?The Passacaglia is a form of baroque music said to derive from a Spanish dance. It unfolds as a continuous theme, usually in moderately slow triple meter, with a slow harmonic rhythm changing generally with the measure.? Joseph Way, Sierra Chamber Society Artistic Director
Let me tell you about our song.
We?d been practicing it for nearly as long as we?d known each other: the Impossible Piece, the Passacaglia, Halvorsen?s Duo for Violin and Viola, after Handel. The piece is a variation on the sixth movement of Handel?s Suite No. 7 in G Minor, something I?d performed before in concert, once upon another life.
It is popularly scored for cello in lieu of the viola, and I had been wanting to learn something new when he suggested it. Handel for an old life; Halvorsen for a new. The scoring was impossibly difficult, but thrilling; it seemed fitting.
We?d been rehearsing it since before we were lovers. But not together. I practice in the mornings: it?s been my habit to do so since I was a child. He?s usually gone to the shop by then. I?ve heard him play, of course, and even heard him practice it a few times. But my husband is a secretive man, and a proud one. Such occasions were rare. We danced around it for far too long.
When I came in that afternoon, I could hear him in Bast?s shrine, tuning his violin. It?s a Guarneri del Gesu, the product of generations of secrets kept by a family of Italian violin makers in Cremona, the Guarneris. Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari are better known, perhaps, but rivalry makes for fierce companions, and most who know agree that the youngest in the line, Guiseppe Guarneri, was the master. You want proof? Here?s a bit of trivia: Niccolo Paganinni lost an Amati when he was fifteen to a gambling debt and acquired a secondhand del Gesu to replace it.
He never used another violin.
As I said, I could hear him tuning, and he rarely practiced when I could listen, so I have a confession to make: I didn?t let him know I was there. Part of me, I admit, wanted to know what I was up against. We still hadn?t rehearsed it together. But mostly, it was just that I loved hearing him play.
The terrible secret of the musician is how exposed you are when you perform. Ali described this piece to me once as having a conversation. And while that is true, to my mind it is better described as the conversation of two souls intimately engaged. The Passcaglia, all the way through, only runs about six-and-a-half minutes. Six-and-a-half minutes of a very intimate, passionate, conversation. Rekah and Lirssa were both out; it was only Ali and me there to hear. And Bast. Of course I listened.
He played it perfectly. A thousand times better than it ever was before on those occasions when I heard him attempt it. His bow cavorted over the strings in the spicattos. It wept con grazie. With my eyes closed, I listened to his soul singing, and felt the chills glissande along my spine with the rolling scales of the music he created. When the triumphant of the final allegro rang out, I could see, in my mind?s eye, his left hand rocking as it drew the note out into a final trembling eternity, and I couldn?t breathe for the beauty of it.
I lingered shivering in the silence that followed, too stunned too move. Too moved to breathe. I have no idea how he knew I was there, or how long he?d known it.
?I think,? his delighted voice came through the closed door, rich with amusement, breaking the spell of immobility that seized me, ?that I heard you moan a few minutes ago.?
?You probably did,? I agreed, laughing as I nudged the door open and slipped inside to join him. ?That was amazing.?
He looked like a storybook sultan, sprawled out on the brocade pillows and woven rugs that make up the floor in the shrine. He was shirtless, wearing his torc and a pair of drawstring pants, the lamplight burnishing his skin and gleaming against the night of his hair. When I came in, he rolled his head in a lazy arc to fix the eternal spring of his eyes on me, and his smile stole my breath all over again. Oh, I love him.
?You've been practicing when I've been out, or something.? My bare feet flirted with the pillows scattered like jacks across the floor, coming to rest just shy of his extended arm. I teased at his elbow with the tip of my big toe.
?Or something,? he agreed, wrapping his long fingers around my calf. ?I've been taking it to work with me and practicing during lunch.?
?Do you think we?re ready to try playing it together?? I was afraid, strange as that seems. We?d built it up into something I wasn?t sure I was going to be able to live up to.
?I am ready whenever you are, bien-aim?e.? His grin was lazy and self-satisfied. I had a sudden image of other times he?d worn that expression, and it sparked a surprised little laugh. Fortunately, it was too dim in the room for him to see exactly how my cheeks flushed.
?Shall I ... ah... get my cello??
?You do that. I'll carry your chair. Do you need the music??
?No.? The notes were etched on the inside of my eyelids by that point, every trilling, bright, somber, importunate variation on the common theme. ?Only the chair.?
It wasn?t long before we were both situated. Me, settled on my old, wooden chair, with my hair tugged out from under me and thrown over the railed back and my cello ? the only remnant of my life before Rhydin ? and he, standing and facing me with his instrument tucked under his chin and his bow raised and waiting.
I remember I timed the beginning against his heartbeats, the familiar rhythm my conductor. I closed my eyes, my bow loose on the strings, and the music just came. The first, long notes of the harmony sighed into being while he leapt headlong into the melody, long fingers pulling a delicate vibrato from the strings as his own bow danced in double-time to mine.
I peeked once; he was rocking his weight from foot to foot in counterpoint to the swaying of the cello in my arms. It was like dancing together ? not perfectly in sync ? but it didn?t matter. It was the first conversation of many to come, and it was glorious, and difficult. There really aren?t words for the story we told each other that afternoon.
The harmony became a footrace, transforming itself into water spilling across the stones of a lively brook. Sometimes he kept pace, the notes he poured out melting and sweet, those marvelous high notes fluttering down through the lower register only to leap high again. Other times he loped ahead, the music akin to the rolling tip and rise of a ship at sea. We chased each other in circling scales, leaves on an autumn breeze. The melody and harmony was traded between us again and again, handed back and forth, back and forth until I was dizzy with it.
And then it was a romance, a merry chase, a surrender. Just when I was ready to swoon with the lushness of one measure, it breezed off into a country dance or dove into a shared sorrow, each note attenuated into an endless tender mourning. We were together through it all, hand in hand, the low and throaty moan of the cello highlighting the piercing and sweet sigh of the violin. It was like spinning in dizzy circles in his arms the night of our wedding. At Last, the song was. Never alone again, we sang out together in answer. Never again.
He climbed the E string like a madman, making the violin wail beneath his fingers, atop the waves of sound singing resonance from the cello. It became that mutual climb as we moved entwined together toward a shared pinnacle, wet and gasping and weightless. The farther we climbed, the more discordant it got, but we had no trouble at all staying together, for it. We?d done it many times before, in other contexts. The music was an echo of our lives. When we finally threw ourselves over the edge of the precipice together, into the bite, the bliss, the slow, shuddering spiral back to earth, it was so good. So good.
When I opened my eyes, his were closed, and his head was tilted back a little as if he were straining to catch the last echo of the last note. The violin had come out from under his chin, and dangled at his left side. The bow hung opposite.
He was so beautiful and my heart was so full.
We spent the night there. The next morning, I decided to move the cello and its stand to the shrine. It was better to play there, somehow. It felt right.
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(Loosely adapted from live play with the player of Ali al Amat, with deepest thanks)
The Passacaglia performed
The scores for violin and for cello
