Part V: For Heart and Spirit

When I hear Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being; when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven; but when I hear Bach, I understand what it is to be the Universe. -Douglas Adams

Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying… My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much. -György Kurtág

It took me thirty years of listening to Bach before I understood even an inkling of his St. Matthew Passion, “maybe the greatest work of art in any genre ever to be created in our culture.”^†

It took me even longer to love the B minor Mass, called “the greatest music work of art of all ages and of all people,”^† and “the most amazing musical wonder of all times.”^†

Meanwhile, from a young age I saw so much life in his three great instrumental Variation works—the Goldberg Variations, the Chaconne, and the Passacaglia—that I found myself in them regardless of my mood, setting, or time of day.

In this final chapter of the book, I want to look beyond the first listen, to the music that has kept me coming back in hope of finding something more, even if I have not yet found all it has to offer. We'll see music written for a spiritual purpose, like the excerpt above, and the absolute music that finds the spirit all the same, like the Goldberg Variations.

I call this last part “For Heart and Spirit.” Some of it, like the St. Matthew Passion, has a program, and its story is handed down from source material to Composer to Musician to Listener.

But perhaps the title “From Heart and Spirit” would be more accurate. The essence of the music seems to come from inside each interpreter in the chain. What is handed down merely unlocks it.

It asks us each to surrender to the music and our own intuition—the conclusion of this guide's journey.

Sacred Music

It is hard to write this chapter from anything other than the first person.

The obvious reason I didn't gravitate towards Bach's B Minor Mass and Passions was that I didn't share his religion. I didn't know how to connect with it.

Of course, I could fall back on the outer, programmatic symbolism like we've encountered elsewhere in the guide. For instance, in the Mass, the descending choral lines at the end of the Crucifixus, and the rising, rousing opening of the Et resurrexit, in which Christ rises again.^💬

Yet identifying a descending line as burial and a rising line as resurrection doesn't explain why the piece can make a listener feel somehow elevated—set apart from worldly concerns. Plenty of composers could (and have) come up with these gestures, and plenty have written Mass settings that combine symbolism with hair-raising musical energy, like Verdi's Requiem (“an opera in ecclesiastical robes,” said conductor Hans von Bülow).

But put yourself in a cathedral (or a good pair of earbuds), engulfed by the sound circling around you, and you don't think the symbolism. If I'm lucky, I feel an immensity that is not just sound, but a feeling of lifting, almost detaching from my body, as if Bach, by calling forth all his forces in proclaiming his ecstasy, has telepathically reached into my heart and connected it—or made me aware of its connection—to every other link in the interpretation chain, from myself to the musicians to Bach to Bach's own inspiration, what he might call God or Jesus—what I might call God or Truth or prefer not to name. Some people find this at church, others at EDM concerts, at football games, or in the mountains. Some find it in Bach. Maybe not every time, but enough to call it sacred.

We'll continue to look at the music called sacred—music set apart from the ordinary, and I'll show you some of the music that helps me get out of my own way. And as always, we'll see how the category gets blurred—the sacred gets co-opted for the concert hall, and concert music becomes sacred.

Requiem

In his Requiem, a Mass for the dead, Mozart's Lacrimosa gets to the same end by using our bodies, a paradox, albeit a familiar one for Christians. ^💬 The title means “tearful,” and the music itself sighs, stretched with dissonance.

The text places tears within a vision of judgment and a plea for mercy. But the first time I heard the Pygmalion ensemble (below) at a concert by myself in Paris, I teared up even though I had lost no one to mourn, didn't even know what the Latin meant, and had no personal connection to the Merciful Lord Jesus being addressed.

The text can point us to an experience, but it doesn't exhaust it. Nor does it guarantee that Christians and non-Christians, or even two people in the same pew, will feel the same thing.

In fact, it's an almost identical musical figure to the piano concerto we saw in the Opera chapter, which Mozart wrote when he was only 21 years old. The same two-note phrases, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, here sung instead of played. In both, I can feel the slight tug of a coming sob and an almost imperceptible beginning of goosebumps, regardless of whether the text is there or not.

At its most absorbing, that physical sensation loosens my sense of being a separate person observing a piece of music, and instead drags me out of my world and into its own.

