An image sticks in Vernon’s mind. He was sitting right here, with his headphones on, listening to the Trout Quintet, looking through the doorway. The screen door was open. Mark was hunched over a model piece sitting on the spread-out newspaper, applying red enamel paint from one of those cubic jars the toy stores sell. For some reason, Susan was standing behind him, looking on. Maybe Vernon remembers this because it was rare for her to take an interest. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that she asked Mark something, and Mark turned his head to answer. She leaned closer and gestured toward the plastic part. Then she said something that made Mark laugh and he turned away, as though abashed by his own delight, and the tacky tip of the brush he was holding snagged against the newspaper and started to pull it off the table. Susan put a hand down to hold it in place.
That’s the whole memory. In the last year or two it has come to his mind with increasing frequency. It feels to Vernon like it represents everything he’s lost—his wife, his children. Of course Susan is gone, something he thinks about as rarely as possible. In a more subtle but no less real way, Mark is also gone—that Mark. You have your children and you love them, and where do they go?
He wishes he knew what they’d been saying.
Some years ago he read in an essay a whimsical idea about a Museum of Lost Gestures. The writer was talking about habitual motions people used to make that have disappeared because of changing technology. An example he gave was shielding a candle flame with your hand as you walked down a dark hallway. The lost gesture that Vernon often thinks of is the position you take when a child is standing in front of you—watching a parade, a ball game—and you put your hands on his shoulders. He misses that like hell. It’s probably this trio section of the Opus 132 that’s carrying him out on a tide of wistfulness. It’s a musette, meant to imitate a bagpipe, with a bass-line drone and a simple melody. Something about the static harmony—whatever the reason, it sounds like nostalgia to him, like stopped time.
End of side. Vernon rotates the disk between palms to the opposite side, holds the edge against his shirt-front, cleans the surface with his cloth. With CDs taking over the world, these will soon be lost gestures. On to the third movement.
Beethoven had recently recovered from a serious illness, and he labeled this movement “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode.” (He would be dead within the year.) According to The Beethoven Companion, Beethoven’s recent study of Palestrina had piqued his interest in the old church modes. Vernon had no idea what those were, so he read up about them. Apparently, if he plays from C to C on Gen’s old piano using only the white keys, he’s playing the Ionian mode. If he begins at A, he’s playing the Aeolian. A lot of English border ballads, as it turns out, are in the Dorian mode (D to D), which—if you stare stupidly at the piano keyboard long enough, you can figure out—is like a standard minor key with a raised sixth. The Locrian mode (B to B) has a diminished chord for a root triad, which means—for some reason that Vernon can’t fathom—composers almost never use it. (He so wishes he had a natural aptitude for music. This room would not be his study, but his studio. He’d have widened the door to get his piano in. He would nod his head knowingly to Locrian impossibility, or he’d convert the heathen with his melting Locrian études. He would understand his own emotions.)
As for this movement’s Lydian mode—here’s the theory that Vernon has read: Lydian is like a major key with a raised fourth, which means it doesn’t use the subdominant chord, since the raised fourth is a tritone, which is too remote from the tonic to sound right. So instead of the usual I-IV-V harmonies you get a lot of I-V alone, which in this case is F and C. Since F Lydian has the same key signature as C major, the melody seems to float between the two, making it sound ethereal. Additionally, whenever it sounds like C major, the F and C harmonies seem no longer to be I-V, but IV-I, which is the “amen” cadence at the end of Protestant hymns. Which is obviously appropriate to a song of thanksgiving.
Got that? If so, please explain it to Vernon.
Vernon sets the needle down.
Yale plays it extremely slowly. He approves. May this movement truly never end. It begins, indeed, sounding like a hymn. But even with the score in his lap, even after having laboriously picked out the chords on the piano, he can’t convince himself that it sounds like anything other than C major. For example, the end of the second strain, a C major chord, sounds like home. The fourth strain, which in many hymns would be the final one, does end on an F triad, but it doesn’t sound, to Vernon, like the final cadence, and in fact Beethoven continues into a fifth strain, which on the last chord modulates to A major and then leads in the next measure to a new melody—marked “Feeling New Strength”—which is in D major.
Well—who cares. It’s one of the most beautiful passages in the world, and F Lydian to A major to D major doesn’t explain a damn thing. Some musicians say C major sounds joyful, E-flat major heroic, F major pastoral. Vernon can’t hear any of that. He feels like a purblind man who can glimpse just enough of outlines and shadows to wonder agonizingly what forms and colors are.
He listens. He has thought
