Remembering Michael

The Minnesota Orchestra lost a great friend this weekend. But that seems entirely inadequate: the whole music world lost a great friend this weekend. Michael Steinberg may have belonged to my orchestra by way of marriage and geographic proximity, but he was a man whose quiet passion and boundless intellect touched the lives of an almost unimaginable number of people.

I was lucky enough to get to know Michael fairly well in the decade that I've lived in Minnesota, and even had the good fortune to share a concert stage with him on a few occasions. (He appeared in two of our early Inside the Classics shows as our "pop-up musicologist," expounding on Copland's evolving sound and Tchaikovsky's homosexuality from a first-tier box overlooking the stage.) There are few writers as comfortable and skilled at speaking their words as they are at writing them, but Michael's talks were true events, casually delivered but so full of detail and wit that you'd swear he must have spent weeks putting them together.

One of my fondest memories of Michael comes from my early years in the orchestra, when I was playing regularly in a pretty good string quartet with some friends. We'd decided to tackle Britten's fiendishly difficult second quartet, and while we were making good headway on the technical side of things, we began to feel that we could use some guidance from musicians who really understood the piece inside and out. Among those we called to ask for a coaching session was Jorja, who is as well known for her chamber music performances as for her solo and orchestral work.

Jorja was out of town for the month, Michael told us on the phone, and wouldn't be back until after our performance of the Britten. However, he continued, if it wasn't too presumptuous of him, he himself happened to be a big fan of Britten's 2nd, and while he couldn't offer much in the way of technical expertise on quartet playing, he would love the chance to sit and listen to us rehearse, and offer some general advice if we thought it would be helpful.

We thought it would be quite helpful, and showed up in due course at Jorja and Michael's elegant home in Edina with a fine bottle of scotch to present as payment for Michael's services. For nearly two hours, Michael listened to us hack away at the Britten, offering gentle suggestions and occasional stories of approaches he had heard other quartets take to the piece. What was striking was how easily this writer could slip between the very distinct languages of those who listen to music and those who perform it, and how effortlessly he could connect the larger ideas behind Britten's composition to, say, the specific bowstroke we might want to use to bring those ideas to life.

A few weeks later, Michael showed up to hear us perform the piece in front of a sparse crowd at a downtown Minneapolis church. The performance went better than we could have hoped, and it was, for me, one of those moments in life that musicians live for, when you don't care how many people have heard you play or how much you're getting paid to do it - you're just thrilled to be playing. Michael smiled warmly at us from the pews as we finished, but didn't come backstage after the concert.

When we arrived back to our violinists' house for a post-concert drink, however, we found a message from Michael already waiting on the answering machine. In his usual mellifluous (if maybe just ever so slightly tipsy) tones, he said, "I just wanted to thank you for that wonderful performance of one of my favorite pieces." He went on to say something about elegance mixed with youthful energy, then paused and said, "In fact, the only thing I can think of right now that could give me as much pleasure as your performance is this scotch that you were kind enough to present me with. I don't know whether you've sampled it yourselves, but the feeling of it is as if the Virgin Mary were sliding down your throat wearing velvet pantaloons. So good night, and thank you again."

We must have played that message back a dozen times. The Virgin Mary? Velvet pantaloons? Brilliant. The man even knew the perfect words for describing whiskey.

And that really is what made Michael such a powerful personality, and such a pleasure to be around in any situation. He was a quiet man, but when he spoke, or wrote, the words flowed from him in such effortless fashion that you almost didn't notice how profound they were. When Michael taught you something, it didn't feel like a lesson. It felt like an awakening of the mind, a new way of looking at the world that would never have occurred to you without his insight. As Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times put it, "Reading Michael, your ears -- and your heart -- grow large. "

We'll miss him terribly, of course, but I'm taking comfort in the knowledge that he went out entirely on his own terms, alert and engaged with the world to the very last. It would have been impossible to imagine him any other way.

Postscript: I wanted to give Michael himself the last word, so here he is from his box seat at Orchestra Hall, talking with me about Aaron Copland during the first season of Inside the Classics...