The Russian Way

And so it went.

Week after week, I tripped down the cobblestones to the Tbilisi State Conservatory for my lessons with Misha, the Russian god of all things cello.

After my first lesson, we had established that I knew absolutely nothing about the cello, and he made it his mission to teach me properly. We also confirmed that we had virtually no language in common. He spoke Russian, Georgian, and German, and I spoke English and nearly incomprehensible Spanish. Misha smiled his beautiful smile, which hid the demon underneath, and said in broken English, “Is ok. Music is international language.” All I could think was, oh, if wishing made it so, my friend. But we moved on.

He sat facing me, knee to knee, while I played open strings; we weren’t moving on to actual notes until my bow and my strings formed a perfect 90-degree angle, and I released my crazy death grip on the base of my bow.

Sometimes he would hold both ends of my bow in his hands and saw back and forth, like some sort of bizarre tree cutting ritual. Every week. For an hour.

The irony was, I was taught to play the cello by a Russian violinist, so all of the care and attention to each infinitesimal detail was making me a little crazy. Maybe I’m just too much of an American slob looking to cut a few corners, but the Russian teaching method was a soul-destroying wasteland of endless repetition.

Misha gave me an old exercise book to take home for practice, the bottom of which said, in Cyrillic, “Soviet Music Publishing.” That figured. Only a Soviet could have come up with exercises this fantastically boring. But it was also 2012. Hadn’t the Russians managed to come up with another imprint for their method books? In contrast, American method books teach you a few notes, then you get to play silly little ditties like “Hot Cross Buns.” While absurdly infantile, an idiotic song made me feel like I was making progress.

Even though I understood the importance of practicing good technique, I was starting to feel a little mutinous. As I lugged my cello up the hill to my house and then up five flights of stairs, I wondered, is this really how you achieve excellence on a stringed instrument? Maybe Misha was secretly torturing me, hoping I would just give up and go away. It didn’t help much that Christopher, my husband, would be lying indolently on the couch drinking a beer, taking mild delight in my aggravation. Every Saturday I would drag myself breathless and sweating through our front door, and he would sort of smirk, “Did you get to play any notes this week?” “No,” I would mutter darkly, cursing under my breath. These were cello lessons? This was boredom in an iron grey room for 60 euros an hour.

One afternoon at my school, I was whining about the monotony of my lessons to my new friend Natasha, a beautiful, but slightly flinty Russian blonde who took vast amounts of pride in her heritage. She gave me absolutely no sympathy whatsoever, and lectured me sternly on the grave importance of exact, precise, staggeringly perfect technique.

“Russians only do things one way,” she said. “Whatever it is, whatever skill is required, we master the technique before we move on to anything else. Why do you think all Russians have exactly the same handwriting? There is only one way to hold a pencil. Why do you think Russia has produced the very best athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and scientists? Because we perfect everything technically. People who cannot master technique go on to find other work to do. Perhaps in the janitorial arts.”

Oh yeah? I wanted to retort. Well, I’ll see your Rostropovich and raise you a Yo-Yo Ma. It occurred to me that if Natasha hadn’t been raised in Moscow, she would have made a fabulous New Yorker.

The thing is, while my lessons were dull as dirt, I had always wondered what it would be like to be a Russian. Ever since I read Anna Karenina back in the 1980s, I had become deeply, hopelessly fascinated with Russia. Dark, snowy winters, enchanted swans, the Winter Palace, Tsar Nicholas and his tragic family, the colorful language – all of it struck me as wonderfully magical. What would my life have been like if some crazy party apparatchik had stuck an instrument in my hands when I was a child and said, “You will play this all day long, forever.”

Of course, with my luck, I probably would have ended up the wife of a potato farmer, distilling vodka till my cirrhotic liver planted me in a frozen grave, but who knows? In my fanciful Russian daydreams, maybe someone would have given me a cello and, by now, I would be Natalia Gutman, hair flying with each perfect note.

So, I worked harder. With Natasha’s help, I was attempting to revive my long lost Russian language skills, so that Misha and I could communicate better. On a whim, I bought a book called Dirty Russian, which was basically how to curse in Russian, but included some hysterical expressions I could only ever use in a bar fight in Moscow. It felt really good though, when frustration with open strings reached a boiling point, to scream some horribly graphic expletive in Russian. But then I got back to my monotonous drills and continued sawing away at my open strings.

Later, with the assistance of a cool glass of Bagrationi champagne, I realized that Misha was doing me a colossal favor with his nit-picky insistence on perfect technique. I would never, ever play even remotely well without the basic skills he was trying to get me to master. In a roundabout way, he was also paying me a compliment by taking me this seriously. While the culture of “adult beginners” was gathering steam in the States, in Russia you were wasting your time if you hadn’t mastered an instrument by the time your amniotic fluid dried. So, I redoubled my effort, moved my cello into my bedroom and practiced in front of a mirror until my bow was perfectly straight and my hand was so relaxed I feared I was slipping into a coma.

After a few more weeks of mind numbing boredom, my patience was finally rewarded. I moved on to scales, and Misha gave me a very simple solo to practice, called “March.” Now that my left hand was finally called into action, we had still more work ahead of us, because my fingering was fairly awful, too.

But I had a song! A real song! I played it to death. I practiced and practiced until my kids shouted at me to stop. But on one perfect Saturday, I felt such an overwhelmingly sense of accomplishment when I played “March” in perfect pitch and time with Misha accompanying me on the piano. We finally retired “March” after about a month, and he gave it to me to keep, “as a keepsake.” I put it in my cello case, along with lots of other odds and ends of memorabilia, but as a reminder of how, at that moment, I had moved microscopically closer to mastering “The Russian Way.” RL