Willy Kapell said it best for me:

When a stroke of lightning hits you, and you find yourself floating on the wing of a butterfly, and find yourself deep in the current of a Schubertian or a Mozartean, or a Chopinesque stream of beauty…
When it is not there, we only exist as unhappily as [an] artist… The greatest moments people have are those at which times their identities become involved in someone or something else… No me, no silly public to amuse; only the heart and the soul, the world, the birds, storms, dreams, sadness, heavenly serenity. Then am I an artist worthy of the name… until then, I must submit meekly to slips of the fingers, and to a heart that beats, but not enough to obliterate me, which is what I want.

I must submit to a heart that beats, but not enough to obliterate me, which is what I want.

There are similar concepts in different traditions—flow state, kenosis, fana, mokṣa, satori; emptying, annihilation, liberation, ego death. It is not unique to sacred music, or even classical music more generally. It's not even unique to music.

But music, like smell or taste, has a way of creating a shortcut in the brain—skipping the “here and now” until music and listener are briefly the same thing.

A Trans Requiem

So far, I've been looking for the universal in the specific—finding my own inner enlightenment in the music that came from the composers' own faiths.

In Andrew Yee's Trans Requiem, the specific people being mourned come into focus. The work is written for trans people, and its traditional texts are joined by contemporary ones. The Kyrie, “Lord have mercy,” is followed by the Broadway-flavored “Would You Have Mercy?,” which asks mercy of harassing strangers in the street.

In many ways, this is a modern-day version of Benjamin Britten's landmark War Requiem from 1962, a pacifist cry written in the midst of the Cold War using the Latin Mass and the World War I poetry of Wilfred Owen as its text.

With imagery like “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns,” these works make it nearly impossible for me to look at anything but what exactly I'm being shown.

The interpretation chain for Yee's Trans Requiem is:

A specific mourning of trans people → the composer Andrew Yee, doing the mourning herself → this specific performance including the composer and those in the community → us, the listeners

To me, this particular framing makes the emotional gut punches much more acute. I feel more grief and outrage and desolation just in the first few notes—even though they could easily have been by Fauré.

Like Fauré, Yee passes over Judgment Day's Dies Irae, instead going from the inserted “I Am Afraid” to “Death Before Detransition,” providing a climax as shattering as any standard Dies Irae.

As with Mozart's Lacrimosa, I feel this one physically. But this one crawls around inside, making me uncomfortable, angry, and afraid. I hear the protest, as in People United Will Never Be Defeated from the variations chapter.

Is it also spiritual? Sacred? Does it wash over me and make me feel like a part of something that I previously couldn't access?

For me, listening to a recording, not yet -

But in the final part, the In Paradisum is symbolically given to a powerful lower voice instead of Fauré's more typical airy higher voices—and in the silence that follows the movement before the applause breaks out—which really feels like a moment of silence—I feel like I have shared something with the others who have gone through this experience, with the composer, linked to those who are there on stage, in the community, and those who are there no longer.

Where Sacred Meets Secular

The boundary between worship and concert music is already getting porous. A Requiem can serve a funeral, a memorial, a public protest, or a concert audience. But music can also carry a religious association into the concert hall without carrying the original words.

Bruch's 1881 Kol Nidrei, for instance, treats the prayer before Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) as a miniature cello concerto. Bruch was not Jewish—a friend showed him this “exotic” melody and he decided to turn it into a piece, combining it with a second melody from Isaac Nathan's setting of a poem by Byron.

Does this appropriation hurt—or at least change—the spirituality of the piece? I can give you my take on music from my own tradition, where I'm looking less for the universal and more for a specific role of this music in my life.

To begin with, Kol Nidre has a special place in the Ashkenazi Jewish “repertoire” (called m'Sinai), in that it speaks more with its music than its words. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says the words themselves are “dry, prosaic, not poetry, not even a prayer. They’re a legal formula.”^† It took me three decades of Yom Kippur services before I even learned what the text was really about.

It turns out that over the years, Reform-era practice even altered or replaced the text—rabbis and prayerbook editors often wanted the legal formula gone entirely but congregations wouldn't allow them to abandon the music.

