Brahms in London

My trip to London had a very specific goal. I had been lucky enough to score tickets for a performance of Hamlet starring a renowned actor. The opportunity was special enough to justify the long journey, and after a week in the English countryside, I settled into a rented flat across from Trafalgar Square. I’d purchased the sought-after tickets nearly a year ago and spent months anticipating the trip and the performance. Now that the long-awaited date with Hamlet was drawing near, I felt restless. Out on a morning walk I noticed the flyer on the door of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the crisp white Christopher Wren church located at the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square. The flyer announced a free lunchtime concert of music by Bach and Brahms. Great music performed in the early eighteenth-century Anglican landmark? How could I pass this up?

A crowd filled the interior by the time I got there. I managed to find a seat on one of the raised side pews, sharing it with a young Czech man, two women from China, and a worn but dignified man of the streets. The diverse audience of young and old, visitors and residents was clearly energized, and there was generous applause when the performer came out with her cello.

At the first note the room became hushed. The young Korean cellist began the opening of a Bach fugue, her bow coaxing sounds that felt like living creatures, singing and sighing from her instrument. The antique baroque music sparkled, and her interpretation took us directly to the mind of its creator. A single instrument swelling, aching, descending deep into the lowest reaches of the musical line. Like a slow sip of aged cognac. And then it was finished. The last note resonated for what felt like an eternity. We sat for a moment absorbing the gift she had offered. Then energetic applause, enough to invite several curtain calls.

Soon began the main piece of the concert, a Brahms cello sonata, four movements expanding into the glowing rich panoramas of Brahms’s mature period from a very brisk opening, into a long, slow adagio that felt like the autumnal colors of twilight. The music seeped into me and began to pry me open. I was defenseless against the sweep of sound and the brilliance of the performers. At some point, maybe halfway through the piece, I realized I was in tears.

At this moment, in this place, two young women had gathered up the great musical passion of Brahms and set it ablaze. They had swept me inside the flame and I was burning, weeping, complete. What had happened to me? Was it simply the expertise of the young musicians overwhelming my emotions? Partly. Was I swept away by recollections of making music in my own life? Yes. But it was a physical epiphany. As I listened to the last moments of Brahms, the cello and piano moving across each other’s tonal dynamics and closing in on a fiery transcendent finish, I realized that nothing else reached into me like music.

This was why I had come so far to be here. It wasn’t to see Hamlet. It was to reaffirm in one indelible moment how richly music has illuminated my life. Staying open to the unanticipated, I was given a moment of unexpected clarity and insight. How easily I might have missed it. Looking for Hamlet in London, I almost missed Brahms.

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets