more Philip Roth on music…

[it’s been THAT KIND of week…]
from The Human Stain, by Philip Roth
312-13
[Adagio from Third Symphony to close Coleman Silk’s funeral…]
That was it. They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.
Well, you can’t listen to Mahler sometimes. When he picks you up to shake you, he doesn’t stop. By the end of it, we were all crying… One moment we were immobilized by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler’s adagio movement, by that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not strategy, that unfolds, it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of life’s unwillingness to end… one moment we were immobilized by that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the true, the extended, the monumental ending… one moment we were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on and on with a determined pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like pain or longing that won’t disappear… one moment we ere at Mahler’s mounting insistence, inside the coffin with Coleman, attuned to all the terror of endlessness and to the passionate desire to escape death, and then somehow or other sixty or seventy of us had got ourselves over to the cemetery to watch as he was buried, a simple enough ritual, as sensible a solution to the problem as any ever devised but one that is never entirely comprehensible. You have to see it to believe it each time…
TR: I’ve always wanted the second mov’t to Brahms B-flat Piano Concerto played at my funeral, and just this morning I made SKL promise not to let the word “avuncular” into my obituary. But if you choose this Adagio, you are guaranteed to run out of Kleenex, even if you’re Don Henley. Like a lot of Mahler, early NYPhil Bernstein is still the yardstick, with alarmingly precise details nestled inside the most innocent of transitions. There are very good entries from Boulez, and others, including the always inexplicable Zander.