Fleeting In the Ear, Forever In the Heart

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

WHEN I was 12 or so and a serious piano student, I bought an LP recording of Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin’s four ballades. Though at the time I didn’t know much about these works, I already loved Chopin and had had a recent triumph as a sixth grader performing his “Grande Valse Brillante” in E flat (with lots of clinkers) at a school assembly.

I remember going into the basement den of my family’s house on Long Island to listen to the record. From the start of Rubinstein’s account of theBallade No. 1 in G minor I was hooked.

The ballade opened with a forceful line that began in the low register of the piano and rose up the keyboard in octaves, as if making some grim declaration. At the peak of the ascent the line twisted into a soft plaintive turn, delivered in two halting phrases.

Then something stunning happened, just for a moment: a short gesture, a softly sighing three-note melodic fragment landing on a dissonant-seeming chord that at first sounded as if it were wrong. Yet the harmony lingered, and the pungency of the clashing notes was strangely beautiful, almost comforting. This led into what seemed the saddest melody I had ever heard. The main business of the ballade had started.

I remember how powerfully I reacted to that moment with the sighing phrase. I still get shivers when I hear it or play it.

There are comparable moments in many pieces we love — a fleeting passage, a short series of chords, some unexpected shift in a melodic line — when something occurs that just grabs us. I’m not talking about the obvious ones, those climactic blasts that pound you into submission, or those soaring lyrical lines that sweep you along. I’m thinking of subtle, almost stealthy musical moments that we might or might not notice at first hearing. And these can stand out all the more because classical pieces, unlike many other types of music, tend to be long. Even a relatively short classical song is often part of a sizable cycle.

Why do these moments hook us? What happens musically to make a brief passage have such an oversized emotional impact?

I’m not sure why this has been on my mind lately. Maybe because during the run of Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Metropolitan Opera last season one of my all-time favorite musical moments failed to work its usual magic. It occurs in the final scene when Brünnhilde, having been awakened from her sleeping spell by Siegfried’s kiss, sees her horse, Grane, grazing and realizes that everything in her life has changed. Was it the clear, cool way Fabio Luisi conducted the passage? Or was I distracted by the imposing images of Robert Lepage’s machine-dominated new production?

Almost every time I mention some favorite moment in the company of other music lovers, everyone jumps in to tell me about their own. So I want to share a few of mine and try to account for why these passages get to me. And for good measure, working with Gabe Johnson and Mayeta Clark, video journalists at The New York Times, I have made a video, playing some of those moments on the piano and discussing them.

In addition I invite you to share your favorite moments. I will report back in another article and make another video showcasing some of the suggestions.

In thinking about them, I realize that the moments, however subtle, even simple, have one thing in common: In every instance the composer seems intent on using strategic musical means to bring about some acute sensory and emotional reaction, even if the listener is not consciously aware of what is happening.

Take that moment in Act III of “Siegfried.” Siegfried wakes Brünnhilde atop the fire-surrounded mountain where she has for years been under a spell imposed by her father, Wotan, a penalty for her insubordination. At first Brünnhilde is just stunned to be conscious and transfixed by the radiant sun, which she hails. Slowly she and Siegfried are overcome with confusing but overpowering mutual desire. But as part of the punishment meted out by Wotan, Brünnhilde has lost her godhood.

At one point in the scene she turns her thoughts inward. She sees Grane, who had also been under a sleeping spell, then notices her spear, helmet and shield on the ground. As she gazes away from Siegfried, the orchestra plays a stern two-note bass figure (a rising fourth) that leads to a curiously grim melodic turn. But an inner voice in the orchestra softly plays a fragment of a minor mode fanfare. It’s the “Ride of the Valkyries” theme from “Die Walküre,” the preceding opera in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle: the motif that has been associated with Brünnhilde every time she has mentioned flying about on Grane. Yet now the motif is weakened and halting, and it leads to quizzical, unresolved harmonies.

This moment, such beautiful music, is even more meaningful because it illustrates what has happened to Brünnhilde. Her godhood gone, she is now a mortal woman falling for a young man. The motif is trying to get off the ground, in a way, to restore Brünnhilde to her glory days as Valkyrie warrior. This can no longer be. A lot of musical and dramatic richness is conveyed by this moment, though, true to Wagner’s prolonged way of doing things, this music is repeated a few times, coming at you in different keys.

This is a good example of how a composer can invest a fleeting moment with resonance by giving a motif heard many times earlier a new musical and emotional cast. Puccini does something similar in another of my favorite moments, in Act III of “Turandot.”

One of the best-known tunes from this fairy-tale opera is a theme associated with Turandot, an icy, man-hating princess in a Beijing of legendary times. The theme is a stately, gentle melody that Puccini adapted from a Chinese folk tune. During the opera we hear it many ways: sung by an angelic children’s choir, blasting forth from the full orchestra, proclaimed by throngs of choristers in the courtyard of the palace.

But at this juncture in Act III, Turandot has been summoned to the scene. Imperial guards are holding Liu, the slave girl, who knows the name of the secretive Prince Calaf, Turandot’s mysterious and determined suitor. When Turandot appears, we hear that “Chinese” theme again in the full-throttled orchestra, with trumpets and trombones blaring. But the sound of the orchestra deflates in just seconds, and the first phrase of the theme is repeated, this time in warm, subdued and glowing orchestral sound, rich with throbbing strings. The melodic line is harmonized in sensuous, impressionistic chords seemingly right out of Debussy, turning it into something yearning, romantic and poignant.

In presenting this now-familiar melody in such a harmonically startling and seductive way, Puccini is signaling the audience not only that Turandot is going to melt, that she is about to fall in love with Calaf, but that she already has. Turandot may not know this. But Puccini knows it, and, hearing this musical moment, the audience does too.

One more. This one comes at the opening of the third and final movement of Stravinsky’s“Symphony of Psalms,” in which he sets three psalms of praise. The piece, composed in 1930, is an austerely beautiful neo-Classical work, scored for chorus and an unconventional orchestra that has low strings but no violins or violas; varied brass and woodwinds; a harp, two pianos and percussion.

The first words of Psalm 150, the text for the final movement, as set here in Latin by Stravinsky, are: “Alleluia. Laudate, Dominum.” After a short gesture of rising harmonies in the orchestra, the chorus sings “alleluia” in soft block chords. But the chords are wistful and pleading, as if the timid choristers, feeling unworthy, are asking the Lord permission to praise him. The implied question would seem: “Have we earned the right to sing an alleluia to you?” This moment extends into a somber chantlike setting of the words “Laudate Dominum.”

What so moves me is that Stravinsky takes the word “alleluia,” which has led so many composers to clichéd expressions of praise, and sets it to such aching harmonies. Yet those chords represent such ingenious use of the tonal language that your ear and intellect perk up, while your emotions melt. The third movement eventually takes off and becomes almost aggressive in the act of praise. That sad “alleluia” comes back just two more times: once at a strategic moment that temporarily halts the assertive music of praise; and then at the end, just before the final, calming, harmonically holistic statement of “Laudate Dominum.”

I had the privilege of hearing Stravinsky conduct the piece with the New York Philharmonic in 1966, which fixed that moment in my memory forever.

What are some of your moments?