THE SIXTH PARTITA preview

READ THESE REVIEWS:

"This is a crime novel that rings with musical themes... the compelling story-telling grabs hold...an intriguing thriller with an unusual twist."
(Gillian Wills, The Courier Mail, Brisbane)

"It is a rare delight to be invited to review a novel by a well-known local musician...The story has a unique structure...using the element of suspense to maintain tension... easy and enjoyable reading. ...at times rather clever in its turn of phrase."
( Dr.Peter Roennfeldt, Director, Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University, Bravura, M.T.A.Q. Journal )

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Juliet Hoey was born in Gympie , Queensland , but has lived most of her life in Brisbane . She is a professional musician, having graduated as a mature-age student from the Queensland Conservatorium with a distinction in piano. She subsequently studied cello, playing that instrument in a community orchestra when she is not performing piano concertos with the same orchestra. She was a piano examiner for thirty-two years, is a frequent adjudicator and currently teaches both piano and cello.

Writing has been a parallel passion ever since the age of nine when she found herself on holiday at Bribie Island without anything to read and solved the problem by writing a terrible book about a dog called Spotty. It kept her occupied for a whole three weeks. Three years later she won a state-wide essay competition as well as carrying off the English prize at school nearly every year. After school she enrolled at Queensland University from which she graduated with an arts degree, majoring in English.

During her busy life as a musician and a mother, she still found the time to write numerous articles, short stories and poetry. With her husband Denis, she wrote three musicals for children, one of which, The Loaded Dog, enjoyed an extremely successful schools tour with the Queensland Arts Council. In 1986 she co-founded the national church music magazine One Voice, which she edited alone for five years. A non-fiction book Under the Mulberry Tree, published in 1998, describes the experience of growing up in the riverside suburb of Bulimba.

Juliet Hoey has four adult sons, an increasing number of grandchildren and an extremely patient husband, also a musician.

PROLOGUE

It had always fascinated me, the Sixth Partita. That final work in a set of six that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for keyboard over two hundred years ago, starting in 1726 and finishing in 1731. Totally unlike the other five in the set. Dark. Intense. Brooding. Introverted in the extreme. What was he thinking of when he wrote it? Why is it so much more complex than the others? Why so difficult, so challenging, yet, for me, so compulsively absorbing, so completely rewarding to play? And for that matter, why the composer’s preoccupation with the number six? He wrote six cello suites, six French suites, six English suites, six violin suites, six Brandenburg Concertos and of course the six partitas for keyboard. And that’s not all. Many of these works each contain six movements.

Perhaps for Bach, a devout Christian, the number six had some strong significance, six being a multiple of three, the number of the Trinity. Who can now get inside his mind, that unique and beautiful mind of a long-dead genius? And anyway, does it matter? Perhaps it matters to a musicologist or to a scholar. But I am not a musicologist. I am only a performer, an interpreter of the creations of talents so much greater than mine. I try to remember this any time I start to feel too pleased with myself. It helps me to keep my feet on the ground.

It is over fifteen years since this haunting work by Bach first came into my life—and in its coming, very nearly ended it. The partita was tightly woven into every seam of my existence. I can look back now from the warm sanctuary of a Queensland summer to another summer, cooler, darker and infinitely more dangerous, in which death stalked me every day, though I didn’t always know it. Perhaps this was just as well. There is only so much sheer terror that the human soul can endure without going mad.

Nearly half a lifetime has passed. For many years, Brisbane has once more been my home; yet the story of those short months in London is burnt forever into my memory, each detail sharp and cruelly clear. How could it be otherwise, when I know that every second of my continuing life is pure gift, sheer miracle; a miracle that would never have happened but for a freak circumstance on the banks of the Thames in Furnival Gardens.

PART ONE ~ Rehearsal

PRELUDE

A piece preceding something … or forming the first number of a suite (or partita.)

Late 1987

With the wisdom of hindsight, it’s easy for me now to say that I should have seen it all coming. There were portents. There were dreams. There were signs which may have been clear enough to eyes much older than mine. But I was young and trustful. In my sheltered world of naïve innocence, I had never experienced evil. I did not know then that the seemingly innocuous events of those fateful months ahead were nothing but a macabre kind of rehearsal for some future performance, a performance bizarre beyond all imagining. For the moment, the problems of my day-to-day existence were enough to be going on with.

I awoke with the familiar sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The discomfort waxed and waned in a ghastly tide, keeping pace with the ebb and flow of my thoughts. Snatched fragments of sleep were shattered by abrupt excursions into an unwelcome consciousness.

I had tossed and turned all night. Deep breathing and relaxation helped. For a while. Until the onslaught of the next wave. Prayer helped. For a while. In desperation, I got up and made myself a cup of cocoa. After that, I did get to sleep for a few miserable hours. Until the thud of the paper on the front lawn woke me one final time.

She came over and gave me a hug. “What is it this time, sweetie? Not the lunchtime recital?”

