Beethoven's Banister

Yellowhammer

The other day - maybe due to my advanced age, or upon hearing that I've been writing a memoir - a friend asked me how I would choose to come back in the next life, if there is one. 

"As a busker," I responded. I didn't give my answer much thought, except that I've always liked street performers. "Maybe as a great orchestra conductor, like Toscanini, maybe a pianist too, or Arthur Fiedler. My mother took me to see the legendary Fiedler lead the Boston Pops at the Shell in the summer of 1941 beside the Charles River. I recall the outdoor spectacle vividly though the mists of early memories. After that, I took to conducting radio music with a yellow pencil. One of my aunts gave me a baton, real or perhaps a toy one. 

Beethoven 

That began my childhood busking career. Housing was scarce. For a while, my parents and I lived at the house of my paternal grandparents in the then toney, Boston district of Brighton. It was a spacious three-floor affair formally furnished in Victorian mahogany and velvet, with plush Persian rugs, bronze statuettes and oil portraits of great composers. The air smelled faintly of incense and my grandmother's Chanel. It seemed a sacred space dedicated to classical music and the better things in life. 

Luisa Ardizzoni Tosi 

My grandmother, Luisa Ardizzoni Tosi, was retired opera singer and one of New England's most sought-after music teachers, who gave lessons at her baby grand piano in a dedicated conservatory. I could hear her students practicing their scales and operatic arias though conservatory's French doors while I played with toy fighter planes in the parlor. My mother was among the students - actually, Nonna Luisa's star protégé, who had given solo concerts and performed with the Boston Symphony. 

She was very young to have a five-year-old son, something of an embarrassment in those straightlaced times, married - in a hasty shotgun union - to my Nonna Luisa's middle son. But who was counting? 

My grandparents had a live-in maid. I was the only child among a family of adults. I slid down a mahogany banister every morning from the upstairs bedrooms, with my mother holding her breath each time.

ETA Hoffmann self-portrait

My grandmother hosted a weekly dinner and musicale for relatives and friends, with singers and complete operas or concert pieces played on the Tosi family's mechanical wonder - a bulky console with local and shortwave radio  (over which we could hear overseas wartime broadcasts from the BBC) and a "drop mechanism" phonograph machine that could play whole albums of complete symphonies and operas on shellac disks. 

I would stand in front of the console in my kiddie pajamas and conduct symphonies with my baton in time with the music. I had memorized classics enough to anticipate passages, the location of instruments in an imaginary orchestra and to "direct" the passages they would play. I was the floor show as guests hummed along, sipping espresso and brandy, nibbling small helpings of Italian pastries. 

Arturo Toscanini

My grandmother would call bedtime at the end of concerto or symphony.  I would take my cast iron, painted brown, grizzly bear piggy bank and around the room to each guest who would dutifully deposit pennies, nickels and dimes into its honey pot slot. For that brief time, I became, in practice, a child busker.

Beethoven's symphonies were my specialty, particularly the iconic 5th, "the Fate Symphony" with its familiar, electrifying dah-dah-dah DAAAA opening. Spelling "V" in Morse Code, Beethoven's masterpiece had become a wartime signature of "victory," a favorite of anti-fascist Toscanini, who had left Mussolini's Italy to lead NBC's Symphony Orchestra in New York. 

Later in life, I learned oddly that - according to the eccentric German composer and critic E.T.A. Hoffman (of Jacques Offenbach's opera fame) - that the sweet, high-pitched call of the tiny Yellowhammer songbird had inspired nature-loving Beethoven to build his symphony on the famous phrase - raised to monumental proportions.

I loved to read up on music as a grew up, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Verdi, Rossini, Puccini et al, leading me into worlds of literature and history besides music. 

Ma (Alba) and I c. 1945 

I thought I would grow up to be a conductor.  "A train conductor?" adults would ask. "An orchestra conductor," I would respond. Fate intervened, however. I nearly died of a ruptured appendix; my life saved by then newly developed antibiotics. I ceased my banister sliding and mimed conducting during long months of recovery.  Then I moved to California with my parents. The family Italian deli food business needed my father to broker California tomatoes and olive oil to replace European supplies cut off by the war. 

Lockheed P-38 Lightning_1942

With my parents' brothers serving in the U.S. Armed Services overseas, my father went to work as a welder in a Burbank, California Lockheed defense plant building twin-engine P-38 Lightning fighter-bombers. Our little Hollywood District apartment had no record console, nor a piano. My parents split up. Times were hard. I lowered my sights - regrettably.  But not all was lost. I was always an avid reader, who eventually took to writing stories. Music proved my gateway into many cultures. 

So here I am, collecting coins for royalties, although still with a passion for the symphonies, concertos and opera. Beautifully performed, fine music of all kinds chokes me up, and at age 87, I still struggle to hide my tears, feeling unjustifiably foolish.  Such is social conditioning. We have to admit we are complex beings who don't always make sense. Neither does art.   

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Cover by Eleanor Spiesss-Ferris

Umberto Tosi's recently published books include the highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mystery The Phantom Eye, plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor.

 His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and managing editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. 

He was also editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.

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