Rhapsodic conceit

When I play Johannes Brahms I think of one of my musician friends whom, not long ago, had several of us over to his apartment after we had already shared several bottles of wine. We drank a few more as he queued up the Ravel ballet Daphnis et Chloé, instructing us to listen to this "most beautiful piece." We hadn't listened a few moments before he threw his arms wide and called out to the ceiling, as if to dare those assembled, "I wish to make love!" He leaned back on the sofa, closed his eyes and began conducting his arms widely, swooping....making love, perhaps, to the air around him.

Ravel and Brahms are of different eras, but I can't think of a secular Brahms piece, either, that does not make me want to make love. I'm listening right now to the intermezzo #1 of Opus 119 in B minor...which starts delicately, with a push/pull of tension and suspension. Then the calm gives way to a hugely sweeping arpeggio in the left hand that grinds against chromatic suspensions in the right, driving upward. The flowing returns and builds through crescendo to silence. And repeats itself.

Brahms achieves this in his piano pieces: he simulates the human condition...an intermezzo as love-making, a rhapsody more like an argument. Always emotionally saturated. Sometimes it's as if he follows a thought through a brain and out through lips, where sometimes it catches an ear and builds to something grand, sometimes dissipates.

Thursday night I worked this intermezzo on the church piano for several hours. Listen to it. A dangerous piece to do alone on a Steinway, in a cavernous space with only a lamp for light, late on a cold evening. Heading home with all that melancholy shut in my chest...playing the piece didn't dissipate, rather re-initiated, a longing for something beautiful of my own.