"Breakfast is ready, Sam". Calling him from the kitchen and getting no response, his wife came looking for him. Sharon had been up since 4 ; she would be returning to bed after he left. Dressed in a red robe, her hair done up in curlers, 4 years younger than he was , she looked 10 years older . Sam was very fit for a man of 62 .
" Just a minute, Sharon." He returned to the bathroom and washed up at the sink. The heavy demand for Sam's talents would keep him in the West for the next eight days. His schedule didn't bring him back to the Boston area before his Christmas day appearance with the Boston Philharmonic in Symphony Hall. With a bit of luck he and Sharon could then spend the evening with their 3 children, Abe, Simon and Rebecca, all grown to maturity with their own families and concerns. He would take them to a good kosher restaurant in Brookline.
A brief respite! Sam dried his face with a towel, threw on a bathrobe and slippers and shuffled into the dining-room. After Christmas, Sam wasn't expected home again until January 11th. The interim would see him trekking through snowstorms to engagements all over the country, as well as several abroad.
We ought not to give the wrong impression: one shouldn't conclude that Sam and Sharon felt under any pressure to make the best use of the available time. On the contrary, they saw perhaps too much of one another. Sam only worked two months out of the year.
On his way into the dining-room, Sam paused to adjust the Hanukah decorations on the mantelpiece over the fireplace; then he verified the time from a small pendulum clock. Standing at the dinner table before lowering himself onto the soft cushion of his custom-made upholstered chair , he emitted a sigh of fervent contentment. The aroma of coffee and clatter of dishware signaled Sharon's imminent arrival. While he waited he relived , as he was fond of doing, the high moments of his graduation in June of 1946, at the top of his class, from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He chuckled at the high hopes that teachers, family and fellow students alike had placed in him, and simpered as he contemplated, once more, the cleverness with which he had disappointed them all!
All the faces of the teachers beloved of his youth rose up again before his mind's eye: kind, dumpy and wise Professor Baumgartner, chairman of the Violin Division; the brilliant, exquisitely groomed Professor Spinelli for composition; Professor Lutoslowski, always in a hurry, never on time: piano. Each and every one of THEM had assumed that he , Sam Goldberg, would work like a HORSE at the plow for all the rest of his days and STARVE for ART ! But he , Sam Goldberg the violinist, had quickly laid to rest their European Conservatory old-fogey foolishness: HE had done the UNFORGIVABLE, and THRIVED!
Sharon, sad and unsmiling, came in from the kitchen dragging a tray holding cereal, coffee and eggs. He planned to retire in 3 years, bringing to an end a very successful, in fact extraordinary, though far from brilliant, career. Age had not mistreated him. He was only slightly overweight, in good health for a man in his 60's, his glasses prescription stronger because of fading eyesight, his hearing unimpaired. The tonsure of silver hair stretching behind his ears around the back of his head only added further distinction to his bearing as a respected senior musician.
As Sam reminded himself, he lived like a celebrity from doing the bare minimum of work - "like Jascha Heifetz!", he cried, talking out loud to himself, " I probably earn more, I bet you", he gloated inwardly , " in real dollars, than Baumgartner, Spinelli and Lutoslowksi ever did - all put together !...And in America!" he cackled so loud that even Sharon, who had lost most of her hearing over the decade, could hear him, " MONEY is where it's AT ! MONEY' S WHAT COUNTS!"
"Eat up, Sam... you have to leave soon. " His habit of talking to himself in public had gotten worse as he aged. His reflections were continued in silence : What was my secret of success, I wonder ? It was not the first time he had asked himself this essentially rhetorical question: CLEVERNESS ! , just for starters. Then... A TOTAL LACK OF AMBITION.....Finally... A HARD-NOSED PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE! ....A capacity for "realism"! ... beyond the ordinary, far beyond that of every other musician I've ever known ... .. "SAM" , he congratulated himself, not in the least put out by the shamelessness of his self-satisfaction, You've got that primitive grasp on the verities of life that puts you in the company of the likes of Rockefellers, Vanderbilts , Gettys!....
Sharon watched him with concern. He didn't realize that he was getting old, but to her the symptoms were obvious. She seriously worried that he might not make it through this Christmas. After his return in January she intended to put pressure on him to retire, or at least reduce his commitments . They had enough money; it was only force of habit that kept him at an occupation that was no longer required of him. Or was he being driven by something else ? No one understands what motivates artists. She certainly didn't understand Sam, and she'd been married to him for 32 years.
