I noodled on it every now and then but didn’t play that much, until one day in 2012 when I heard from Dr. Marvin Curtis, dean of the School of the Arts at IU South Bend. He was looking for me to do something with the symphony orchestra, some gimmick to show my support for the arts and help drive up ticket sales. Occasionally, for example, they arranged for a community leader to guest-conduct a piece. Would I be up for something like that? Sure, I said. Anything to support the symphony. Then I thought, aloud, what if I actually played something? Could I perform a serious piece of music with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra?
Marvin embraced the idea so readily that I now think he hatched the idea before I did. Maybe he had heard from someone around town that I used to play. He promptly sent me to meet the orchestra’s maestro, Tsung Yeh, at his house for what began as a social cup of coffee but ended up more like an audition. The maestro had presided over our South Bend Symphony Orchestra for more than twenty years—I could remember school trips to see him conduct educational concerts—and was known for squaring a genial demeanor with an exacting command of a symphony several notches above what you might expect for a mid-sized city in Indiana.
I hadn’t played consistently in more than a decade, and never with an orchestra. But after hearing me play some things I could still remember, the maestro concluded I might be up to it. What better way to send a message that the arts were vital to the city than for the mayor to perform with the local orchestra?
I thought of the blue-jacketed solo arrangement of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which came into my underused sheet music collec tion when my grandmother, herself a piano teacher, had passed away. Even when she was still living, I used to find it on her bookshelf and try to tap out Gershwin’s familiar passages. My hands not yet big enough, I tried to reach the octaves of its soaring final theme, known to a generation of commercial-watchers and frequent fliers as the official music of United Airlines. Considered by many to be Gershwin’s masterpiece, Rhapsody is a rollicking ecstasy of jazzy piano and symphonic interplay. To me, it is the most American piece of orchestral music ever written. I’d always loved it, but never actually learned it properly—nor even reached the skill level needed to play it.
But Marvin had a plan. “We just have to get some Russian in you.” And by Russian, in this case, he meant Georgian. He arranged a course of lessons with Edisher Savitski, one of Toradze’s star graduate students. A genial man with a cloud of wavy dark hair, Edisher would spend an hour with me every week, patiently coaching me into becoming a concert pianist—with not quite enough time.
We had six months. I practiced every day, usually early in the morning, on my old grand piano, which probably hadn’t been played two days in a row since Ronald Reagan was in office. On this ambitious time line, daily practice was a must. A famous pianist (the Internet can’t agree which one) once said: “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.”
The quotation became my mantra. If I was traveling, I found some way to get access to a piano—at the home of an acquaintance, perhaps, or an unsecured hotel ballroom where the night maintenance staff could be relied on to look the other way. Once, around five-thirty in the morning, I found myself in O’Hare Airport on my way to Miami to see Notre Dame play for the BCS title, aware that I might not see a piano for three days. I found one by Gate C16, alongside a deserted bar, a discreet rope around it, no bench. The concourse was almost empty. I gingerly moved the rope, and wheeled up my roll-aboard bag to sit on. And I began to play. Pretty soon I had a couple listeners, then a small audience, and at the end there was applause—and, awkwardly, a couple of dollar tips.
If I was running with Tim and Joe in the morning, then I’d fight exhaustion and practice before bed. Once, after a near-all-nighter coming home from the Democratic Convention in Charlotte in time to host Mitch Daniels, our Republican governor, for a lunch with business leaders, I hurried home for a lesson in between the airport and the restaurant. Standing as Edisher demonstrated a passage for me, I felt my knees go out from under me and grabbed the side of the piano. He looked over, alarmed, and asked if I was all right; I had fallen asleep standing up.
As I got to know Edisher I learned more of his story. He had come from the Republic of Georgia at Toradze’s invitation, with no money and no English. He was already emerging as a world-class pianist—he once won a grand piano at an international competition—but had to start from zero financially. While enrolled at IUSB, he got a job making submarine sandwiches at a Blimpie in a strip mall on South Bend Avenue—he described to me once covering a sandwich in garlic powder after misunderstanding a customer’s emphatic and repeated demands to have no garlic on his sandwich. He’s since become a professor, a fitting outcome for a classically American story of opportunity, but when I think about his journey I can’t get past the thought that it was a crime to allow such talented fingers so near to a meat slicer.
Each week for one hour, he would sit in my living room and hone my technique. I’d play a passage for him, and he would lean back thoughtfully, bring his hands together, and say, “Okay, lots of beautiful things. Now . . .” And here he’d begin deconstructing my performance and putting it back together. He would say things that sounded strange at first, like, “Don’t play the notes—just play the music.” Explaining how to make one passage twinkle, he described the first time he saw an American Disney cartoon and asked me to evoke its characters. It seemed cryptic at first but began to make sense over time. After a cou ple of months I was dreaming Rhapsody in Blue. I could close my eyes, start at any point, and play the rest of the piece in my mind.
After two rehearsals with the orchestra, which were my first and second times ever playing piano with an orchestra, it was time for the performance. The whole program was Gershwin, with two talented vocalists teed up to do Porgy and Bess for the second half. My part would be before intermission. The date was February 16, the show called “A Valentine from Gershwin.” I did my best to stay calm in the dressing room as the maestro warmed up the orchestra and the audience with “Strike Up the Band,” then I hovered offstage as they turned to “An American in Paris.”
Finally, it was time. Wearing a suit instead of a tux (a concession to the reality that at the end of the day I was a mayor, not a professional pianist), I stepped out onto the blond wood of the stage at the Morris Performing Arts Center, a space that started as a grand vaudeville house in the 1920s and became a movie theater before the city took it over and renovated it. Through the glare of the spotlights I could just barely make out a sea of over two thousand faces. It was more than I’d ever seen for a symphony performance. I wondered if they were there because they loved Gershwin, or to cheer me on. Some part of me sensed that many had in fact come to see if I would succeed or not; beyond the unlikeliness of the spectacle, it was above all the possibility of failure that created the suspense.