Winterreise

Dad decided to die on a Friday so the rest of the family had the entire weekend to grieve. It was a grotesque arrangement, if not considerate in his own personal and brutal way. Though saying that it was his decision may have been a stretch. He thought he had enough, and told us to remember him, but to forget the parts when he was drunk and mean. And then he died. The funeral was short and intimate; I had to leave early for a rehearsal. I knew Dad wouldn’t have minded.

I recently cut my hair short so mornings would be easier. I had never been a morning person, and I hated going to rehearsals or meetings with my face and hair looking so frazzled, as if I could never get my shit together. It was a common trend with us musicians, but of course I didn’t want to confine myself to that image. I played piano and composed. I wrote mostly piano music, sometimes for various chamber ensembles, occasionally arranging for orchestra. I played in clubs and accompanied soloists for money. People told me that I should teach, but I could never do that, at least not now. I didn’t dream of fame, or playing in front of large crowds with world-renowned orchestras. I only wanted to create art—channeling myself through music. I’ve always been an idealist. I stopped caring that the world was against people like me.

I came over to my parent’s house the following weekend to see Mom, and to take some of Dad’s possessions that were no longer wanted there. I didn’t have the key to the house, so I rang the doorbell and waited outside for five minutes, and rang the doorbell two more times before my older brother Adrian opened up with a look of surprise.

“Oh hey, I didn’t know you were coming. Mom—”

I walked in and felt like I was in my early twenties again. Like I was a former self in this old familiar space, and simultaneously a stranger, feeling strange in a inscrutable environment. I didn’t want to go into my room and break the nostalgia. I went straight to the upright piano in the living room and sat down on the bench. I let my hands hover over the keys for a second, before returning them onto my lap. Adrian came over next to me and smiled and glanced behind him.

“How are you?” he asked in a small voice.

“I’m alright,” I said. I looked down at the piano keys. I absentmindedly played the right hand of the first two bars of Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum.”

“I don’t think it’s been tuned since you graduated,” Adrian said.

I shrugged. The dissonance wavered in the air. I played the three lowest octaves of C, and it sounded like a ship sinking. Once the sound died out, the room felt awfully quiet. Adrian had gone and sat down on the living room couch, looking at his phone.

“When did you get here?” I asked with bland curiosity.

He raised his head and lowered his phone with minimal effort. “I’ve been here since Wednesday,” he said as if it were obvious. But I didn’t know that. My mind was on music, as always. Schubert’s Winterreise had been circling in my head constantly since Dad died. I imagined the piano timbre creating a snow cover as the tenor trudged barely above with the melody. I could see the frosty black notes dissolving into chilling sound, wrapping around my body. Without realizing until several seconds later, Mom was in front of me and had finished asking a question and was staring at me with hazy eyes.

I woke up the next morning and realized I was unable to play tonal music. It was the oddest thing, but when I sat down at the piano my fingers shifted into positions and keys that pierced together, resisting—and perhaps fearing—resolution. I had no choice but to write it down. I spent the next three hours jotting down this jagged landscape: the staves were almost crooked, like the pencil marks had a ragged madness to them that translated directly into the sound. I went back and forth between moving my hands across the keyboard and scribbling on the pages with a panicked ferocity, as if I was going to die any moment then. And when I had finished, with a sparse, airy chord wisping up to the ceiling as I kept the pedal down, I felt completely empty, but strangely not alone.

When I was young, Dad would sit me down at the piano and made me drill scales and etudes until I cried, and then after I finished crying, he would make me play for at least an hour longer, and then he’d get me ice cream and tell me that I was going to be the best pianist in the country, that it was okay to be frustrated as long as I persisted. He talked endlessly about how music was like painting that went directly to your soul (he was an art teacher), and made comparisons between artists and composers that made no sense to me until one day when I was a high school senior I finally began to understand and I started to feel like I was doing something more than playing an instrument. He was driving me back from a lesson, and we were initially talking about auditions for conservatories.

“Just two contrasting pieces, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. I was thinking the Bach g minor and the Prokofiev.”

“But they’re so similar.”

“What do you mean? One of them’s Baroque, the other is Modern.”