It was patently self-evident that the majority of music lovers only wanted to hear a small number of established masterpieces played over and over again in exactly the same way. The realities were enough to discourage any serious , security-conscious young artist, and Sam briefly considered dropping out of Curtis and enrolling in medical school. Then his imagination went to work, and in due course he discovered a silver lining within the dark cloud of professional music. Any qualified musician who invested his energy into mastering a few shrewdly chosen war-horses could forever afterwards chuck out the sentimental garbage about suffering in garrets and snubbing the Philistines and working for nothing and live out his allotted span of days surrounded by all the blessings of comfort and wealth. The remaining residue of work was more in the nature of a hobby: cultivating the agents, institutions and grateful audiences who would reward him handsomely for the undeviating rendition of the tried-and-trusted.
He continued to weigh the career options in classical music up to the end. Providing neither money nor job satisfaction, teaching was definitely not one of them. At his senior honors recital at Curtis in May of 1946 Sam presented the Paganini Concerto in Eb , the Wienawski Concerto in D minor and the Bartok Unaccompanied Violin Sonata. More fiendishly difficult pieces do not exist in the violin repertoire. By graduation day he had narrowed the list down to a single indestructible paradigm: the first violin part of the orchestral accompaniment to Handel' s Messiah, a score technically accessible to any talented elementary school student after two years of Suzuki method .
Of course it should be noted that for accomplished musicians there are no easy pieces in the classical repertoire. During an interview with Martin Bookspan on the PBS series, "Live From Lincoln Center", Itzhak Perlman once explained that Mozart's violin concertos , although lacking in every gymnastic device present, for example, in any of the concertos by Paganini , are in many respects more difficult to perform in public. There is total exposure on every note, no tricks to make the facile sound complicated, no display of brilliant effects to disguise poor musicianship or faulty intonation. Even so simple a score as the first violin part of Handel's Messiah will resound, when played by a musician at Sam's level, as far above the rendition of your generic orchestra violinist, as the ravishing bouquet of vintage Chateau-Laffite Rothschild will soar above that of ordinary table wine. Sam devoted 3 years, from 1947 to 1950, to the attainment of absolute mastery of the Messiah score. Every note was committed to memory, all bowings revised a dozen times, fingerings many times more.
This experimentation with minor technical improvements went on for another decade , and never completely stopped at any time in his career. He sought out and studied every recording in the catalogues. He read the musicologists, analyzing the score theoretically, historically and artistically. In the hope of gaining insight into the oratorio's deep structure, he went so far as to explore the writings of Heinrich Schenker! Ultimately he knew every note of every orchestral part, the chorus, and all the vocal soloists, as thoroughly as any conductor.
It is rumored he once stunned Leopold Stokowski, of fabled and prodigious memory, by pointing out an error in the bassoon part undetected by the maestro. While acquiring this proficiency, Sam supported himself by freelancing. Several orchestras wanted to make him their permanent concertmaster. He turned them all down; Sam knew what he wanted. Within a few short years he had convinced everyone in the music business that his presence on the stage at a Messiah performance galvanized orchestras and audiences alike in a way that no-one had ever imagined possible. Mind you, this was a young man, still in his twenties. Once he started playing, everything cohered; the effect was indeed amazing. Musicians who had performed in the Messiah a hundred times over suddenly found new life in what had seemed a tedious obligation. Either on stage or in the audience, to watch Sam at the helm was to be witness to a revelation. Orchestral sound gained incredible homogeneity, sophistication, style. Conductors were known to say that Sam rendered their role superfluous, he knew the music so much better than they did.
For concert hall managers, ticket agents, trustees and orchestral boards of directors, it was the testimony of the Box Office which told them everything they needed to know. By the early 1950's , Sam could -and did- call the shots. He never played anything in public but this one piece, never accepted a position lower than concertmaster, never gave autographs, or solo performances, or lessons. He banked his first million just before the Kennedy assassination. Financial insecurity was henceforth a thing of the past . Wise investments gave adequate protection to his old age.
By his own lights his crowning achievement was in the creation of a brand new profession within music: roving Messiah concertmaster. By the early 50's his career was already settling into a stable rut whose momentum would carry him through the next four decades. From January to March , and again from May to November, Sam Goldberg's fingers did not so much as graze the strings of either of his prized Old Italian Masters violins, an Amati and a Guarnerius . Getting back into shape, which he did in the months of March and November respectively, was pursued in a leisurely manner. He disciplined gradually, pacing himself through a strict though not strenuous program of exercises, etudes and scales, supplemented by jogging and workouts. He also went on a diet, not only for his physical well-being, but also because the concert season invariably brought many invitations to banquets, not all of which could be declined ,where excessively rich food was on the menu.
