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GHOST MUSIC - excerpt
(from Pete Hegal's diaries) Though I have to admit that, in the increasingly far-off days when I myself decorated the second violin section, I too dreamed of revenge. I admit it: beneath the drooping facade of even the mildest player lurk daydreams of darkest fantasy. I dare say the average concert-goer wouldn't credit what goes on in most second violinist's minds, but thumbscrews, boiling oil, and those bone-crunching medieval stretching racks generally come into it somewhere. Indeed, the farther down the orchestral ranks you get, the wilder the imaginations tend to become. It's not generally the principals who dream of revenge. No, they're too busy mobile-phoning their accountants and number-crunching VATs onto their last film session. What energy they have left--and, by the results, it can't be much--is wasted on attempting to look intelligent when bullied by conductors. No, behind them, far behind, are the ones whose diaries --centuries from now--will put Pepys squarely amongst the also-rans. These are the souls whose spirits rise above their serfdom, who charge in early to rehearse with their string quartet, whose artsy black-and-white photgraphs disclose a world of weirdest fantasy, whose imaginations would make Picasso and Tolkien (should they happen to still be with us) gnash their molars in impotent despair. I find now that when I look down at the heaving swells of a toiling orchestra--the roll of waves and the hiss of spray--I feel gleeful as a child missing school. I've been there, you observe, I've done that; I have even, God help me, got the T-shirt. I've succumbed to the great moments--and I've endured the endless, back-blistering, three-quarters-of-an-hours. I've been lifted up by geniuses and suffered any number of fools, not particularly gladly, but there you are. . . I can even recall the exact moment when I knew I'd had enough. It happened seven years ago - I was thirty-two - and I was assisting in dismantling Prokofiev's 'Classical' Symphony in the Royal Sinfonia second violin section. Further, I had just been informed by my principal that I'd been rushing the beat - which was not only bare-faced cheek but untrue to boot, the comment being applicable, if at all, to the horny-handed son of toil beside me. I picked up my violin, fantasising that it was loaded, only to hear the orchestra leader piping up about the second violin section's unendurable heavy-handedness. Now this, between us, was purest applesauce. The leader was one of those leaders who secretly feel that what most composers had in mind was a continuous violin solo, the extraneous violins being, to all intents and purposes, painted on the backdrop. Notwithstanding this, and with a smugness indescribable, my principal assred the leader that the matter had already been attended to, meaning yours, the undersigned. Upon which my odious, and indeed malodorous, desk-partner dared to chuckle at me. That combination was what did it. I suddenly felt, as I hoisted my violin back onto my should, what an absurd position it was to make a living. And (still more bitterly) what a scurrilous profession it was that enabled a blameless soul to be publicly excoriated without recourse to defence lawyers, affidavits, witnesses and the awful paraphernalia of British justice. It would not be going too far to say that I seethed. I will say it: I seethed. Deep in the heart of the second violin section, I seethed like a dried-out, plugged-in water kettle. And, as I seethed, the truth dawned that I was not formed by my maker to sit in the middle of the second violin section for the rest of my natural. That there are people, millions of them, so inclined is undeinable. There are stalwart men and women - bless them - who ask nothing better, who positively thrill to the sensation of being one of ten or twenty violins playing (almost) exactly the same part at (very nearly) the same time. More power to their elbows - and I hope they have a fine day for it. However, I, Peter Christoph Hegal, suddenly recognised that I was not amongst them, and became simultaneously seized with the determination to escape. People have often told me since just jow lucky I was. This is because there is absolutely nothing people enjoy more than telling you how extraordinarily lucky you were, and how (whatever it was you did) it's become most frightfully more difficult since. The subtext naturally being that, in these more enlightened times, a grade A buffoon like me wouldn't get a foot inside the interview room door. But are these self-same people ever lucky themselves? No, they were born to struggle and endure.
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© Alice McVeigh 2000
