The Glorious 5th

Like one who has sunk below the surface, I struggle to rise again, only to find I cannot pierce the pernicious meniscus, that slender filament separating me from the here and now.  Or, I fear, from the there and then.

I have no recollection of how I came to be where I find myself, but I hear voices murmuring around me—softly, indistinctly—until my older daughter says clearly, “He looks so peaceful, as if he’s just sleeping.  Maybe he’ll wake up.”

“He looks old,” my eldest son says.  “And frail!  How did that happen so fast?”

“Hey, the doctors say he may be able to hear us,” my younger son admonishes his brother.  “Be kind.”

I wonder if perhaps I am dying, surrounded by my family.  After more than ninety years, that should not come as any surprise.  Yet, it does.

Still, what celebrated years they have been!  I was declared a prodigy! at ten years of age, an emerging titan! in my twenties.  Throughout my thirties and forties, I was hailed as our pre-eminent interpreter of Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, and the master, Beethoven!  And from my fifties onward, I was renowned as a colossus of the keyboard, unrivalled in his musical genius!

Indeed, it is the master’s music I can hear right now, moving mellifluously below the surface—the Emperor concerto, the glorious 5^th.  It has always been my favourite, a piece I performed in front of packed audiences in countless concert halls across the globe—none more often or with more acclaim than the Berliner Philharmonie, Barenboim conducting.

Those soaring high arpeggios in the Emperor’s second movement have always sounded to me like the voices of angels on high, welcoming weary souls to heaven, and I am hearing them again now as I imagine myself playing. 

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A long-since-departed colleague once told me he believed the last piece of music we shall hear at the moment of death is the music that will accompany us to…to where, I wonder now?

It has for some time been my view that my soul, my muse—that spark of energy that animates me—will continue to wend its eternal way through the universe once released from its corporeal constraints.  And it pleases me to think that it will be accompanied on its journey by the unparalleled music I have loved since birth.

“Look!  His fingers are moving!” I hear my youngest daughter say.  “Maybe he’s going to wake up!”

But it is my darling wife of seventy years who dashes their hopes.  “He is playing the instrument,” she says sadly.  “But only he can hear it now.”

And I do hear it, grand, magnificent, the orchestra and piano blending their harmonies seamlessly in this Meisterwerk, this masterpiece.  And as I hear it descend inevitably to its conclusion…as I suppose that I am about to die…when the music stops and the applause begins, I do, indeed, cross the bar.

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After a moment, or perchance an eternity, of nothing but darkness, I spy a pinpoint of light.  It feels as if I am floating somnolently toward its radiance, still below the starry surface, but unencumbered now, free of all restraints.  And as I drift, I hear the Emperor begin anew, flooding me with unbridled joy.

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The magnificent sound swells all around me, suffusing my soul as my fingers caress the keyboard, and the splendid music fairly flies from my beloved instrument.

And gloriously, I am born again.

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2023}