First Contact: (Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s apartments. A musical salon.)

I hear he’s a wild man, a proletarian who forgets to shave and rejects tutelage;

who’ll dare nobility to trespass wherever he decides to take his constitutionals

but at the keyboard a wonder. So I am exactly where I need to be,

tuning my instrument with Vienna’s finest on a sun-blown April afternoon. I’ve made

the rounds, Baron to Count to Prince, had my letter of introduction passed on tray after tray

like an after-dinner drink. It’s all a bit dizzying— the lilting queries, coifed heads bobbing

in murmured goodwill; I watch late light soften the stucco into creamy arabesques

as polite chatter swirls around me, whirls and dips until I feel I’m being slowly stirred by a celestial

coffee spoon. At last! Schuppanzigh moves toward the foyer, maneuvering his gut

past a mahogany secretaire and two nattering poufs to welcome—too late!—his friend

who bursts into view, a squat invasionary force not quite as dark as me—in coffee-speak

a Kleiner Goldener, Small Gold to my Big Brown—but pocked, burly;

a dancing bear who’ll refuse to entertain, who’d ignore the yanked chain until

they slit him for a coat. He’s clapping shoulders now, shaking hands, moving forward

as the room expands, laughing. And why not? This is his party, after all; we are here

to play him––this ugly, flushed little man everyone calls “The Moor”—

although not to his face nor, I suspect, within my earshot.