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appreciation music

denk on brahms and nostalgia

Jeremy Denk, to whom I can only now just genuflect and give homage due, writes in his inimitable style about the Brahms G-major Violin Sonata, and in the end almost writes that which cannot be written (almost, to really get it, just listen to the sonata) in some of the best blog writing I’ve seen all year:

In Mahler’s 9th and Schubert’s Winterreise, to take two extraordinary instances, we have nostalgic works which begin from “game over,” from a condition of preexisting loss, where everything—happiness, life, dreams, hope—has already evaporated from measure one, and we merely count our disintegrating losses. But most composers of nostalgic pieces take the more traditional route: they create worlds of happiness in order to destroy them. This seems, perhaps, mean-spirited? But then the third, unpredictable step is applied, a door is opened onto neither happiness nor despair. An emotional note is sounded on a foreign clef, undermining and questioning the whole previous vocabulary and proposing a more meaningful, but even more evanescent understanding, which perches like a bird on the last note of the piece and flies away never to be heard again. In other words: the place where you arrive at the end of Brahms G Major Violin Sonata cannot be summoned to mind or soul “on demand.” It cannot be remembered. It is perishable, even as an idea. It is the precarious, extraordinary result of all the conflicting codes and messages of all the preceding notes, the message hiding behind the Motive which only tells you, at that moment, what it might have been. Someone is there working through the night for you, deciphering this code, your code, understanding your whole life, and they pass a final translation to you on a piece of paper which …

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