In 1938, Los Angeles rabbi Jacob Sonderling even commissioned the recently emigrated Arnold Schoenberg to write a new Kol Nidre altogether, resulting in an English dramatization with only a vaguely reminiscent theme that might have been puzzling at best to High Holy Day-goers. Schoenberg described one of his main tasks as “vitriolising out the 'cello-sentimentality of the Bruchs.”^† In that, he certainly succeeded. But is it more spiritual? Let's see Bruch's Kol Nidrei.

For me, what Bruch does with the melody—what Schoenberg calls sentimentality—only enhances what Sacks calls “haunting, evocative, sad yet defiant” on any day of the year.

Those of us who know the liturgical Kol Nidre, who expect it to be repeated identically three times in increasing confidence and intensity, might be jarred when it turns into a theme and variations. But it has already done its job. And so when Bruch's variations drift from the Jewish musical idiom later in the piece, reaching its climax in a major key^💬 we are ready to buy whatever Bruch is selling.

For me, it is a different experience of spirituality than hearing it in a synagogue—but in a way perhaps contrary to expectations. The Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement, known as the High Holy Days, come with cues to practical personal reflection alongside their prayer. Listening to Bruch is purely an opportunity to lose oneself.

Prayer in the Concert Hall

While Bruch and others co-opt sacred music to write a popular concert piece, there are many more examples of composers that use the tradition of secular concert music in order to explicitly probe the heart and spirit.

For many Jews, the essence of “heart and spirit” is not just a matter of transcendence and being overcome by God; it is also a fundamental grappling with existence—and in the last century, an often inseparable reckoning with the horrors of the Holocaust.

This means that rather than passing down their heart to their performers and listeners, a composer will pose questions to the recipients of their art, and challenge them, just as they're doing, at the same time, to God.

The Kaddish prayer, a basic praising of God, comes in many forms in a Jewish service. Before the Holocaust, Ravel composed a gorgeous setting of the High Holy Day Half-Kaddish in the manner of Bruch's Kol Nidrei. But after the Holocaust, we see examples that feel more like the Mourner's Kaddish, a sort of Jewish Requiem.

In Mieczysław Weinberg's Symphony No. 21 “Kaddish,” dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, we have an interpretation chain that begins with the Kaddish prayer, and get a glimpse at one composer's rendering of it. It is a vast and wide-ranging work, so here are just a few moments of it to respond to, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.

Here is the moment where he quotes the first ballade by Chopin (a fellow Polish composer), and then leaves the fragment hanging in mid-air.

Along the way, we get traces of a sort of ghostly Klezmer band which turns into grotesquerie. In some recordings this Klezmer music can sound more alive and danceable, like it might have been pre-war, or even like it is being played within the ghetto itself.

We go through a xylophone-violin duet and an explosive cry that reminds me of a cross between a blaring alarm and a shofar^📖 bringing in the Jewish New Year.

Then we find the music closest to what we usually think of as a Kaddish—a soprano singing wordlessly in duet with the clarinet. I like this recording of conductor Gražinytė-Tyla singing it herself. And then after the stillness of the organ rising up, the soprano's cry turns into a ululation, joined by the piccolo, which transitions into the final climax.

So in what ways is Weinberg's Kaddish spiritual to me? This piece is relatively new to me, so I can give you the impressions of my first listen. I already have much to say—more to say than about the Masses from outside of my religion—but that doesn't mean I had more to feel.

I can already tell I will have to keep coming back to this piece in order to let its questions sit with me. But I think that will be over years, not right now.

Much of the piece is, frankly, quite difficult to listen to. There are grating dissonances and the discomfort keeps me from enjoying it. The beautiful elements of the culture—Chopin, Klezmer—are always cut short.

But enjoyment and spirituality are different things. It might even feel perverse in a way to “enjoy” a Kaddish for the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. And yet I do enjoy the requiems of Mozart and Verdi and Fauré, both for their aesthetic pleasures and for the sort of spiritual high that they sometimes facilitate.

Is it because the Weinberg is specifically about the Holocaust that I have this reaction? I think it's more about the content of the music.

It is religious, but not in the same way. It is immediately clear that this Kaddish does not sound like a praising of God, even in the soprano's sung lines at the end. Instead, it is wrestling with God.

This wrestling with God—not just “worship”—lies at the heart of Jewish spirituality. As Rabbi Sacks says, “the name 'Israel' itself, according to the Torah (Gen. 32:28), means one who wrestles with God and with man and prevails. We never stop wrestling with God, nor He with us.”

