Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 6
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"Mr. Krause says to play it through.""Mr. Krause comes on Fridays," said Cecily, "and is not here on Wednesdays."Georgiana looked at her for a moment. Then she went back in and played four bars twenty times slowly. She did that every evening until the twenty-second, and did not tell her mother where it came from, and Cecily did not ask her to keep it quiet, and both of them understood.The Clementi arrived from London on the fourth of April, and it was, as printed music generally was, a disgrace. Cecily worked on it for eleven days.She sat in the small parlor at the back of the house, which had the second instrument in it—an old square piano with two dead notes in the bass—and she went through the sonata bar by bar with a pencil, a sharpened knife to keep the pencil, and a sheet of paper for the queries.She found eleven mistakes. Two were nothing: a slur that stopped in the wrong place, a dynamic mark on the wrong side of the stave. Four were the ordinary carelessness of a busy engraver: wrong accidentals that any competent player would correct at sight without noticing. Three of them were serious and would have stopped Georgiana dead in front of a room. And two of them were the kind that a player who does not read well will not notice at all, but which make the whole passage sound like an error the player has committed: a missing tie in the left hand at bar forty-one; a bar in the second movement that has an extra beat in it, which is not possible, and which the engraver had made possible by dropping a rest.She corrected all eleven in pencil in a small, clear hand.The three serious ones took her an evening each, because a correction is not a guess. When a bar does not add up, you cannot put in whatever you please: you have to work out what the composer wrote and where the engraver's eye slipped, and you do that by looking at how the same figure is written the other four times it appears.At bar forty-one, in the left hand, the tie was gone. She knew it was a tie and not an error of her own reading because the identical figure occurs at bar ninety-three and is tied there, and because without the tie, the bass note stops dead under a phrase that has three beats left to run—and no composer alive writes a hole under his own melody.The extra beat in the second movement took her two evenings and a candle she was not supposed to have lit. The answer, when she found it, was that a whole-bar rest had been dropped from the left hand, and the engraver, coming to set the bar and finding it short, had lengthened a note to fill the space: two errors, one on top of the other, the second one committed to conceal the first. She wrote the query out on her sheet of paper anyway, in case she was wrong, and dated it, because that was what her father did. She was not wrong.Then she did the rest of the work, which was the part nobody ever sees. She marked the fingering for every difficult passage, choosing fingerings for Georgiana's hand, which was small, rather than the fingerings a larger hand would use. She marked the page turns, and where the turn fell in an impossible place, she copied the last two bars of the page onto a small slip and pasted it so the line could carry over. She marked, at four places, a breath—not a musical marking at all, simply a small pencil comma where a nervous nineteen-year-old could take her hands off and put them back.And in the margin of page seven, beside the passage in the slow movement that Mr. Krause had been playing to himself, she wrote a note. She wrote it at eleven at night, alone, with two dead notes in the bass, and she wrote it because there was nobody in that house to say it to.