February 15, 2002
MY MANHATTANThe Memorabilia of Music
(Page 2 of 2) In these stories, legendary performers become lovable family friends. The great Belgian violinist Eugčne Ysaye
was a big gourmand, Ms. Wurlitzer explained casually. "He would knock
on the window to find out what was for lunch, and if it was something
he liked, he'd knock on the main door to be let in. And who wouldn't
invite Ysaye over for lunch?"
This intimate sense of connection to musical spirits long gone is, of
course, present not only in Ms. Wurlitzer's family stories, but in the
collection itself. The "graphics room," off the main gallery, is filled
with signed letters, autographs and musical quotations. Many of these
are tastefully matted and carefully stacked one atop the other on
shelves: a message scrawled on Shostakovich's private stationery; a
calling card from Mahler with a note inviting a friend to cocktails at
a Vienna hotel; a concert ticket signed by Berlioz; a folk rhythm
jotted down by Bartók. These were all quotidian moments captured from
transcendent lives, and I loved the way they were now piled cozily
together, a Gordian tangle of chronology, geography and memory.
And while similar relics might appear in a museum exhibit, sterilized
by a glass display case and soporifically explained by a caption, the
excitement of this gallery lies in the fact that each object can be
held in one's hand. What's more, the items are introduced personally by
their owners and layered with the couple's own relationship to the
item. One is drawn in by the hushed tones with which Mr. Bruck unveils
a youthful portrait of the composer and musical mystic Ferruccio
Busoni, or the care with which he opens the cover of his favorite first
edition of Bach to marvel at the splendor of its title page.
And yet, as Mr. Bruck and Ms. Wurlitzer are quick to point out, they
are not collectors in the traditional sense. Despite all of their
appreciation for what they own, they also run a business, and they are
willing to sell even the most magical and precious items in their
inventory. That attitude first struck me as odd, even
heartless, but I soon came to see it as a sort of wisdom, an idea of
property divorced from its illusion of permanence. Everything in their
gallery belongs to them, but in a way that acknowledges that these
items were never theirs to begin with. Rather than collectors, the two
are custodians of these objects, assembling them and providing them a
place to reside until they find their future homes. As the
sunlight faded in the apartment that first afternoon, Mr. Bruck and Ms.
Wurlitzer showed me stack after stack of pictures, letters and
autographs. Over time, I discovered that not all salvaged scraps of the
past were equally moving to me. Some items seemed pregnant with a
deeper meaning and a historical poignance, while others seemed little
more than curiosities. As we waded through Dvorak letters and
Puccini quotations, I found myself impatient to encounter my own
musical heroes. I asked, for example, if they had any photographs of
the Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, a musician whose incandescent
playing burned through the darkness of his times in a way that has
always captured my imagination. (They of course produced several
pictures.) As I spent more time in the gallery, I realized that
I was ultimately seeking a particular type of connection with the past.
Rather than admiring its wonders from the critical distance of a
historian, I was instead looking for a resonance of myself in that
past, a connection through time to my own ideas about someone or
something I could never really know. This, I finally
understood, was what Proust meant when he wrote about our searching in
things for glimmers of our own thoughts or, in his words, the
reflection of what our soul has projected onto them. When we find that
reflection, the object becomes meaningful to us, perhaps more so than
it ever was to its original owner. There was something very beautiful,
I thought, in this notion of a physical thing and its moment in history
being reimagined and reborn inside each new owner. Back in the
gallery, I was careful to focus on the task at hand, but I suspected
that Mr. Bruck and Ms. Wurlitzer had already discovered my secret.
Despite my stated journalistic mission, the couple surely realized that
while they were showing me the pictures, letters and everything else so
that I might write this article, I was quietly imagining myself one day
purchasing just a single item from within these walls. And
while I didn't find that object on either my first or my second trip, I
am not worried. I know that I'll be returning to this otherworldly
place, to visit Mr. Bruck and Ms. Wurlitzer and to continue looking
through their stacks — until that moment when I hold in my hand the
sliver of history I will one day own, and find in its sepia-toned
imagery or in its hastily scribbled sentences the shock of recognition.
Jeremy Eichler is features editor of andante.com and writes about music for The New Republic.
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