I nodded. “I know it’s stupid. I know I have to get over it. Anyone would think I was about to be eaten by lions, instead of just playing some Bach in front of fifty people. But …”

Many disturbing thoughts hung upon that ‘but’. The fact that half the keyboard department would be there listening for every unscholarly detail they could find in my performance. The fact that I was already tired from a week of midnight oil-burning on my thesis. Most of all, the hideous reality of Diane Forsayth who would be there sniggering to herself and hoping that I’d make a fool of myself in front of a hall full of people.

Like me, Diane was a post-graduate student at the Conservatorium. But there, I would hope, the similarity ended. Most people who knew her had her correctly catalogued as a complete bitch—over-ambitious, arrogant, condescending and fiercely competitive. Moderately talented, she had a fantastic technique but didn’t know what to do with it. This didn’t stop her from entertaining the delusion that she was about to become a reincarnation of Liszt. In the early days of our courses, some of us had tried to befriend her but had got absolutely nowhere. Today, I needed her like a bad case of botulism.

“You shouldn’t let Diane get to you,” said my mother. “She’s not worth losing any sleep over.”

I knew that. I knew that the opinions of other people were valuable, but within reason. How I envied my best friend, Gemma Smith. Gemma was a violinist. Short, chubby, snub-nosed, with a mane of curly blonde hair, she sailed through life with a gracious ease that looked simple, but which I found impossible to emulate, try as I might. Gemma wouldn’t have cared if Menuhin himself had been there in the hall when she played—well, perhaps Menuhin, but nobody less. She played extremely well, too. Confident, assured, almost impeccable intonation and with a gorgeous tone, already Gemma was worth listening to. Intensely musical herself, she generously nurtured the musicianship of others. If she didn’t make it as a soloist (which she didn’t really seem to want) or a chamber player or an orchestral violinist, she would make a superb teacher. Just to have her there when you played made you feel better. I was hoping that today she might manage to cancel out Diane.

I was standing in the green room, waiting to go on stage. I turned around to face him, burying my head on his shoulder.

“I can’t do this,” I exclaimed wildly. “Andrew, I just can’t do it!”

There was no time for extended comforting. “Just go, love. You’ll be great. I’m going back now to sit there where you can see me and to cheer you on.”

He vanished through the corridor and I was left alone in this stifling, claustrophobic room. Why are green rooms always such depressing places, I wondered? On second thoughts, I supposed that any torture chamber would look much the same to its victims. For God’s sake, Helen, stop being such an idiot. You’re not going to the gas oven. You know this thing backwards. The Toccata which forms the prelude to the Sixth Partita. What a good idea to have a Bach concert. Four different students playing. Only I wish one of them wasn’t me. Perhaps if I’m sick enough, I won’t have to play. Gemma has almost finished the Chaconne. Marvellous, as always. I’m going to sound terrible after her brilliant playing.

The clapping roused me from my introspection. Gemma came off stage, violin tucked under her arm, beaming from ear to ear. She’d had the time of her life and so had her audience.

“Oh, Helen! Don’t look like that. You’re going to be terrific. I know you’re scared, but just try to think of the music and enjoy it … you’d better go. They’re waiting for you.”

My legs somehow managed to carry me across the platform. In a fog of blind misery, I acknowledged the audience, found the piano, adjusted the stool and tried to prepare myself, as I had been shown so often.

Nothing happened. I glanced down at the keyboard. The notes were all there in place. Look at them, grinning up at me like black and white tombstones, mocking me from their grisly keybed. Dead things. Hostile things. Things put there to taunt me in my humiliation.

Where is middle C? For crying out loud, I can’t even find the bloody notes. How does it begin? My mind dissolved into a red swirl of terror. I’ll have to get up and go off stage.

I can’t do this. I’ll never hold my head up here again. Never mind even thinking about graduating.

Someone in the audience coughed. I looked down. And then I saw them. Andrew. And Mum. Sitting together. I had not been expecting my mother. I had asked her to stay away, such was the state I was in at breakfast. Typically, she had ignored me when she knew I wasn’t making any sense. And now as I looked, I saw the secret sign. That lifted thumb, our special communication that meant, “It’s all right. I’m here. You’ll be fine.” From the time I was a small child, that sign had got me through numerous eisteddfods, competitions and similar ordeals. Suddenly, I was ten again and playing Four Funny Frogs in the Brisbane Eisteddfod. I sighed.

The fog lifted from my brain and I began. Those first, magic, swirling notes of the toccata that introduces this magnificent work. I felt at home here. Don’t think about the fugue that’s coming next. Don’t think about it. Just enjoy the toccata.

The fugue began confidently. This is fun. I’m starting to relish it. The weaving and interweaving of subject, answer, counter-subject and episodes all made their familiar and beautiful patterns under my fingers. They’re coming alive, these inanimate blobs of black printer’s ink on the lifeless page. How do we do it, we performers? How do we convert these inert patterns on paper into living sounds of such loveliness?

A resurgence of blinding terror, during which I felt the whole thing about to unravel before I pulled it back into line again, using a superhuman concentration and willpower that I didn’t know I possessed.

I finished the toccata drenched in sweat. In a daze, I walked offstage, oblivious of everything. From miles away, I heard the applause. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except the incredible relief and the certain knowledge that I was never, never in a thousand years, going to put myself through this torture again.



PAPERBACK BOOKS