We all have our madeleines.  This morn­ing I sat in a wait­ing room, and the Beethoven Vio­lin Con­certo came over the radio.  Lost time came in search of me, a mass of moments reviv­i­fied and occu­py­ing me equally and simul­ta­ne­ously.  The sen­sa­tion was famil­iar in one impor­tant way, it was the feel­ing I have each time I hear this music, which is both the sen­sa­tion of the moment and the rec­ol­lec­tion of that same, won­der­ful feel­ing from each pre­vi­ous time.  It is the sen­sa­tion of know­ing that Beethoven is my brother.

In my first go-round in Brook­lyn, liv­ing in Fort Greene in the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, you might have found me some early week­day evenings at the bar of the Alibi Club, which, before the sun set nightly, was a com­fort­able, no-frills neigh­bor­hood place where one could sit qui­etly, chat and win a pot of cash by putting in your own money and answer for ‘Final Jeop­ardy.’  I remem­ber one con­ver­sa­tion I had with a fre­quent patron named Noel, about music.  We were talk­ing appre­cia­tively about what we loved, avant-garde jazz for me and clas­sic album rock for him, but when I men­tioned that I had been lis­ten­ing obses­sively to George Szell’s Beethoven cycle — and I had been — we found our­selves con­joined in a love for Beethoven.  Not every­one loves, or is even inter­ested in him, but he’s easy to love no mat­ter what one’s musi­cal taste or inter­est may be; we love our broth­ers, and Beethoven is one.

Pop songs tell us about expe­ri­ences that we have had our would like to have, we can relate to and iden­tify with the sto­ries and the feel­ings and the per­son­al­i­ties of the tellers/singers, whether we kissed a girl or loved and lost like Frank has.  Some­times the songs are so good, so com­plex and endur­ing that they leave it to us to decided what exactly we are iden­ti­fy­ing with emo­tion­ally, which changes through time as we endure life.  Usu­ally, though, unen­durable teenage heart­break turns into adult dis­ap­point­ment and ennui, and so the teenage songs no longer work and must be replaced by adult songs.  Clas­si­cal music is dif­fer­ent in that it doesn’t tell us very much at all, it instead appeals to totally abstract ideas of time and form.  It asks ques­tions rather than offers answers, and so does not appeal to all, but its appeal is endur­ing since it’s always an intrigu­ing, often beau­ti­ful mys­tery to solve.  We never actu­ally find the solu­tion, but there is mar­velous plea­sure in the process.

Clas­si­cal music does offer per­son­al­i­ties, but often these are both abstracted and ide­al­ized.  This is espe­cially true in the Clas­si­cal era, where the music of Mozart and Haydn is guided by their per­son­al­i­ties, i.e. their taste and choices, but presents what they think about their own ideas, not them­selves directly.  This changes with Beethoven who is so excep­tional because he does both simul­ta­ne­ously; he doesn’t need to choose between telling us about him­self and about what he thinks of his own abstract ideas.  To Beethoven, that’s an irrel­e­vancy.  In the Vio­lin Con­certo, we hear what he thinks about sonata-allegro form, and how he likes to solve the puz­zle of find­ing his way home after a long jour­ney, and this is appeal­ing and sat­is­fy­ing to those who find spirit and beauty in those ques­tions (and they are full of such things).  We also hear Beethoven tell us about him­self, not the abstract fig­ure rep­re­sented in Clas­si­cal music but his real, Roman­tic self.  What he tells us in all his music, lit­er­ally all, is this: I have suf­fered, and I have strug­gled, but I have also found joy.

That is some­thing we all desire to hear and to be able to say our­selves at times in our life, and so Beethoven can appeal to every­one.  For other Roman­tic com­posers, we react as we would in mak­ing or reject­ing friend­ships; how our per­son­al­i­ties mix with the music is the key.  If the music is appeal­ing it is because it becomes a friend, and like real friends we think and react in a vari­ety of ways depend­ing on who we are with, and our moods and the com­pan­ion­ship we require.  Schu­mann, Schu­bert, the eccen­tric Berwald, the sim­ple, mys­ti­cal Bruck­ner, the aes­thete Tchi­akovsky, the enig­matic Sibelius are all my friends, but I don’t wish their com­pany at all times.  The Stravin­sky of The Fire­bird, Petrushka and Le Sacre du Print­emps is my daz­zling, eter­nally youth­ful and bril­liant friend, while the late-Romantic Schoen­berg is an acquain­tance who shares few con­cerns with me, and Richard Strauss is an unpleas­ant fel­low who seeks social cir­cles that I find repul­sive.  Gus­tav Mahler is the exhaust­ingly inti­mate friend with whom the dis­cur­sive, fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion never ends.

Those are some of my friends, and they are my friends because I like them.  Beethoven is not my friend, how­ever, and I don’t always like him.  He can infu­ri­ate me with his scorn, his pet­ti­ness, his arro­gant and cruel moods — he’s not a per­son who, if I did not know, I would pur­sue a friend­ship with.  That doesn’t mat­ter, though, because I do know him, and he knows me.  He’s my brother, and so I will always love him.