“That’s true,” he said in slow deliberate tones. “But they have similar colors. Like—like a dark maroon against navy blue, I think. Do you see that?”

“I guess?” I said hesitantly, unsure but not wanting to dismiss his bizarre claim.

Looking back, Dad probably had synesthesia, which made him associate colors with certain pitches. He always thought middle C was black, but that was probably just him.

I lived in a small apartment in the Mission District, so I could walk over to the Conservatory and Symphony Hall if I needed to. I lived by myself, but I was surrounded by artists of all sorts, free spirit types that didn’t mind me practicing late into the night. The Sunday afternoon was chilly but not cold, the January coastline wind brushing through. I was walking up and down the streets with Walter, a late-twenties actor/video editor/waiter who lived below me, who probably liked me but was too shy to do anything. He had a rough, uneven beard, more to create a mature disposition than to keep warm in a mild San Francisco winter.

“I wrote something this morning,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. For piano. Maybe you could tell me what you think.”

“Absolutely. Of course.”

“I think it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever written.”

“I’m sorry—I mean, is that even a bad thing?”

“I don’t know. It just is,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he said.

Mom called in the evening. Did I pick up? Yes, I did. Did she ask me if I was ok? Indeed. Did I return the question? Only phrased differently. Did I pay attention as she disintegrated into choked tears, slowly, painfully, as her lungs and soul drained out through the phone line, a lifetime of hurt transmitted through her gasping voice, while she asked me if I was happy, that she would be happy if I was happy, and that she felt sorry for everything but nothing in particular, just a general sense of guilt, of loss, of something missing, a hole of silence upon the polluted skies? No. But I told her everything would be ok, and she seemed to be placated, and then I hung up.

Later on, close to midnight, I pulled out the three sheets of paper that I had written the music on. It was wrinkled, close to illegible, like the work of an old arthritic man’s last words, rushed against death. I could still read it though, the sounds were still in my ears; I placed the music gingerly in front of the piano and danced my hands across the keyboard. I could hear the entire piece in my head; I dared not play a note out loud, lest it ruin the perfect sound in my head. The silence rang throughout the dark room, undercut only sporadically by gusts of cars going by in the streets below. I took a pencil and scrawled on the top of the piece, “for Dad,” and I continued to sit there until I couldn’t tell if my eyes were closed, and the harmonies in my heart sang involuntarily.

The following weeks I kept up my schedule of gigs and rehearsals and concerts, but I did not write a single note more. The spaces between my playing Bach, jazz, and cheap and easy accompanying pieces were filled with the same atonal, haunted soundscape that I had written on that peculiar morning. The only thing that varied was the tempo: sometimes fast enough that it sounded like a violent, churning ocean; sometimes so slow that each chord could string together all the stars in the sky.

My brother Adrian called one morning to ask how I was doing, something that he never did. I said I was doing just fine. That’s not what people are telling me, he said. What people? I demanded. He wouldn’t say, and remained silent over the line without hanging up. The question lingered until he said it didn’t matter, to call him if I needed anything, and he said good luck with everything and then hung up.

That night, my mind finally once again turned to Schubert’s Winterreise—Winter Journey. A song cycle for piano and tenor, set by 24 poems. I found myself fixated on the last song in the cycle, “Der Leiermann”: The Hurdy-Gurdy Man. The song opens with with a pair of deep ominous 5ths in the piano, with a grace note, like funeral bells, like trudging through deep snow alone. The right hand enters with a whispering, troubled melody, shifting between questions and laments. The tenor sings his verses between the pianist’s interjections, melancholy but matter of fact, as if totally resigned to travel forever in the cold. The song ends with a question in forte, full of pain, before dying out into a soft, fading minor chord.

There, behind the village,
stands a hurdy-gurdy-man,
And with numb fingers
he plays the best he can.

Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers back and forth,
And his little plate
remains ever empty.

No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him,
And the hounds snarl
at the old man.

And he lets it all go by,
everything as it will,
He plays, and his hurdy-gurdy
is never still.

Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you play your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?

I couldn’t find a venue to play my new piece. I didn’t think clubs would want something so modern—and personal, for lack of a better word. I thought of contacting some of my composer friends to try and put together a new music concert, or asking to play at a chamber music recital. But I didn’t do any of those things. I thought it was vain, and despicably so, to market my piece like that. As if to sell off my grief with a performance.