This struggle is more grounded. It by definition does not carry you away. It is occasionally entertaining, stimulating, and frustrating. It is intimate and defiant. For many, it is prayer.

Schoenberg's A Survivor From Warsaw, in contrast, is a dramatic narrative of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. At its climactic moment, the prisoners rise up and belt out the “Shema,” Judaism's central prayer before the prison guards take their lives. Schoenberg's dissonance is never dissonant for its own sake—it is the only way he thought was remotely adequate for the material.

Jeremy Eichler writes in Time's Echo, “We are there not to be entertained but to bear witness to the music’s own testimony.”

Weinberg's Kaddish is not a drama in the way that A Survivor from Warsaw is. It is also not a prayer in the way that Ravel's Kaddish or Bruch's Kol Nidre or Mozart's Requiem is. But it is an expression of Weinberg's personal heart and spirit—his own wrestling with God. He invites us in to bear witness, in Judaism an active obligation to see, hear, and respond.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

I've discussed several visions of the heart and spirit—the universal and the specific, through others' faith traditions and through my own, a surrender of the mind and an engagement with its questions. Some pieces I loved instantly—others I might never truly understand.

Finally I come to the music that I have returned to most over the years—the secular works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach's Chaconne is sometimes called a dialogue between life and death.

But when I listen to Bach, I do not ponder grief, death, or what comes after. I sometimes feel, in turn, a vastness and a smallness, a loneliness and a togetherness. But it's rarely the concrete versions of these emotions that I might feel watching them play out in a movie. Not, for instance, the acute need of human contact that comes from feeling alone.

Instead, somehow, it seems to me that I am face to face with the Platonic forms of these concepts.

You could see Bach grieving his first wife, Maria Barbara, who had died at 35 years old and was already buried when the composer returned from a trip. You could see him grieving his children—three of them already lost, to be joined later by seven more who wouldn't reach adulthood. You could see your own grief. Usually, I just see Grief. Not tears, or anger, or acceptance. The fact that Grief is. That it is unique to everyone who's listening and at the same time shared.

But this is just me reaching to put words to something that doesn't need words put to it. Bach doesn't even ask when you're finished listening, “so, what did you think?”

We are reaching the end of this Guide's journey. The words are losing their utility and the music is what remains.

The Goldberg Variations: The Final Pocket Concert

Bach's Goldberg Variations could be interpreted using any lens from this guide.

You can find plot, like a movie, or characters, like an opera. It is constantly dancing.

It can be running water, night music, or grief. It rewards deep, meditative listening.

It is pure, mathematical wizardry, immaculately calculated and yet simultaneously spun out of mid-air. It takes us on harmonic journeys to the end of the world, and back again. It can be listened to in the background or the foreground. It is playful, witty, and good-humored. In its last three variations it pays off our patience with fireworks and then in the final aria returns us to silence, giving us the best of both worlds.

And as Kurtág says, it never stops praying.

There is a sense that for all these elements to align, what he gives us must be “Truth” if we could only comprehend it. But it should still have to pass down the chain to interpreter and listener.

While Bach's sacred works feel like they give me some Universal Truth, it always comes first through his Lutheran Faith, then through Bach himself, and finally to me. Bach's secular works feel like they are giving me access to that Universal Truth directly. Like somehow the interpretation chain has magically become Truth → Me.

What is that Universal Truth, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

“Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?”
“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.” ^†

I debated which recording to use for the Goldberg Variations, and decided to show a handful of my favorite variations from a performance I gave at an unpaid amateur event.^💬

In the spirit of this guide, it is raw, imperfect, and real.

Acknowledgments

The first thank-yous go to my teachers—Natalie Ryshna Maynard, who gave me a love of music; John McCarthy, who nurtured that love; Jeremy Denk and Jon Nakamatsu at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who made me a pianist; Tom Schultz at Stanford, who showed me that classical music isn't dead.

And a special thank you to Maria João Pires, as I wrote these final “pages” during a residency with her at her home in Belgais, Portugal.

Thank you to my mom, for not making me quit cello lessons even though she didn't want to drive me, to Mela for going on walks to keep my mom company during said piano and cello lessons, and to my dad, for being maybe the only person to read every word in this book.