I love classical music. You know how some people who are enamored of mathematics talk about it with such enthusiasm you can almost see them crunching numbers, devouring equations, chewing logarithms and biting through integrals, as if math is something completely tangible? No? Okay, you know how I am enamored of mathematics and talk about it...okay, anyway, my love for classical music is similar--I feel as if I can put my arms around the the movements in a piece, taking fistfuls of the notes and hugging them to me and inhaling whole lines of melody, the way you do when you're holding on to someone you love and trying to imprint their everything about them on yourself.
If I start talking about classical music, I won't stop for a long time, so the best way for me is to approach it from different angles: favorite pieces, composers, players, conductors. Even then, it'll likely have to be just a quick touch, if I am to ever to actually stop long enough to get around to posting about it.
***
In my very first post here, I mentioned the book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and how I was completely taken in by the character of Mick. Mick loves classical music physically, without knowing or questioning why she does, more than she probably loves any actual person. Her relationship with music is an underlying theme to her story throughout the book; nowhere is best described as when she hears Beethoven's Third Symphony for the first (and last) time, after her birthday. I have to believe Carson McCullers is ascribing her own feelings to Mick, because I just don't see how she could have written the passages that describe Mick's reaction simply as something imagined by her (McCuller's) mind, and not felt by her own being.
***
So powerful was the impact of those particular passages on me, that I immediately went in search of finding a recording of the symphony. I knew my dad had, years earlier, recorded all nine of Beethoven's symphonies on cassette tapes, from recordings on LP borrowed from the local library. It didn't take me long to find them; my dad had recorded them on extended play cassettes so that--with the exception of the Ninth--there were two symphonies to each cassette, one on each side. I popped in the cassette which had the Third on it, pressed play, and leaned back to experience it for myself.
The first thing I noticed was that I didn't quite feel the same onslaught of emotion as described in the book, but rather a buildup, something that felt tenuous at first and then gradually took hold. As the piece played on, I kept thinking there was something almost youthful and straightforward about it, rather than mature and complex. The description of the movements didn't match up with the book, either...but by that point I was too enchanted by the music to really care. There was a simplicity in this particular symphony that I liked and could somehow relate to--something that I didn't quite understand (yet; I was about just shy of 12 at the time) for the two symphonies I already knew (Fifth and Ninth).
When the symphony ended I went back to rewind it to listen to the last movement again and, not able to eyeball how far back I had rewound, took out the cassette to take a closer look.
It turned out I had been listening to the First all along.
***
I did eventually listen to the Third and while I do think it is worthy of the praises heaped on it, both in book and elsewhere, nothing will ever take the place of the No.1 symphony with me. As undeveloped, raw, and elementary as it may seem compared with the later, greater works--a promise of the things to come, a mere stepping stone--it will always be my symphony, the way the Third was Mick's.
"This was her [...] walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her.This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. [...] The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt."
(My favorite recordings are by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Karajan, and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Furtwangler. Here is the final movement from the Furtwangler one.)
