Bulgar and Brahms

Home alone on a cold gray morning—Hilary is bringing some vegetable soup over to her mom's apartment—I convince myself that it's time to make the salad I've had on my mind ever since I bought that bag of Bob's Red Mill bulgar a week ago. I can see through the plastic container that the fresh mint I bought for that purpose is growing less fresh by the hour. I put a CD of Brahms' second and third symphonies on the stereo—melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic by turns, like a shifting sea at sunset. Those symphonies remind me of my college years, when Brahms was one of my favorite composers. (I'm not saying that my college years were melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic, though that's not far off the mark either.)

But a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens from the same era suddenly surfaces:

A little less returned for him each spring.

Brahms, his old familiar, often walked alone.

At the time those lines worried me a little. Is this what aging does? I asked myself. Reduces one's ardor, one's affection for things? I haven't found that to be the case. I simply quit listening to Brahms somewhere along the line, except for his late, poignant piano intermezzos. He began to sound slightly turgid and overwrought in comparison to the more haunting and evasive sounds of Faure, for example. And at a certain point the lyric and dramatic genius of Brahms' near contemporary Verdi came into play, along with other competing interests.

In short, I found that my experience broadened rather than fading; my tastes expanded. Yet there's also a subtle joy to be felt  in circling back to those memories, and tastes, of forty or fifty years ago. I found myself whistling along to the symphonies—I internalized them long ago and know them all by heart—while following the recipe for bulgar salad in a food-spattered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook from the same era. This isn't nostalgia—a pining for something that's lost. It's probing the mystery of time and relishing the deep overlay of memories that have returned to life in the here and now.

Hilary and I drove down to campus on a sunny morning a few weeks ago to see an exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum. We parked on the street a few blocks away--it happened to be spring break, though we didn't know it at the time--and strolled down East River Road to the gallery. After viewing the show we returned via the mall to Northrup Auditorium, trying to remember what each of the buildings used to be. Scott Hall was Music, Morall Hall was where you registered for classes. Anthropology was in Murphy Hall, but so was the University Film Society. Or was that Fraser Hall?

 Beyond Northrup we came to Folwell Hall, where I once studied Classical Greek, and sometimes climbed out on the roof through the dormer windows after class to enjoy the spring breezes.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Dinkytown. The Podium Guitar Shop across the street is long gone, and so is the Tokyo Café, where you could get a bowl of tendon for $3.50. (In those days the tempura was out of my price range.) Gordon's Bakery, where the banana donuts were so good? Long gone. Vescio's? Not a chance. But there were shops selling Gopher paraphernalia, which would have been unheard of  during the hip and turbulent Seventies.

After lunch we went upstairs to browse a used book store that's changed hands several times over the years. Alas, for me that particular activity has lost most of its charm. I've got quite a few books lying around the house, and I seldom see a new one that doesn't immediately remind me of others I already own. For example, I was intrigued by a book containing eyewitness accounts of Verdi's life and habits by those who actually knew him or passed him on the streets of Busseto or Parma. Sounds interesting. But what about the thick Phillips-Matz biography of Verdi sitting on the shelf back home, unread? And George Martin's Aspects of Verdi?  Charles Osborne's The Complete Operas of Verdi? Or my favorite, William Berger's Verdi with a Vengence? No. I don't need another book about Verdi right now.

But I've made a mental note of it, and if I happen to be in the neighborhood again sometime ... 

I was happy to see that Verdi's Nabucco had been included among the Met Opera Theater Simulcasts last fall. I'd never seen it, and the only piece I knew was the famous "Va Pensiero." The opera was Verdi's first youthful success, a Biblical epic heavy on the choruses, and I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be tremendous--stirring, romantic, ridiculous, and profound--and the effect was enhanced by the fact that the theater sound had been turned up a little too loud.

We wanted to sustain the mood, so when we got home I scoured our CDs and came up with a complete recording of La Forza del Destino, an opera sometimes referred to as Verdi's "black sheep" that we hadn't heard in years. In this sprawling four-hour drama the hero, Alvaro, kills his girl-friend Leonora's father by an unlikely accident, and spends the rest of the opera being hunted down by her brother Carlo. In the third act Alvaro (incognito, of course) saves Carlo's life in a back-alley rumble, and they become best friends. (You get the feeling it's not going to last.) By the end of the opera both Leonora and Alvaro have withdrawn from the world to monasteries, but plenty of blood gets spilled just the same. In operaland, how could it be otherwise?

Listening to CDs, we had no idea what was going on, of course, but the music was a delight. 

And just our luck, a few weeks ago the Met brought La Forza del Destino to town on a Saturday Theater Simulcast. The production was terrible...but the music, as usual, was sublime.