A month's steady training sufficed for the cruel workloads of Christmas and Easter. Between Thanksgiving and Twelfth Night and from the end of March to the beginning of May, Sam slogged between 120 to 150 gigs! Since his fees ranged from one to as much as five thousand dollars per concert , his yearly income before taxes was never less than $250,000.
Most of his effort was directed towards lining up engagements for the two seasons, in about 50 cities and towns across the United States, and a dozen or so in the rest of the world : every year took him at least once to Montreal, London, Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo, Copenhagen and Bombay, with less frequent commitments from Djakarta, Rio de Janeiro , Capetown, occasional appearances in Paris, Stockholm, etc. The overwork fell short of killing him outright, though the return more compensated him handsomely for the misery. For 8 months out of the year Sam was free to do as he damn well pleased. Though excessively arduous, even punishing during these brief intervals, his profession demanded neither inventiveness, resourcefulness, dedication, risk, or imagination . The venue for the exercise of these faculties was manifested in the intricacies and details of making arrangements: scheduling, travel, connections, cost cutting , emergencies, accommodations.
Sam loved every minute of it. The birth of the home computer had brought the decisive miracle to Sam's career. His library of diskettes held information worth millions, a multi-layered, cross- referenced encyclopedia of road maps , mileages, auto repair shops, filling stations .... up-to-date schedules, prices, specials, package deals, long distance and short distance options for trains, airline companies, major bus lines, short lines, urban and rural transit systems .... seasonal hotel accommodations .... daily , sometimes hourly weather reports across the country and around the world .... restaurant locations, menus and prices .... local addresses for violin repairmen and music stores .... large address books filled with information about all the agencies and personalities in the music world necessary for the management of his affairs .
Had he so wished, Sam could have set aside part of his free time for developing a lucrative, and much less taxing, business as a travel consultant for other musicians. Using the resources available in his information retrieval system one could arrange travel between any two accessible settlements in the United States with no more than 4 transfers between trains and planes, local buses and taxis, often with savings at 30 to 50% over the big companies such as Greyhound and Amtrak. Juggling the connections, striking a balance between time and cost, implied a talent for precision timing. Not for nothing had Sam graduated at the top of his class at Curtis : is violin-playing anything else ?
Yet as was recognized by everyone, himself included , he had no ambition. He no more wanted to be a business tycoon than he did to be a great violinist. His goal in life , oft proclaimed in fatuous detail to friend, family and associate as "Sam's practical philosophy", was to do as little work as possible, yet live like royalty. It just happened to be the case that this view of the world had, over almost 4 decades, translated itself into a calendar of two months of back-breaking labor followed by 10 months of delicious hibernation.
Sam was enormously proud of himself. While one might not agree with most of his self-satisfying justifications, there is no doubt that he had to be given credit for shrewdness: if there is one musical masterpiece that the Christian world will continue to listen to after a billion replays, it is the Messiah. Handel's Messiah will outlast McDonald's hamburgers. As long as Christianity remained a force in the world, Sam's nest-egg was indestructible. Nor was he considering new strategies for survival in the event of its' sudden demise.
In the United States, his fixed engagements as a Messiah concertmaster included Hartford, New Haven, Providence, Portland, Burlington and several other small New England towns; 4 in Boston ; 8 or more in and around New York City ; Buffalo; Syracuse; 2 in Philadelphia; Anchorage; Miami; Charleston; Louisville; Cleveland; Detroit; 3 in Chicago; St. Louis; Phoenix; Minneapolis; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Birmingham; 2 in Atlanta; 4 in Chicago; Houston; Seattle; Denver; 2 in Salt Lake City; 2 in San Francisco; 5 or more around Los Angeles, etc. These were guaranteed, while others were re-negotiated from one year to the next.
After 40 years in the profession of course, Sam hardly needed to hustle. Within the music world everybody knew him as " Sam, the Messiah Man". Many legends circulated about him. One of them centered on a booking agency in New York where, every year shortly before 11 AM on the third Monday in September, the entire staff gathered around the telephone. As they waited they placed bets on the exact minute when Sam's call would come on line. This ritual had been going on for at least 20 years. Sam always called between 11 and 11:10. In the first ten years he always introduced himself with "Hello. This is Sam. How's the Messiah doing?" Then he dropped the "This is Sam" part. Once , so the story goes, someone picked up the receiver and barked, without waiting for his voice: " Messiahs for Hire, Incorporated!"
