December 10: The Chaconne, and the Meaning of Life (Itzhak Perlman, violin)

My Year of Bach ends in calamity, and in hope.

Human existence is by nature a sojourning, a temporary dwelling between non-being and extinction. — Robert Alter

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Life unfolds as a theme and variations — the theme is love and loss.

It weaves through the greatest piece of music of all time, Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin in D Minor (BWV 1004). This work, which has been a sustaining and inspiring force for the decades I’ve known it, concludes my yearlong survey of Bach’s complete catalog.

Perhaps more than any other composition, the Chaconne demands openness from its interpreters and its listeners. My Year of Bach has not ended in the way that I planned, and, as ever, Bach demands I experience the Chaconne anew.

Itzhak Perlman, graceful in the greatest performance of the greatest work, in 1978, the year of my birth.

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My wife, L., she is so easy to love: reserved and kind, sharp-minded, a woman of her word, highly attuned to everyone. From the first weeks after we met in our early twenties, I was hooked on her empathic mind, her surprising, steely determination, and her elegant physical lines.

We married three years after our first kiss. Under the chuppah, before our friends and family, we declared:

“I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine.”

And we built our lives. Through each other, and then through our children, we discovered our full selves, learning grace and patience, frustration and forgiveness, and how to take care of one another. We grew to understand our deepest fears and desires. Our twentieth wedding anniversary approaches in June.

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When I was a young child, my mother wouldn’t put me down. On my first day of kindergarten, I clung to her leg, begging to not be left in a room of random children. Couldn’t we just stay home together?

My mother devoted so much of her life to raising my sister and me, seemingly to the exclusion of everything else. For years, I dismissed her approach to life as somehow unserious. This was so unkind.

As my own children approach adolescence, I tell my mother sometimes how I finally understand her, how I often channel her essence when I try to make my kids feel cared for, and attended to. But today I can talk to her only through my memories.

I can still hardly grasp that she’ll never know her grandchildren.

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Bach brings the Chaconne to a huge peak early on. Perhaps this is the moment that led Brahms to write:

If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad.

The violin is pushed to its physical and emotional limits, the double stops and furious bowing a controlled chaos:

At other points in my life, I’ve heard in this section intimations of failed romance, or a solitary man’s apocalyptic gaze into the abyss.

This year, I hear loss — embodied first as a cutting grief, then in crushing waves.

I hear Bach, who was orphaned at the age of 10, and who in his mid-thirties had outlived a wife and three children, telling us that he loved, that he has mourned, and that you, listener, love and have mourned, or will.

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Thinking about my mother recently, I figured it all out:

A meaningful life is the one in which you have felt deeply loved, and the meaning of life is to give others the chance to feel the same. 

For us lucky ones, music becomes a pathway that channels this love, and transforms it into a wellspring. In this space, memory sublimates into meaning, and numbness dissolves.

Three months after my mother’s death in 2009, I wrote an email to my therapist:

I feel like my grief over the past few days has been mutating somehow -- in a way that's somehow flatter and deeper; it's a different kind of pervasive from a few months ago…

I came home and wrote and recorded this piece, inspired by memories of my mom… it sounds to me like I mean what I'm playing, lumps and all, and authentic, somehow, in a way that I rarely approach.

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I’m writing this final post from Mount Sinai hospital, sitting beside my resting L., tubes draining fluid from her chest, opioids dripping into her spine, as she recovers from surgery to treat the lung cancer she was diagnosed with a month ago.

By the good fortune of her date of birth, her social circumstances and biological luck, L.’s prognosis is excellent. We are absurdly blessed.

In the week leading up to her operation, we took long walks and had conversations about topics I won’t detail here — you can surely imagine. Hand-in-hand together as our path approached the Long Island Sound, despite my fear, I found myself grateful that it was me and not anyone else who would be her caretaker, the trusted person to advocate for her through the worst moments of her life.

My beloved is mine.

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The Chaconne has a false ending that has always puzzled me.

It seems like we should end here, in a tragic climax at the 12-minute mark:

There seems to be nothing left to say — Bach, in his genius, pushes straight into the next variation. Perlman plays this with a sense of introspection and even some surprise about where we’ve found ourselves:

Even when things seem to be over, when all is lost, we find ourselves thrown by life (God? fate?) onto another path.

There’s never ‘closure,’ of course, just the integration of absence — you’ll miss all the people you’ve ever loved until your ability to experience anything comes to its own end.

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Each of us faces the same impossible bargain to which we never agreed: there is so much beauty and transcendence in life, and it’s ours, but for only a moment. For exactly how many moments, only God knows.

More than two centuries after Bach’s demise, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote an elegy for himself, entitled “Awakened”:

In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn't obliterate consciousness; the past which I carried was there, together with my grief. And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: "You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago." The peace I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side. I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.¹

I hope that JSB felt a similar clarion moment of joy at the very end, his mind filled with the echoes of organ pipes and resonating wood and the vibrating human body, remembering his long lost parents, his wife, and his children, knowing that it was all perfect.

May these moments of grace arrive for everyone I love — a long, long time from now.

And what about for me?

After my writing and I are forgotten, and long after the last of notes of Bach have faded from human memory, the Earth will return to dust. What will remain — my salvation — is the deep and abiding love that I bestowed upon other beings, a gift that will blossom from generation to generation for as long as living creatures breathe.

It’s what connects me to my late mother, my sick wife, my children, and to Bach, who never knew me.

Bach’s genius is ours because it demands to be reified by us. At its summit in the Chaconne, his work intimately connects us to one another, in each of our particular variations of love and loss, triumph and sorrow, confusion and uncertain resolution.

Bach whispers to us from deep in the past: “It also happened to me.”

A whisper, a song, a gesture of love: resting in my mother’s arms, holding L.’s hand in an airless hospital room overlooking Central Park, sitting at the piano with my kids, taking our time with Bach, measure by measure. It’s the most we can ever do for one another.

Thank you for joining me on my Year of Bach.²

1. Recently quoted by

Ross Douthat

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2. More to come, soon.