the ability to interpret it more than correctly. Training, for that was what it was all about after so many years of a concert career, allowed me to make the interpretation of any piece an unforgettable experience for the listener. There were few people in the world who could find fault with my performances.

I have never been modest, I know.

Nevertheless, when I performed I felt like little more than a freak. I was tall, thin, slouching, tight in my tailcoats, with shiny shoes that no longer pressed the adapted pedals, but the normal pedalboard of the grand piano. My piano of course traveled with me. America and Europe, we went wherever we were paid. Like acrobats in a circus. Our tent was theaters, living rooms, concert halls.

My hair was redder, blonder, always unruly and almost impossible to comb. My rebellious hair, along with my head, followed and emphasized the frenzied rhythm of my performances. My locks would fall in front of my eyes in the most sentimental passages of the performances or my encores. In the moments of greatest pathos, when my hands almost disappeared due to the speed required by the piece I was performing, I would shout disconnected phrases that were the delight of my female admirers. At the end of those spectacular passages, I would stiffen up almost falling into a trance and then regain the smoothness of movement necessary for the more sentimental passages. I was a keyboard acrobat, a juggler, a clown. But, like Buffalo Bill, I was always striking in the center, in a Barnum Circus of reckless chords and an orgy of notes.

My mother was constantly trying to perfect the non-musical and more stagey part of my performances. Before I was born, she had been an actress for a while.

Suddenly this was no longer enough for me. I had to challenge myself, and what could I do it with but the Niccodemi Variations? With the legend of piano performances from the second half of the 19th century?

Thus began years of mad, reckless study, but on my 18th birthday, I gave up.

I realized that there was nothing more I could do to improve my performance of those damn Variations unless I found a way to complete them. I knew every note, chord, angle, stricture of them. Sixteen Variations plus one unfinished one, linked together by the genial, obsessive and varied repetition of the Grail theme from Richard Wagner's Parsifal.

There was that last darn, fascinating chord at the end of Variation No. 17, the last known, incomplete Variation that puzzled me. When I played it I stayed with my hands in midair on the keyboard waiting for a hint, perhaps from beyond the grave. I was suspended, waiting to continue with I did not know what.

The damn composition was missing a page and then of course there was no last Variation. Had there ever been one? Had a Variation No. 18 ever been composed?

That last agreement was identical to the legendary Tristan agreement. Like that it was to lead to an indefinite search for resolution. It was, in Wagner's words, an "insatiable and eternally renewed longing." This was what Richard Wagner said of his diabolical and sublime chord. And that unquenchable desire was my persecution, as perhaps it had been Furio Niccodemi's.

It was then that I became convinced that Furio could not have killed himself, not until he had finished his composition.

So I reasoned as I maniacally repeated in my head those notes and chords. And then I would repeat them on the keyboard. If the ivory and ebony keys could have been worn away, the marks of my tired and battered fingers would have appeared.

What had happened to the rest of the score? What had really happened to Furio Niccodemi? I was certain that Furio had completed his life's work. He could not have killed himself before completing it. I did not accept this assumption.

Perhaps one can kill himself after accomplishing a masterpiece, not before completing it. In history, it has happened that an artist would kill himself after leaving the world a one-of-a-kind work. Not that he would kill himself before finishing it. One can kill himself out of fear that he cannot repeat it, not that he cannot finish it. Especially when it is so close to the end, to the apotheosis. So I reasoned very childishly, forgetting all the artists who had succumbed to despondency, in the inability to be able to finish a work. How many victims had insecurity made? What we would now call depression. I was forgetting all those sad souls, but I was blinded by my desire to know, to be able to execute the completed work.

I began to have panic attacks every time I performed that last Variation. At that time, in the early 20th century, they were not yet called that, they were considered mere hysterical reactions.

When I would play that last damn chord, I could no longer breathe. The air began to fail me as early as the first bars of the Variation. It became an obsession. When I could breathe one more time, I would stubbornly play Variation No. 16 again, play it and move on to the next one, the damned No. 17. Until I stopped on that chord, on the last mark in the score. And I would start gasping again, until someone, usually it was my mother, would intervene to shake me, to force me away from the keyboard.