Once on a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting with Walter on a grassy hill at Dolores Park. The place was swarming with people. We were drinking beer and breathing in the weak sunlight. We talked about nothing in particular, just letting odd thoughts roll off our tongues.

“I’m working on a TV show now,” he said.

“Hm. About what?” I was watching the white clouds drift over downtown San Francisco.

“It’s pretty stupid, really. It’s another one of those dysfunctional family comedies: the dad’s like a depressed, morose professor and the mom’s this semi-naive schoolteacher, and the kids are all over the place.”

“Wow.”

“But it pays well, and—I mean, I need the money, and the work isn’t all bad.” He took a large gulp of beer. “What have you been up to? You have that piano piece, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. It hasn’t been performed yet though. Probably sometime soon though.”

“That’s good.”

“Other than that, things have been the same really, for the most part.”

“So you’re doing alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, why?” I probably sounded more accusatory than I meant to be.

“I don’t know, I believe you. You’re just a little more quiet than usual, I guess.”

I was unsure of what to say, even though I knew that I was just confirming his observation. I put my beer down and stood up.

“Are you going?” he asked. He sounded surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed.

“I don’t know, maybe,” I said without looking at him, my eyes fixed on the clouds.

The next day, I drove back down to the South Bay to have dinner with Mom at a dimly lit Thai restaurant. She seemed absolutely unable to ask me anything specific, as if she didn’t want to disturb the imaginary life she created for me, afraid of finding out how I was really spending my time. Instead she kept on reminding me—probably three or four times within a half hour—that she was always feeling cold at home, and ate out a lot more now.

“Is that a waste of money? I mean, I think that—” She sounded genuinely concerned.

I took a few seconds to swallow. “I don’t know, Mom. If it makes you happy.” I knew that I was being curt with my replies. My eyes were lowered on my plate.

“Oh things just seem so—I’m not sure—just so blurry. So confusing.” Her food was barely touched. Her words sounded hazy too. I wanted to reach over the table and squeeze her hand, but I just leaned forward a little, folded my arms, and smiled sympathetically.

I was accompanying a few violin students for a recital. It was exactly two months after Dad died. After it was over, their teacher came up to me and thanked me. I said it was no problem, and she walked away slowly. I stayed by the piano, watching parents and shy kids filter out of the hall. Once the last person was gone, I leaned over to my bag and carefully pulled out three pieces of paper, now mangled and stained, and laid it on the stand. I looked at the notes, the lacerated emotions behind them. I thought of the hurdy-gurdy man and his empty plate. I breathed in the silence. Then I played.

My last conversation with Dad ventured onto the topic of love. It seemed only natural. He said he barely loved anymore. He figured it was the only way he could die well, if he stopped loving. I sat by his bedside silently. He reflected on what he just said, and then reached for me with playful urgency. I only meant that theoretically, he said. I mean, how could anyone live without loving something? Anything? He laughed, amused by his own philosophical musings. Minutes passed without a word.

“Do you want anything?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he said contently. “I wish you could play me something on the piano again. Maybe some Bach, or some Schubert. Something simple.” But he was in the hospital, and there was virtually no way to get a piano, or even a keyboard in there.

“Maybe I could write a piece for you,” I said. His eyes brightened for a moment before he slackened back into a familiar, tired smile.

“I would say you shouldn’t. But I can already hear it.” The conversation seemed to end then, and he laid back deep into his pillow and closed his eyes to sleep. I remained still, and listened to the fan hovering above chopping the air, the lights buzzing, the dampened hospital noises outside.

The sound stretched wistfully to the dark walls of the hall, unencumbered by people. My heart melted into the melody, a singular soul enclosed. No one was there to applaud at the end. There was only the empty silence of desolate peace. I sat in front of the piano and wondered if I should just play it again. An encore for the dead. But I didn’t. No one was there to listen, I knew that. But of course music was still music if no one listened. I had no need for people to sit out there like statues. I was playing to something beyond those walls. Of course music was still music if no one listened. Of course it was.