A CLASSICAL EPITAPH : Reaffirming the Existence of a Late Friend by Immersing One’s Soul in the Music He Loved

My friend Ulysses was the sort of academic eccentric you might expect to find in a Barbara Pym novel, a young African-American for whom culture had truly ground to a halt somewhere around 1785. He read poets like Petrarch and Spenser for pleasure, he swooned over Bellini and he searched record stores for import versions of long-forgotten trio sonatas by Tartini and Zelenka. If he could have gotten away with it, I have no doubt that he would have worn waistcoats and pantaloons.

His particular obsession was the music of Antonio Vivaldi, and when I first started to hang out with him during our freshman year at UCLA, he already owned recordings of some 300 of Vivaldi’s 650 concertos. (I gather he was considered unusual at Inglewood High.) He may have been enrolled as a violin-performance student, but he was really trying to find a way to major in Vivaldi.

Ulysses, I think, was regarded as an indifferent violinist. When he worked through the Bruch G-minor Concerto, say, an overwrought relic of 19th-Century Romanticism that is generally the first major work career-track violin students are required to learn, his intonation was uncertain and his phrasing reminded me of a truck changing gears on a steep uphill grade. When we sight-read Beethoven together (I played cello), the sustained cantilena seemed to come out in clots. But when he played the Baroque concertos he loved, his long fingers flashed, tricky bits of passage-work flew beneath his bow, and implied inner complexities sang out as clearly as they did in the Bach chorales we studied in theory class. He was born to play this music. He breathed it, romped through it like a colt through clover.

With a flutist and an oboist from our first-year music theory class, we formed a Baroque quartet that must have gigged at half the weddings in Bel-Air for a couple of years, propelling brides up the aisle with Pachelbel’s inevitable Canon in D, rocketing them down again with some Telemann snippet or another. We played French quartet sonatas from microfilmed manuscripts that probably hadn’t been heard in 200 years. We played Vivaldi, of course, and--once--we played a transcription of a Stravinsky transcription of an air by Pergolesi. (Ulysses didn’t like Stravinsky--the composer had once quipped that Vivaldi hadn’t written 650 concertos but rather one concerto 650 times. Ulysses never forgave him for that.)

In classical music, as in sports, talent generally sorts itself out pretty early, and as a decided non-virtuoso, I became less interested in Geminiani trio sonatas than in the Germs. I left the quartet, and I gradually lost touch with Ulysses. His tastes had by this time expanded to include Haydn and certain relics of the late 18th Century, but certainly not so far as punk rock. Every so often I’d hear about him from a mutual friend, about a prestigious graduate fellowship he’d won or a scholarship he’d been awarded to study in Italy, some particularly wonderful Baroque opera he’d had a part in putting on, but I never got around to giving him a call. Music had brought us together as young men. Music had driven us apart again.

A while ago, I was sorting through some stuff my late father had left behind, his own subtle musical intellect deconstructed into a few dozen boxes of opera librettos and scratchy Shostakovich LPs, when I ran across a program for an early-music festival at UCLA. Soiled and creased, the years-old program fell open to a page that dedicated the festival to the memory of Ulysses, who had himself recently died. I hadn’t known.

I rummaged through my father’s records until I found a copy of Vivaldi’s Gloria I thought he’d had. I took the disc out of its sleeve, I carefully put it on my turntable and I turned the volume on the preamp as high as it would go. Vivaldi’s magnificent trumpets rattled the windows of my apartment until I thought they might crack.

DR, Steven Salerno