Berlin Adagio

Chapter 1: Salzburg, Summer 1933

The cello case was heavier than it should have been. Imogen Marchmont had carried it across three countries in ten days, from the rehearsal rooms of Southwark to the echoing stone corridors of the Mozarteum, and somewhere between Dover and Calais the instrument had acquired the accumulated weight of every expectation her mother had ever placed upon her shoulders.

"You'll go, you'll play, and you'll come home," Dorothy Marchmont had said, standing in the doorway of their house in Ashford, her arms folded across her chest as though barricading herself against the possibility that her daughter might do something reckless. "Promise me you won't do anything foolish."

Imogen had promised. She had meant it, too, which was the part that would later seem most remarkable.

Salzburg in August was a city given over entirely to music. Every café seemed to pulse with it, every open window released a cascade of scales or the murmur of a string quartet rehearsing behind shuttered rooms. The festival drew musicians from across Europe — soloists, conductors, composers, and the countless lesser players who orbited them, hoping that proximity to greatness might elevate their own modest gifts. Imogen counted herself firmly among the latter. She was a competent cellist, perhaps better than competent on her good days, but she harbored no illusions about her place in the firmament. She had spent the last three years playing second chair in a London chamber ensemble called the Blackfriars Consort, performing Haydn and Schubert in churches and small halls to audiences of fifty or sixty, and she had been content. Content enough, at least, not to question it.

The invitation to Salzburg had come through her former teacher at the Royal Academy, a whiskered Scotsman named Professor Dunlop who maintained a sprawling network of former students across the Continent. He had written to say that a chamber group was forming for a series of festival performances and needed a cellist who could sight-read competently and wouldn't cause trouble. Imogen suspected she had not been his first choice, but the letter had arrived on a gray Tuesday in March, and the prospect of Austria in summer had been irresistible.

She arrived on the third of August, stepping off the train into air that smelled of river water and pastry. The city was smaller than she had expected, nestled between green mountains that rose so steeply on either side that the streets felt like corridors in some vast, open-roofed palace. She found her pension — a narrow building on the Getreidegasse with window boxes full of red geraniums — and spent her first evening walking along the Salzach, watching the light turn the fortress on the hill from gold to copper to a deep, bruised violet.

The rehearsals began the next morning in a converted ballroom at the edge of the old town. The ensemble was a mixed group: two Austrian violinists, a French violist with a permanent expression of mild disapproval, a Hungarian pianist who spoke five languages and smoked constantly, and Imogen. They were preparing a program of Mozart and Brahms for three performances over the following week, and the work was demanding enough to occupy most of her waking hours. She practiced in the mornings, rehearsed through the afternoons, and in the evenings ate simple meals at a tavern near her pension where the proprietor, a broad-shouldered woman named Frau Lechner, seemed to regard all musicians as slightly pitiable creatures in need of feeding.

It was at this tavern, on her fifth evening in Salzburg, that she first saw Johann Stadler.

He was sitting at a corner table with three other men, all of them talking with the animated intensity that Imogen had come to associate with conductors and theatre directors — people who were accustomed to commanding rooms and did not easily modulate their volume in smaller spaces. Johann was the youngest of the group, perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three, with dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that suggested either carelessness or careful arrangement. He had a long, angular face, a strong jaw, and eyes that were so dark they appeared almost black in the tavern's lamplight. When he laughed — which he did frequently, throwing his head back with an abandon that drew glances from neighboring tables — his whole face transformed, becoming suddenly boyish and open.

Imogen noticed him because he was loud, and she continued to notice him because he was handsome, and she would have forgotten him entirely by morning if he had not, at the precise moment she was paying her bill, turned in his chair and addressed her directly.

"You're the English cellist," he said. Not a question. His English was excellent, accented but fluent, with the slightly formal precision of someone who had learned the language from books before hearing it spoken.

"I'm a cellist," Imogen said. "And English, yes. How did you know?"

"Erich told me." He gestured toward one of the Austrian violinists from her ensemble, who was apparently also a friend of his. "He says you play very well."

"That's kind of him."

"Erich is never kind about musicians. He must mean it." Johann stood and offered his hand. "Johann Stadler. I conduct."

"Imogen Marchmont. I play the cello, as you seem to know already."

He smiled. It was the sort of smile that rearranged the air around it. "Will you sit with us? We are arguing about Bruckner, and I suspect a cellist's perspective would improve the conversation enormously."

She should have said no. She was tired, and her fingers ached from six hours of rehearsal, and she had intended to spend the evening studying the Brahms score in her room. But there was something in the way he looked at her — directly, with a frank and unguarded interest that she found disarming — that made refusal seem not just unnecessary but somehow impossible.

She sat down.

The argument about Bruckner lasted two hours and covered terrain that ranged from symphonic structure to the nature of religious experience to whether the Viennese critics of the previous century had been merely wrong or actively malicious. Johann held forth with a passionate eloquence that Imogen found both impressive and slightly exhausting. He had opinions about everything — about tempi, about bowing technique, about the proper dimensions of a concert hall, about the relative merits of Viennese and Berlin orchestral traditions — and he expressed them with a conviction that left little room for disagreement. But he also listened, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his chin resting on his clasped hands, giving whoever was speaking the full force of his attention.

When he turned that attention on Imogen, she felt it like a physical thing — a warmth, a pressure, as though she had stepped into a beam of concentrated light.

"You play in London?" he asked.

"With a chamber ensemble, yes. The Blackfriars Consort."

