Al Niente
BEGINNER’S EAR | 6.13.21
My beloved father Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim passed away last Wednesday. After a long battle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s he slipped away peacefully while my mother held his hand and sang “Dona Nobis Pacem. It’s normally a round for several voices, but of course she had been making conversation for the two of them for years.
If you’re on Facebook you’re welcome to stop by my private page, where I am posting micro-memoirs and photos of my father for seven days as a kind of virtual shiva.
My father loved music. He had played trombone and piano in his youth. In Brussels, where he made his home for 40 years, he was an avid concertgoer and patron of La Monnaie, one of the most innovative opera houses in Europe. He loved the human voice and composers who wrote well for it, like Handel, Mozart and Verdi.
But his musical north star was Bach. My father was born into a Lutheran family with Jewish roots. When he was 10 his father, a doctor, was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp as a political prisoner, a trauma that led my father to dedicate his life to building a Europe without borders where war would be unthinkable. He almost never went to church.
“I don’t have faith,” my father once told me. “But when I listen to the music of Bach…”
Dementia is a brutal disease with an almost imperceptible ending. For many weeks, my father had lost the ability to swallow and was taking in only minute quantities of water. His already gaunt body shrank a bit more each day. In musical notation, there is a difference between diminuendo al fine, a sound that grows more quiet until the end, and diminuendo al niente or “into nothing.” The notation for that is the diminuendo hairpin followed by Ø.
In linguistics, that null sign indicates “the lack of an element where one would be expected.” For example, a missing consonant at the beginning of a syllable where, according to the rules of the language, there should be one.
That’s not the same as an end: there are processes and pieces of music where the end is clearly defined and predictable. There’s nothing lacking, because the story’s over.
And then there are nothings that are not endings. According to Jewish theology there is an invisible letter aleph at the beginning of Genesis. The Hebrew text b’reshit, “in the beginning,” begins with a bet, the second letter of the alphabet. Hovering before it is the null sign, the idea of the voiceless, limitless, unphonated aleph.
I received news of my father’s death in Sedona, Arizona. I took this picture of the sunset during my last hike when I knew he was in his final moments. I thought of him as I watched the sky change, filling with color even as the light drained: a diminuendo all’aleph.
LISTEN
There are two ways to hear this cantata about dying by Bach. “Ich habe genug” can mean, I’ve had enough as in, I can’t take the suffering anymore. Or it can mean, I have seen enough, done enough; I know everything I need to know to let go in peace. Have a listen and let me know your own thoughts. (You can just hit reply to this email.)
Corinna