my teacher. Briefly. I want to write about him because no one probably ever will. I have put him into a couple of my novels, and may even have mentioned him in this blog. But here is the real, true, full story. Hah! Or perhaps I should frame this story as: ‘what I perceive to be the truth.’ Oh dear. When I was 16 I imagined I might be a cellist. It was a crazy idea. I was part of a quartet mentored by Robert Spergel at the Real Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He too was a cellist, and I was terrified of him. At that time he appeared — to me — to be very very old — I imagine he was in his 50s, as this would have been 1969. I know that I was a very pretty 16 year old — I’m not bragging, it’s just a part of the story. Anyway he seemed to me to be a particularly nasty old man who had it in for me. He had absolutely no patience. As one of Noel Coward’s characters says of Toscanini (in Present Laughter), Robert Spergel would get very angry if I ‘played the wrong note.’ But I sensed something else; a deep, fundamental, disapproval -- that he felt it was presumptuous of me to entertain the thought that I might someday be a musician, because I displayed not the slightest sign of the necessary dedication. A couple of years later I chose to abandon the cello, and to abandon music as a career (I also wanted to compose) which was probably a good thing. And I honestly thank Robert Spergel for precipitating that decision But looking back on it now, his wounding looks might have had their origins elsewhere — for not only was I a pretty 16 year old, but an effeminate one, and quite a privileged one at that, so I was not the least bit self-conscious about displaying my girlyness. (At the time I was in love with a trumpet player named Domenic and a double bass player named Joel; they were both straight and regarded my attention with suspicion, I was blithely unconscious of my attraction to them, but obsessed nevertheless. Though I do remember Domenic asking me, at one point: ‘Don’t you have any other friends?’) The long and short of it is I think Robert Spergel had a love/hate relationship with me, because he was gay. I discovered his sexuality by accident many years later. The second and final part of my story about Robert is this. I was cruising a steambath in Toronto called ‘The Cellar’ about 15 years after he had mentored me. If you’ve never been to The Cellar in needs to be described; no one who ever went there will ever forget it (I think it’s a basement shooting range now). The Cellar was by far the seediest and most depraved bathhouse in Toronto — and that’s saying a lot. Anyway, as I was wending my way through the popper-infused hallways late one evening who should turn a corner but a very very aged Robert Spergel. I remember him grasping the wall with a kind of desperation, and peering at me like a starving man ogling fresh meat. I was terrified and ran away. Suddenly my earlier relationship with him made sense. But it was not until I read his obituary in the Globe and Mail so many years later that it all really came together (he must have been nearly 100 when he died). There was a photo of him at age 16 — my age when I met him — accompanying the article. ‘Bobby Spergel' was beautiful. I was merely pretty at 16, he was, well, kinda transcendent. Blonde curly hair, a princely profile, and a kind of cruel, pouty, very kissable mouth. His bio was fascinating. I had heard rumours that he was once a child prodigy, but hadn’t thought about them much. Here is the complete story. (I may have misremembered some of the facts, but the truth here lies in the general idea.) Robert Spergel was 9 years old when he played the Kol Nidre with the Toronto Symphony orchestra. He toured Canada as Bobby Spergel, boy cellist. He also wrote a quartet and a symphony, went to Paris, and met Leonard Bernstein as a teenager. In other words, he was destined for great things. And then something happened; but exactly what? There is a giant aporia. Or is it just that the child prodigy is no longer a child prodigy anymore but instead morphs into a merely talented adult? I happen to know two ex-concert pianists quite well (not sure how that happened) and one of them told me that at a certain point he was no longer a child prodigy. There is a special training that can only happen to young fingers that are not fully formed — if the prodigy grows up before the training is done then all is for naught. At any rate, the fully grown Robert Spergel was a cellist for many years with the Toronto symphony — which is what he was when I met him, I imagine. The reason I wanted to talk about Robert Spergel is because I wish to nip in the bud the notion that will now be expanding in your brain: the idea that he had a sad life. He did not. He was blessed with a devotion to beauty. I know this because of his merciless teaching, and because I once saw him at the seediest steambath in Toronto. You may say that the beauty of the human body and the beauty of music are two different things. I beg to disagree; beauty is beauty, although beauty has been given a bad name these days by those that would demand art be useful. Of course art is by definition useless, and if you can use it for anything, if it informs you of anything, if you can find in it a moral code that is useful for conducting your life, than it is no longer art but merely preaching. Oscar Wilde said this, Shakespeare practiced it, Adorno taught it, and I believe it. There is nothing more generous, kind, and just than a devotion to beauty. If you love beauty than you will be cruel, but fair; and most of all you will be fully satisfied by life — as I am — because you have so much to be thankful for — because there is so much beauty, everywhere. Robert Spergel’s lack of patience with my instrumental ineptitude was a gift, and seeing him at the bathhouse was a gift too. And it is not simply the fact that if every man was obsessed with beauty then there would be no war (although this is true) but that the recognition of beauty always ennobles us. In that way beauty might be said to be useful; but no please, no, it must not be, and is not. When you use beauty you kill it. Just let it be; love it, let it love you. That bliss is its own reward.
