beloved

Assignment #2: music

When I was seventeen, I ordered a set of classical music CDs from Columbia House.  Upon receipt of them, I was immediately drawn to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (which I prefer in D minor).  I played it on loop, wrote reams of (bad) poetry, read his encyclopaedia entry.  Fifteen minutes was too short.  I visited my local library and borrowed all his CDs; I sat cross-legged in front of my floor to ceiling window, watching the crab-apple trees outside blossom white and pink, crescendoes crashing in my ears.

I fell in love.  Hard.

For a good month, all I did was listen to Ludwig.  I felt his pain, his torture.  I felt his frustration and rage.  I felt his quiet sorrow.  I even related to  his pithy attempts at feverish jocularity (which always felt stilted and awkward).  This man was made for teen angst.

It is no great secret, then, that whenever I hear the Sonata (standing in my lobby, on hold with a certain cable company) I am immediately transported back to the windy Spring days of 1998.  I connect that melody with the beautiful tragedy of the asymptote, which is ever-diminishing even as it carries on to infinity.  I think of university applications and awkward (unsent) infatuation letters.  Mostly, though, I remember the thick sadness that coated my movements, a sadness that (after a while) became addictive.

I hadn’t heard the sonata in its entirety for many years.  Until today.  Its power has not waned.  I know that I can only give it a few hours before I must stop listening.  Its dark thrall is as enticing and as seductive as it ever was.  It would be too easy to wallow, to drink deep of his melancholy.