On Thresholds
BEGINNER’S EAR | 5.2.21
“I almost mourn it,” my husband said the other day as we were standing in the field behind our house, surveying the conquest of spring. I knew exactly what he meant. For weeks we had been chronicling the transition, celebrating the unfurling of this leaf, the first sighting of that bird. But the trees still had that stern clarity of winter we’d come to love, their silhouettes scratched into the sky in graphite.
For much of April, green was a process. In May, it’s a fact.
Moving to the countryside after 16 years in New York City, has been a lesson in re-enchantment. A full moon here is a revelation, its light strong enough (and uncontested by electricity) to throw deep shadows onto the field. In the city -- if I noticed the moon at all – I would watch it weave in and out of the skyscrapers like a deferential waiter at a cocktail party.
Speaking of re-enchantment, I listened to a lot of Mozart recently. The reason was a curious challenge: I was invited to take part in a debate about who was the greater composer, Beethoven or Mozart. I was to argue the case for Mozart. (I’ll send the link to the podcast once it’s out.)
In the course of my preparation I came across a beautiful book called “Mozart’s Grace” by the Princeton musicologist Scott Burnham. He points out the composer’s special gift for illuminating liminal states. Mozart, he argues, “often stages the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether deeply interior or incipiently transcendent, by composing passages that seem to rise above the discourse of their surroundings.” And these are often the places where you find Mozart’s weirdest dissonances gliding, just briefly, into earshot.
An example is the exquisite trio “Soave sia il vento” from the opera “Cosí fan tutte,” which occurs just before the characters lose their innocence. Notice the discordant ache on the word desir. Or take the moment in “Don Giovanni” when the Commendatore has been mortally wounded and the music enters a state of suspended mystery, that is dark and weightless.
When you think about it, the entire character of Cherubino in “Le Nozze di Figaro” is about liminality. What other composer thought to give voice to puberty?
Near the end of his life Mozart wrote a song about children yearning for spring and the chance to play outside again after a long cold winter. There’s not much to the tune – it’s so innocent you kind of worry it’ll get bullied in school. But Mozart used it again in the final movement of his last piano concerto, where he subjects it to the kind of chromatic sleight-of-hand that makes us recognize the transcendent beauty of transformation itself.
Here is a playlist with the opening of Mozart’s “Dissonances” string quartet, the sublime Barbara Hendricks singing “Yearning for Spring,” and that final movement of Mozart’s piano concerto no. 27. Watch for some jazzy wizardry at about 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
Corinna