Trade humor.
To get there on time Sam had raced through heavy traffic from Logan Airport. The holiday's wrestling match with the iron law of wages had begun the night before at a gigantic midnight mass concluding an Evangelical Congress at the St. Louis Convention Center. There had been no sleep for him that night: a plane flew him to La Guardia airport in time to preside over a 9 A.M. Messiah at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His brother, a rabbi on the faculty, sat in the audience. His refusal to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus may have been due to religious scruples, or it may also have contained an implied reproach of his brother's attitudes . Sam didn't wait to find out: a chartered limousine took him to Newark airport, where he caught the 45-minute Continental Airlines commuter shuttle to Boston. At 2 A.M. that night he would be on yet another plane back to Chicago! Then onwards to Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and St. Paul, Minnesota.
A vortex of snow whirled like a tower in his wake as he hurried through the doors . A doorman cleared the way; Sam returned no greetings. During the holiday season one could not have uncovered so much as a mustard seed of benevolence in his calculating heart .These were THE MOST LUCRATIVE DAYS of the year. From the long travail beginning with the midnight mass the night before and ending with a guest appearance with Pinchas Zuckerman's chamber orchestra in St. Paul, Sam raked in $50,000!
Sam hung his hat, coat and scarf on a rack in the performer's lounge, then dashed into the Men's Room for some quick grooming. Within 15 minutes of his arrival he was in the wings, pacing the musician's lounge. The priceless Guarnerius was withdrawn from its case, the strings tuned, the bow tightened and rosined. Warming up with scales or passage-work hardly seemed necessary: had he not already played the score twice over in less than 16 hours? Nor was it necessary even to review the slight variants in the different editions used between St. Louis , New York and Boston: Sam knew them all.
A droll recording of chimes playing the horn solo from Wagner's Siegfried recalled the audience to their seats. The auditorium's amplified din subsided as the musicians began walking onto the stage in small groups. Lights dimmed as Sam, followed by Seiji Ozawa, now in his 14th year as permanent conductor of the Boston Symphony, entered from the left.
With the consummate stage presence of a veteran of 4 decades of public service Sam returned the applause from an eager audience by a deep bow at the waist. He placed a thin handkerchief on his left shoulder; his was of the old-fashioned school that did not use shoulder-rest gadgets. His ear picked up the ambiguous "A" from the oboe which his strings , following minute adjustments , transmitted to the rest of the orchestra. Fans waved to him from the audience; he winked at them as he sat down. Comfortably seated in the concertmaster's chair, his gaze casually examined the ranges of sentimental pseudo-Greek bas- reliefs at the base of the ceiling. He recalled what Isadora Duncan had said about them: "You worship plaster Gods!" "I wonder how much", he asked himself with a rhetorical smirk , "she left in her bank account? "
Orchestra musicians treasure their ancient jokes; some of them probably go back to the Middle Ages. One of more recent origin, speaks about the viola player who dreams that he is sitting in an orchestra playing the Brahms Requiem. Upon awakening he finds himself in an orchestra, playing the Brahms Requiem. 40 years of conditioning had worked on his nervous system so as to place him far beyond the protagonist in this dour anecdote , far beyond either dreaming or sleeping, or even hypnosis . The proper analogue to Sam's spiritual achievement is rather to the workers on automobile plant assembly lines, whose mental survival depends on their capacity to totally block out their minds while on the job . One might describe Sam as someone who had fashioned himself to be , to a consummate degree, the perfect artifact of modern capitalism : a technician ridiculously over-trained for the production of an single absurdly specialized task.
