waiting hands.
Toby gives the piece a quick scan: Jon uses conventional notation with a hodge-podge of time signatures.
“Perfect encore piece,” Jon says, hovering. “Bravura, yet compact at three and a half minutes.”
Toby taps his toe on the floor as written notes translate to sound in his head. Perfect pitch arrived at birth, but rhythm comes from the heart’s own beat.
“Give it a go, will you?”
Toby smiles. “Sure.”
“Horace!” Jon barks at the luthier hunched over half asleep in a neighbouring booth. “Lend the man one of your gut buckets.”
Horace Manners, who builds concert-level guitars and Celtic harps, wakes up with a snap and gestures toward Toby. “Take your pick.”
Silky smooth grain, spruce top with a yew body made from timber milled on Horace’s property near Lake Simcoe — waiting list for an instrument at least five years. Toby grabs one off the stand. A guitar’s not a newborn. You can bash it around a little. It improves the sound.
Horace winces. Toby grins, but he does remove his zippered jacket and drape it over the back of the chair. He’s the prince of sight-readers. Give him anything and he’ll rip it off the first time, not just correct notes but phrasing, expression, the whole nine yards.
This guitar, redolent of seasoned wood and coats of meticulously applied polish, nestles against his body, a perfect fit. He inhales, and the instrument breathes with him. Run his hands over the smooth neck, then try a chromatic scale: boomy bass notes, brand-new strings too crisp. It takes at least a year to break in a new instrument.
Toby launches into the skittish piece.
The trick is not to over-think, just enter the bloody thing, one eye out for the next corner. First few bars conjure up a tilted version of Dowland’s famous “Lady Beatrice’s Jump,” but isn’t that a Latin beat starting in the bass? The instrument is loud and full-voiced, crafted to reach the far corners of a concert hall without amplification.
A small group gathers around the booth as the music erupts. Enter Javier, then a couple of other luthiers emerging from their booths, followed by students from the local conservatory, all pressing in to hear the world premiere of “Dowland’s Backbite.”
Toby nails the complicated patterns, the zigzag of counter-rhythms and nasty transitions, his jaw tight and shoulders hunched, bronco rider taming the beast.
When he finishes, giving the final chord ample time to ring, he lowers his hands.
Someone says, “Holy shit.”
There is a smattering of applause and even laughter.
Jon Smyth’s eyes burrow in on him. “I know you.”
Toby recoils. This is not what he expects.
“I remember this bloke.” He points at Toby, then glances around at the gathered crowd.
Toby squeezes the guitar into his chest — body armour.
“Paris,” Jon announces. “You went off the rails. But first you ambushed everyone in the semis. After hearing you play, I nearly packed it in.” He’s extending a hand, and Toby understands he’s meant to shake it. “I offer you this work for your repertoire.”
Toby remembers to smile — a dragonfly lighting up at this moment, wings shot with gold. He’s always known this about himself, that he’d rise higher, faster, translucent.
The composer must have sat at this window looking down at the bustle of St. Lawrence Boulevard, working at this beat-up desk, really just a table with a drawer. The room is small but bright, and Leopold Hirsch was already feeling the effects of the osteoarthritis that crippled him in later life. His last couple of decades before dying of emphysema were spent back in Europe where he scraped by thanks to earlier achievements. Didn’t he conduct a regional orchestra in the Netherlands?
Toby is alone in the museum room except for Lucy, who cranes her neck to read the titles on the top row of the bookshelf. He runs his hand over the bumpy surface of the table despite a sign that warns: do not touch. But he is here to touch, to inhale, to enter the life of this man.
Leopold Hirsch, born 1900, lived in this third-floor apartment with his family for close to twenty years. The notebook splayed under glass was fashioned by the composer, heavy paper sewn roughly into leather covers, and it’s clear by its concave shape that he must have carried it around in his back pocket. There’s a scattershot of notes pencilled on hand-drawn staff lines, the stems unanchored to note heads, flags tiny as commas. This is the man’s mind in action, untethered, the actual record of his musical thoughts as they tumbled out. The label describes the journal as being “preliminary fragments” of what became “Triptych for Guitar and Orchestra” — here, a gleam in its creator’s eye.
Toby can feel the weight of the man’s arm as Hirsch leaned over the desk, while elsewhere in the flat his wife cooked up a batch of sauerkraut as she ducked between roughhousing children: “Shhh, your father is working.”
Toby’s head jerks up.
Did someone speak?
Just Lucy who is still on tiptoe, reading. “They’re all in Polish or German,” she says. “Beautiful bindings. He must have brought his library with him on the steamer. And look, Toby, this toy is handcrafted. Do you think Hirsch made it for one of his children?” She holds up a small wooden tugboat painted red and black.
Toby hears but doesn’t listen. His heart has tapped open. He’s fallen back into time and can smell the long-vanished bakery below with its old-country sweet buns, and when he pulls at the sleeves of his jacket, it’s the ratty suit coat that Leopold Hirsch wears in the photograph above the desk. Another richer fragrance of pipe tobacco permeates the room after all these years. Hirsch got his favourite brand shipped to him from overseas, except during the war years when he lost track of most of his relatives, some of whom moved here for weeks or months, crowded into the bedrooms, rolling cots up the narrow staircase.
The room is a blur. Toby tastes salt, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he stands helpless and watery, half drowning in his own fluid.
Lucy notices and quickly reaches to touch his hair. “It is your great luck to feel deeply. Which is why you play like you do.”
The book of études was composed earlier, back in Europe when Hirsch was still a student at the conservatory, but the gorgeous “Triptych” was formed in this room. The work begins with that lush romantic melody, and you think you’re in for a good time, then it kicks open and you don’t know where the hell you are.
Lucy drops her hand and nods toward the corner. “Do you suppose there’s a real guitar in there?” she asks. A battered instrument case leans against the wall. “Or is it just for show?”
Toby says, “One way to find out.” He strides across the room. Leaning to snap open the case, he suddenly stops himself. He doesn’t want to know. If this case is empty, a sham, better that it stay shut. He rises to his feet and backs off.
“While he was beavering away at his scores, his wife was peeling potatoes and caring for the mob of children,” Lucy says. She slips into the hallway where the walls are decorated
