Miracle Update

12: The Blue Pencil of Brahms

Yesterday, after an overwhelmingly busy work week and conducting a Havdalah / Rosh Hodesh book event and writing workshop for a group from Congregation Makom Ohr Shalom, I decided to treat myself to a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at Walt Disney Hall. The program featured the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by the Finnish pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, and selections from Wagner's Ring Cycle. I knew that the concert, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, would be nearly sold out, but since I needed only one seat, I thought I'd try my luck. The most I could lose was a few gallons of gas (not a small consideration in Los Angeles these days, however) and the price of parking.

I was also motivated by the fact that Fanny Neuda might very well have heard both of these pieces of music performed live in Vienna. Knowing that Fanny's daughter-in-law, Rosa Neuda-Bernstein, studied piano with Brahms has made me listen to his music—which I've always loved—with even greater attention and enjoyment.

I arrived only 15 minutes before curtain. A thin, intense woman immediately approached me, surreptitiously hawking a ticket. We agreed on a price, but she kept jacking up the price the longer we spoke, so after a few minutes of this, I walked away and decided to try the box office instead. The best-price seat was $96, a bit too high for my budget.

As I left the box office feeling dejected, a gentle and dignified woman who had been standing there for a while caught my eye. She appeared to be waiting for someone but must have seen the disappointment on my face and asked me if I was looking for a single seat. I told her I was, and she promptly offered me one of the tickets she was holding. When I asked her how much it was, she said, "Oh, it's free. My husband couldn't make it, and I was just looking for someone who might need one." I glanced at the ticket and read the price: $142—more than I've ever spent on a single concert ticket in my entire life! I immediately reached out and gave her a giant hug, thanking her for her generosity and offering her whatever gifts I could think of in return, including a complimentary copy of my book. She seemed pleased just to be able to offer the ticket to someone who appreciated it.

My impromptu benefactor, Margaret, and I sat together in the third row, just steps from the stage, and began an animated conversation about classical music and European travel. She even gave me specific tips on my forthcoming trip to Vienna, where I plan to do further research on Fanny Neuda's life there.

The hall grew quiet as the concert was about to begin. Because we were opposite the keyboard side, I had the unusual experience of being within the line of sight of the pianist, which was such an intimate experience, I often needed to look away. He played the Brahms concerto with such a depth of understanding, precision, and contained emotion, it may have been the most moving experience I've ever had at a concert. This feeling was made even more profound by the exquisite cello solo in the third movement, which literally brought me to tears.   

Sitting there, feeling so enormously blessed and moved, I felt convinced that life—a real, authentic, lived life—was essentially a delicate balance between joy and sorrow, that both were essential, and that to make art from this place had to be the highest form of human expression. I also decided once and for all that I needed to spend less time on promotion and more time writing poems. When I come to the end of my life, I will certainly never regret not doing more speaking engagements, but I certainly might regret not writing more.

As Margaret and I parted company, I felt grateful on so many levels—for the generosity of this stranger, for Brahms' musical genius, and for the insights that had come from being in a place to receive them both.

I returned home that afternoon to an e-mail message from Ludek Stipl, director of the Respect and Tolerance foundation in the Czech Republic, giving me the contact information for Celia Male, the genealogical researcher who had found the place in Vienna where Fanny Neuda once lived. I had hoped that Celia and I might meet when I travel to Vienna in September. I wrote to Celia immediately and decided to share with her the information I had gathered about Fanny's descendants, including the interesting fact that Fanny's daughter-in-law had studied piano with Brahms (see my post 003: Einstein and Relative-ity). Celia responded by telling me that her own grandmother actually sang to Brahms on his deathbed. "I have quite a few Brahms song manuscripts with blue markings," she writes, "which experts tell me was his pencil."

Our mystical tradition teaches that the divine force operates within and through us to continually create and repair the world. If this is true, then connections of this sort are taking place everywhere and at all moments. Most of the time, we're hardly aware of these threads, but sometimes—just sometimes—they penetrate our very beings like a concerto by Brahms.

 

003: Einstein and Relative-ity

I decided to start off this weblog with a quote from Albert Einstein on miracles not only because I thought it was so appropos to the blog's title but also because it affirms my experience that everything changes depending on how you look at it. Little did I know that Einstein would show up in my research somewhere else, but more on that in a few minutes. . . .

Now that "Hours of Devotion" has an actual existence in the world and is no longer my "project," I rather miss the engrossing activity of working on it morning and night, turning Fanny Neuda's prayers into poems—which often felt like living inside the prayers themselves (what an amazing place of blessing that was!)—so I've taken up a related obsession: trying to locate Fanny's descendants. This is not an easy task after the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia and Austria, where Fanny and her family lived. But, thanks to the Internet, and the existence of searchable databases, more bits of information are starting to arise, literally, from the ashes.

A search of the Yad Vashem central database for Fanny's relatives immediately yielded results. Yad Vashem, located in Jerusalem, has collected and recorded the names and biographical details of as many as half of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The names show up in one of two ways: either from documentation collected by various groups or from pages of testimony by a relative. The testimony pages are especially valuable for genealogical research because the forms often show the parents' names as well as the name and address of the person who filled out the form.

On my very first try I found the name Lili Neuda-Halpern (1882–1940) recorded in pages of testimony by two of her children, Lisa Jack (née Lotte Halpern) and William Ward (née Robert Halpern). Though recorded 15 years apart, they both tell essentially the same story: Lili's father was Moritz Neuda, Fanny's eldest son, and the family lived in Vienna before the war, where Fanny also lived in the 1880s, when she was in her sixties. This confirms my suspicion that Fanny moved from Lostice to Vienna to be near her grandchildren. Not only that, but in William Ward's testimony, he records his mother's profession as "writer and poet." Could Lili have have been inspired by her grandmother to become a writer as well?

Lili also had an illustrious mother, Rosa Neuda-Bernstein, a noted opera singer. I originally found Rosa's name in a discography last year but didn't know how she might be related to Fanny. Now, finding her listed as Lili's mother, and thus Fanny's daughter-in-law, I could start to form a picture of what a highly cultured, aristocratic life the family must have lived in Vienna in the late 19th century. I was especially thrilled to find this quote in Walter Frisch's 1990 book, Brahms and His World:

As far as I know, the well-regarded concert singer and voice teacher Frau Neuda-Bernstein is the only talent in Vienna who can boast of having enjoyed piano lessons with Brahms (p. 169).

If Rosa studied with Brahms, might Fanny have met him personally as well? She could very well have been present at the 1876 world premier of his achingly beautiful Symphony No. 1, and she most certainly would have seen the composer conduct one or more of his great masterpieces of the 1880s. How impossible it would have been at the height of this period of grace for this privileged family to see into the future and imagine the nightmare that would eventually befall them and that would engulf Fanny's granddaughter  Lili and many other members of their family as well.

Which brings us back around again to Einstein. . . . Today, in digging deeper into Lili's own work, I found Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology, in which the author examines Einstein's thoughts on mysticism. In the course of doing so, he quotes a 1921 interview conducted in Vienna by our own Lili Neuda-Halpern (then age 39)—a writer, poet, and journalist, who had enough interest in mystical thought to raise such questions to Albert Einstein, whose name sits at the top of this blog. Now that's what I call a "miracle update."

Next time, a miraculous story of survival with awesome connections at every turn.