These observations are important for the understanding of his distress when, starting with the fugue that enters midway through the Overture , Sam acknowledged the encroachment of a relentless , irritating though strangely welcome rumination, utterly unlike anything he'd ever experienced before. Despite all his conditioning and will power, his mind now refused to shut down on command. With an obstinate energy that caught him off balance, he found himself picking up and pursuing a train of reasoning that had actually begun the night before in St. Louis, during an endless harangue he'd been forced to listen to on divine intervention and the Virgin Birth. By the time of the entry of the tenor recitative , " Comfort Ye My People", a host of nagging reflections had swollen to the proportions of an obsession. No noticeable effects were translated into his playing. At 3 AM in the morning , blindfolded, drugged, and fast asleep , even comatose, he could still render a Messiah without faltering or blemish. This is what Sam was thinking:
Now, you take this man, Jesus. I consider him as just a man, mind you. Remember: just a man. I' m a Jew, ( they don't let you forget it) .... I'm never going to believe the Christians' "Son of God" cockamamie ... Between you, me and the metronome , believing in God is already a crock, if you know what I mean. I never met anyone who ever made a dime crying Hallelujah and crawling before an old man with a beard , begging for forgiveness ..... So I' m a lousy Jew, too , all right? So why should I worry about his so-called Son , I ask you? .....But you know, his birth was a good thing for me ...... Hey ! I' ve made a fat income from it all my life... and for music in general ....they tell me that Christmas carols are like a soup kitchen for jazz musicians on the skids....and his death gave us Easter, too, a real blessing ...as a matter of fact, the goyim consider his death more important than his birth, otherwise there wouldn't be any religion... and , say, when you really come down to it , he went on, with a disturbing sort of momentum,
....The way this man, Jesus, died, couldn't have been accidental ...... He was just a man, remember; just a man .... a man, not God.... for the Holy Scriptures say that He rose up in the flesh and appeared to his disciples after 3 days.....and they believed in Him.....and again on the road to Emmaus...and only doubting Thomas refused to believe...until he touched the wounds.....( what utter balderdash ! ) .....and then the Church fathers went out into the desert, and fasted...and the martyrs were persecuted by Rome... but then Rome acknowledged Christianity as its state religion...and it took root in the two Empires, East and West ..... then came the Dark Ages .... and the Faith conquered Europe.... and spread all over the world ....
Startled, Sam shook his head as if waking from a dream : what's this all about? But he soon fell back into the same train of thought :.
... then, in the 18th century, George , the English monarch imported from Germany, brought Handel along with him ..... who conquered the English musical world .... and King George the First commissioned the Messiah .... or maybe it was George the Second .... I don't think it was George the Third, that's the American Revolution...I don't know, I' m not a musicologist! I' m not even a violinist when you come down to it, or rather I' m a funny kind of violinist..... so that millions of Christians around the world would flock to performances of the Messiah at Christmas and Easter, year after year for centuries, .... so that I, SAM GOLDBERG, COULD DRAW A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR FORTY YEARS WITHOUT HAVING TO LEARN A SINGLE GOD-DAMNED NEW PIECE OF MUSIC!...or pretend that I really enjoy living like an artist, that is to say like a DOG , or be forced against my will to be creative, or show initiative, or invent some kind of ambition IN THIS MISERABLE, CUT-THROAT, RUTHLESS, VICIOUS AMERICAN ECONOMY!!
Sam Goldberg' s violin obbligato, written by himself 20 years earlier to accompany the alto aria " He Was Despised And Rejected, A Man of Sorrows And Acquainted With Grief " , was always the high point of any of his Messiah concerts. There existed a dedicated following of music lovers all over the country who came to his concerts solely to experience the transport of ecstasy delivered by the sound of his lyric violin sobbing above this aria. As he began to draw the soft strains that raised the illusion of an amber glow over the trembling strings, Sam could scarcely restrain himself from crying out:
" WHAT ALL OF THIS MEANS IS THAT CHRIST DIED FOR ME - FOR ME ALONE! CHRIST HAD TO DIE SO THAT SAM GOLDBERG COULD LIVE!! "
Like the sun emerging from the edge of a vanishing storm-cloud, Sam's stiff grimace crinkled across his face. Smug satisfaction rippled from ear to ear. Observing the cleverness he'd demonstrated in reaching this conclusion had given him great pleasure. But now it was time once again to hew the line: his special relation to Christ could be debated in his 10 months of leisure. Calling upon almost half a century of habit, Sam again totally emptied his mind.
Yet with an upsurge of mounting horror he found himself, for the first time ever in all his days as a Messiah concertmaster , thinking about the meaning of the words written in the libretto! ......" He was despised and rejected, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. " Responding to a strange agony moving through the depths of his interior oppression, Sam moaned softly to himself:
" I, too, am acquainted with grief!...Didn't Julie, my daughter, die in a car accident when she was only 15? ...And when my mother died while I was on tour, I couldn't miss even a single day to be at her bedside. ...It didn't matter that I loved her as much as any son can love a mother ... she had to die alone!...And the doctors say there' s trouble with my heart...They'll soak me for all the money I ever made , then throw my body into an unmarked grave......like Mozart!... And property values are dropping in Concord .... too many ethnics, like Sharon and me. We'll have to move - in our 70's ! ....And Sharon, I know she doesn't love me, I' ve known it for many years...." .
