On Love and Music
Vienna, late 1790s.
A city admirably designed to encourage feelings in the artist and then punish them for having these feelings.
The composer is in love with the student.
The student is in love with the music.
So the composer writes a sonata.
The first movement is sweet. His friends say it sounds ominous, even funereal, but this is simply because they misunderstand sweetness. This is not the sweetness of desserts or engagements or children running across the room. This is sweetness that knows it will not survive the lessons with the student. Sweetness already in mourning for itself. A sweetness that says, This will never happen again, even as it is happening. But oh, to see her lovely hands on the keys.
The second movement is more direct. The melody fits perfectly with the words,
”will you be my wife?”
The third movement is joyful and written in a minor key, which the composer finds perfectly reasonable. Joy, after all, rarely arrives without a footnote. The music leaps and dances, delighted with its own energy, while quietly acknowledging that the situation has already been decided elsewhere.
The student refuses him.
She does so kindly, which is to say, conclusively. She gives reasons. Reasons are the sharpest instruments we have, he thinks. The composer is destroyed in the appropriate fashion: dramatically at first, then sincerely, then privately. His friends intervene, as friends do, proposing travel.
There is a festival in the countryside. Festivals are where city and country people go to get drunk together.
At the first country dance, the composer meets a peasant girl. She does not symbolize anything. She dances. This is enough. The composer’s heart panics—it recognizes the pattern—but the body, which has no patience for philosophy, keeps moving. Step, turn, bow. He survives without even asking himself how he would live with a country girl.
The next morning by the river there is champagne and pâté, which no one questions. Juicy figs are split open right in front of the sun. Shoes are abandoned. Someone says something profound and immediately forgets it. The composer feels himself returning to circulation, like a limb that had been asleep. He announces that he is healed and has just begun another sonata.
This one is about country things and the smallest of things. About the pleasure of not having to explain oneself. He now regards the Vienna episode with relief. Marriage, he concludes, would have cost him this feeling—this delicious sense of being unavailable.
At night there is a masked ball. Musical chairs is set to a brilliant composition with a walking bass line in a minor key, too thoughtful for the game, which makes it ideal. The peasant girl lands in his lap more than once. He laughs. He stands. He bows. He refuses love with practiced elegance. The music becomes the second movement of his new sonata.
Later, near the fountain at town’s center, his friends drink more and grow eloquent. One climbs the stone rim and delivers a speech to the goddess of the night, praising her beauty and requesting her company immediately. The speech is ridiculous, sincere, and universally admired. It is forgotten within minutes.
The composer decides it must be preserved. It becomes the third movement.
Earlier, by the river, the composer read aloud a letter he had written to the student. It now sounds excessive hanging out in the moonlit town square. Overheated. A friend observes, helpfully, that all communication is satire—that it always circles reality, exaggerates it, and arrives too late! The composer asks whether music does the same. Whether music, too, is a kind of elegant avoidance. No! they all reply as two of them jump into the fountain and begin singing.
The next morning, the composer returns to Vienna, alone. The countryside outside the carriage window appears still to be dancing, which he takes as reassurance. He believes, sincerely, that everything will be fine after his headache subsides. The city appears.
His heart dips. Tears arrive without consultation. Is this really his life? Is he to repeat this cycle indefinitely—desire, expression, refusal, recovery, composition?