These repeated ailments forced me to desert some of those concerts that fed the unbridled luxury in which we lived. For this alone my mother was forced to intervene.

She tried to forbid me to study the Niccodemi Variations. She took away the score that I already knew by heart. She could not take the piano away from me, because otherwise I could not practice. I threatened to cut off one of my hands, my right hand. She screamed like a maniac. Hers was a real hysterical fit.

My secretary, and her lover at the time, recommended that I be visited by a distinguished Austrian clinician who was very successful in those years. Before we moved on to Vienna, another 'friend' of my mother's suggested that we first go to Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast. There was still the Villa there where Furio Niccodemi had conceived and composed his Variations. It could be rented. We would stay in that place symbolically linked to the composition that so haunted me. I could stay there for as long as necessary to restore myself and then face a new season of concerts.

I enthusiastically agreed to go to Italy, to the Amalfi Coast. I thought it might help me find myself and understand what I really wanted to find. I went so far as to dream that I could search for the final pages of that score and find them in a ravine of rock, at the foot of the cliff on which, I knew, the Villa was situated.

The mild climate, the light of the sky and the sea, created an atmosphere my eyes had never remotely imagined. I had been to Naples before, but I was too young to understand and notice how beautiful it was. I had never stayed long enough to appreciate how charming and hospitable those places were.

It was only when we arrived, on that morning full of sunshine and light, that I discovered that Villa Ginestra, formerly the property of the Niccodemi family, was located right next to Villa Rufolo. That was the place where Wagner stayed (9) and from which he drew inspiration for the second act of Parsifal he was composing in those years.

Everything conspired to restore my peace or to further excite my imagination.

****

(1) The Washington Globe no longer exists, but a newspaper by that name was founded in 1901. Its publications lasted little more than a year.

(2) Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institution with a major museum attached, administered and funded by the U.S. government. It was founded in 1835 and is headquartered in Washington, DC. It has about 142 million items in its collections making it the largest museum complex in the world.

(3) The first Salle Pleyel in Paris was built in 1839. In this hall equipped with 550 seats, piano concerts took place that occupied an important space in the Parisian and European musical life of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In those years the Salle Pleyel became the world temple of concert pianists.

(4) The line “Giunto al passo estremo, della più estrema età” (Now that my extreme old age has brought the end in sight) is from the epilogue of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele. It is an opera inspired by Goethe's Faust and was first performed in 1868.

(5) “E corse più veloce del vento” (And he run faster than the wind) is a line that, in a completely different context, appears in a song by Francesco De Gregori (Italian singer-songwriter, La leva calcistica della classe '68 - 1982).

(6) Nicolas-Denis Derome was a French bookbinding craftsman whose workshop became famous and appreciated in the 19th century for the sublime quality of his bookbinding work.

(7) The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (General Music Newspaper) was a periodical in German published in the 19th century. It was one of the most influential of the time. The journal reviewed musical performances from numerous countries, focusing on German-speaking nations, but also covered France, Italy, Russia, Britain, and occasionally America.

(8) Sergei Rachmaninov actually stayed at the Scherry Netherland Hotel in New York upon his arrival in America in November 1918. Rachmaninov was on the run from Russia after the October Revolution. All the artistic personalities living in New York at that time went to meet him, but I doubt that he met Tristan von Aschenbach as well.

(9) Richard Wagner did indeed stay at Villa Rufolo in Ravello, but he did so in 1880, so about 20 years later than is imagined in this story. The opera Parsifal was in fact staged on July 26, 1882. Villa Rufolo is also mentioned in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. It is likely that Boccaccio himself got to know the Rufolo family directly and stayed at their residence. In one of his novellas Boccaccio describes the villa thus, "The palace with beautiful and great courtyard in the middle and with loggias and halls and with wonderful gardens." The garden was an inspiration for Wagner. In the mid-19th century Sir Francis Nevile Reid, a man of great learning, had the building restored and rearranged the garden terraces, creating the masterpiece that made Wagner exclaim, "The magical garden of Klingsor is found." And so he imagined Klingsor's garden there, for the second act of Parsifal. There is a Grail theme in Parsifal, but I do not know if it could lend itself to being varied in the way it is described in this story. Of course, there is no Villa Ginestra, twin of Villa Rufolo.