Sam wept copiously. The musicians seated at the adjacent stands were too thoroughly engrossed in their chores to take notice.
" ...Despised...Rejected.. Rejected of Men! That describes me exactly, just as it did that man , Jesus...' He gave his face to the smiters!' And, Oh, DON'T I know what that means! I know how they all hate me, ME, SAM GOLDBERG THE MESSIAH MAN!, because I graduated at the top of my class, and GOT RICH through mastering a single score and playing it for the rest of my career! Oh they hate me all right! Like a moth returning to the scorching flame , his mind feasted obsessively on its torment :
" I am Sam Goldberg, the Messiah Man, despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief! BEHOLD AND SEE, IF THERE BE ANY SORROW LIKE UNTO MY SORROW!!...."
By a powerful effort of will Sam managed to pull himself together. Anyone observing him at that moment would quickly have seen that he was in the grips of a major spiritual crisis. But why should anyone have thought that something was amiss ? The audience couldn't see him very well. The players were busy. His violin playing was, if possible, above even his usual standard of flawless perfection.
Yet somewhere in the middle of the chorus , " The Lord Gave The Word " , there came that irrevocable moment when the deep truth he'd sought through these two long hours of misery exploded into consciousness, when Sam's suffering psyche was rent by the force of a grandiose revelation: It arrived at the end of a long interior discourse that went something like this :
" .....Jesus was a Man of Sorrows... I, too, am a Man of Sorrows...Jesus has been called 'The Messiah' .... I, too, am called 'The Messiah Man'...and Jesus died for me ALONE , so that I could live! WHAT CAN THIS MEAN? WHAT ELSE CAN THIS MEAN?
.......Jesus was born... ( Behold, a Virgin shall conceive ! ) ....Jesus preached to the multitudes; those who had ears to hear, heard ; the others did not....He healed the lame and blind, raised the dead....He suffered and died on the Cross , the Prince of Peace... Then the disciples proclaimed the teachings of their beloved Rabbi. ...The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans , 70 A.D . ..The Jews dispersed, my ancestors among them... Constantine converted to Christianity , A.D. 336.....Then begins the long line of Popes... Charlemagne, feudalism, the Middle Ages ..... European classical music develops, very slowly ,under the patronage of the Roman church..... Luther, Calvin... Henry the Eighth and the Church of England.... Elizabeth, the golden age of English music and letters.... Cromwell, the demise of music in England...the Restoration, which chases out the Puritans and brings music back into the churches... 1688, the Glorious Revolution; James the Second is booted out, .... William of Orange is invited over from Holland...Then Parliament asks George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, if he wants to be king...1702...He instructs Handel to join him in 1712...... WHO COMPOSES THE MESSIAH IN 1741 ! WHICH IS PERFORMED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DUBLIN, ON APRIL 13, 1742 ! ... Wasn't there some kind of calendar reform about then? .... Where was I ?"
.... Sam paused, only for a brief moment, before going on .... Mozart arranges the score for large orchestra ....a Messiah cult evolves around Christmas and Easter, together with evergreen trees, wreathes, bunnies, turkeys, reindeer, Santa Claus... To the sole end that SAM GOLDBERG, ALSO A JEW, COULD KNOW FULLNESS OF LIFE!!"
There was not a minute to be lost. As the Hallelujah Chorus burst over Symphony Hall , Sam sprang to his feet and cried: "I AM JESUS CHRIST! I, SAM GOLDBERG, AM GOD' S OWN SON! GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE SENT ME, SAM GOLDBERG, HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, SO THAT YE MIGHT HAVE ETERNAL LIFE!!! "
T he entire audience was on its feet bellowing the Hallelujah Chorus at the top of its lungs and unaware of what was happening. But Sam's wild antics were being played out in full view of the entire Boston Symphony . Seiji Ozawa went on with his conducting, indicating to the startled musicians that they should continue to play on as if nothing were the matter. He'd dealt with worse crises in his 35 years as a conductor. He paused long enough to bend down to the principal cellist and give him instructions to rush offstage, alert the security guards and telephone for an ambulance. The curtains would come down at the termination of the Hallelujah Chorus. F or the moment there was nothing else to be done : Sam had to be allowed to rave at liberty. His Buddhist father, he reflected, would have provided an apt proverb.
" They all crack up in this racket" , Ozawa murmured bitterly to himself in Japanese, "Each in his own way, sooner or later, they all go down."