"I don't know it."

"You wouldn't. We're quite small."

"Small can be beautiful. Some of the finest music I have ever heard was played in rooms no larger than this one." He paused, studying her face with an intensity that made her want to look away and also, contradictorily, to hold perfectly still. "What brought you to Salzburg?"

"A letter from a professor and a particularly gray English winter."

He laughed. "Honest. I like that. Most musicians would say something about artistic pilgrimage or the spirit of Mozart."

"I'm sure the spirit of Mozart is here somewhere. I just haven't found it yet."

"Perhaps I can help you look."

It was a line, and she recognized it as such, and it did not matter in the slightest. When he asked if she would like to walk along the river, she said yes. When he took her arm as they crossed the Staatsbrücke, she let him. When he stopped beneath a streetlamp and told her that she had the most serious eyes he had ever seen, she did not laugh or deflect or do any of the things that the sensible, self-contained Imogen Marchmont of Ashford, Kent, would normally have done. She simply looked at him and felt something shift inside her chest, like a key turning in a lock she hadn't known was there.

They walked until midnight. He told her about his childhood in Stuttgart, about his father who had been a mathematics teacher and his mother who had played the piano with more enthusiasm than skill. He told her about studying conducting in Munich, about the years of assistant posts and guest appearances that had finally, this very spring, culminated in an appointment as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Society Orchestra — not the Berlin Philharmonic itself, he was careful to clarify, but a respected ensemble with a long history and a loyal audience. He was to begin in September. The appointment was the culmination of everything he had worked for, and when he spoke of it, his voice took on a quality that Imogen could only describe as reverent.

"Berlin is the center of everything now," he said. "The finest musicians, the finest halls, the finest audiences. It is where music lives and breathes."

"And the politics?" Imogen asked. Even in England, the newspapers had been full of Germany's new chancellor and his party's alarming rhetoric. "Doesn't that concern you?"

Johann waved a hand, a gesture that encompassed and dismissed the entire political landscape of Europe in a single motion. "Politicians come and go. They always do. Music endures. The concert hall is the one place where ideology cannot reach."

It was a beautiful thing to believe, and Imogen wanted to believe it too.

Over the remaining days of the festival, they were inseparable. Johann attended all three of her ensemble performances, sitting in the front row with his arms crossed and his head tilted at the slight angle she would come to recognize as his posture of critical listening. After the final concert — a performance of Brahms's Piano Quartet in G minor that Imogen felt, with quiet certainty, was the best playing she had ever done — he found her backstage and took both her hands in his.

"You have something rare," he said. "Not just technique. Feeling. You play as though the music matters to you, not just as sound but as — as truth."

No one had ever said anything like that to her before. Her teachers had praised her discipline. Her colleagues in the Consort had complimented her reliability. But no one had ever suggested that her playing contained truth.

"Come to Berlin," he said.

"Johann —"

"I'm serious. There is a place for you there. Not just with me — though I hope with me, very much — but in the musical life of the city. You could play with any number of ensembles. Your talent deserves a larger stage."

"We've known each other for ten days."

"I have spent my entire career learning to recognize quality in the first few bars. Ten days is more than enough."

She returned to England. She resumed her place in the Blackfriars Consort. She practiced, performed, took the train to Ashford on Sundays to have lunch with her mother, and tried to convince herself that Salzburg had been a pleasant interlude and nothing more.

Johann wrote to her every three days. His letters were long, vivid, and persuasive. He described his rehearsals, his musicians, the concert hall with its gilded ceiling and its acoustics that made even mediocre playing sound noble. He described the apartment he had taken in Charlottenburg, with tall windows that overlooked a courtyard full of linden trees. He described the city itself — its museums, its theaters, its parks, the way the light fell across the Tiergarten in the late afternoon. And woven through every description, like a recurring motif, was the simple, insistent refrain: Come.

By October, Imogen had stopped pretending that she was going to refuse. By November, she had given notice to the Consort and begun packing her belongings. In December, Johann came to England. He met her mother, who regarded him with the suspicious courtesy she reserved for all foreigners, and her father's grave in the churchyard at Ashford, where he stood with his hat in his hands and said nothing, which Imogen appreciated more than any words he might have offered.

They were married on the twenty-third of December, 1933, in a registry office in London, with two witnesses from the Consort and a bunch of winter roses that Johann had bought from a street vendor outside Paddington Station. Imogen wore a blue wool dress that she had owned for three years and had never considered particularly special until Johann told her she looked like a painting.

"Which painting?" she asked.

"One that hasn't been painted yet."

Her mother cried at the reception, which was held in the back room of a pub near the registry office. Imogen was never certain whether the tears were from happiness or from the conviction that her daughter was making a catastrophic mistake. Perhaps both. Dorothy Marchmont was a woman capable of holding contradictory emotions simultaneously, a trait Imogen had inherited and would have cause to exercise many times in the years ahead.

They left for Berlin on the second of January, 1934. Imogen carried her cello in its battered case and a single trunk containing everything she thought she would need for her new life. As the ferry pulled away from Dover, she stood on the deck and watched the white cliffs diminish until they were nothing more than a pale smudge against a gray sky.

She did not know, standing there with the salt wind in her hair and Johann's arm around her waist, that she would not see those cliffs again for nearly four years. She did not know that the life she was sailing toward would demand of her things she could not yet imagine. She knew only that she was in love, and that the music was calling, and that Berlin was waiting.

It was enough. For a while, it was more than enough.