Love at First Sound

by Diana Reynolds Roome

At a time when all my friends at school were raving about Fabian and Elvis, I found musical thrills coming from an entirely different place.

One night, as I was trying to get to sleep in the dormitory after lights-out at my small English girls’ boarding school, a piano struck up in the gym below. It started quietly as if creeping up the keyboard, but rippling watery arpeggios were soon wafting up from below until the notes rang out with furious energy. I sat bolt upright in bed, straining to catch every phrase through the floorboards. The girl in the bed next to me snuffled rhythmically. Two older girls farther down the dorm were whispering and stifling giggles. The rule after lights-out was silence. But I barely heard nor cared. The piano below was growing more vociferous. The notes were galloping now, as if straining to escape. I was out the window with them, through the beech woods and running. The yearning minor key was supported by powerful low notes – but then stentorian chords burst in like a barrier, harsh and final as capture. Just as suddenly, the music broke away and escaped into air, with the piano expressing a free song I wanted to sing, first minor, then major as it rose and flew. It was hard to sleep after that. I had experienced love at first sound.

Next day, I perused a posted practice schedule and found out that the piano player was a dignified pixie-like senior named Noel, doing her regular practice. I knew we had some gifted musicians in the upper classes but although this might have been routine to her, to me it was revelation. The music was like freedom to me. I needed it to survive in this restrictive place. So without going to the lengths of speaking to this venerable seventeen-year-old, I managed to discover the name of the piece – Johannes Brahms’ Rhapsody in G minor. Somehow, I obtained a copy of the music. At ‘prep’ time, when all the boarders did their homework under the fluorescent lights of a large barrack-like hall, I put up my hand and excused myself for piano practice. Nobody challenged me or accused me of an outrageous deception as I crept out clutching my copy of the Rhapsody. Though my name was not on the practice schedule, I managed to find an unoccupied piano and opened up the music. The notes went all over the staves. There were two flats, which changed later to two sharps! Key signatures were still a mystery to me.

Painstakingly deciphering the first notes, I pressed the keys down gingerly, one after another. Bit by bit, I dissected the chords, working out how each note corresponded with a white or black key. I made my clumsy fingers press the right ones at approximately the right times – or so I hoped. The chords were far too wide for my hands, which ached from the effort. But wasn’t I playing Brahms? Wasn’t I taking the notes the great man had written and making them come awkwardly alive, all by myself?

A few weeks later Miss Flint, the music teacher, walked in on one of my mangled playing sessions. She did not criticize but merely remarked that she didn’t know I was learning piano. I wasn’t, I told her. “Why not?” she wanted to know. As my parents were already paying school fees for myself and siblings, I didn’t want to ask for extras, I admitted.

“Then I’ll give you lessons,” Miss Flint said.

I arrived at my first lesson full of pride at being a real piano student at last. But joy turned to dust when Miss Flint handed me a book of Grade One exercises. I was instructed to use only the five fingers on one hand then the five fingers of the other, alternately, and with no chords. For days, alone in the practice room, I tried to do what I was told. But I was boiling over with humiliation and gall. I knew I could do runs that took me from lowest D to top E and chords that employed every one of my fingers, however tangled up they got. Miss Flint explained that it was necessary to start right from the beginning. I could not stoop to this. The shame made me a little crazed, as I imagined people crowding outside the practice room doors, hooting with laughter at a twelve-year-old playing baby exercises. I did not practice my Grade One pieces but continued my laborious work on the Rhapsody in G minor, and only that. My teacher was disappointed at the lack of evident progress, and the piano lessons ceased.

A year later, I started violin lessons. My parents must have realized that music was inevitable. Undaunted by my previous experience, I obtained a copy of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major. I had to see how those divine sounds were made. By this time, I was living back at home, and my bow scrapings made our corgi bark mercilessly. She had every right to protest. Brahms forgave me though and continued to accompany me through my life.

On my last day at school, the choir sang his soaring anthem from the German Requiem, “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen.” I thought this was as close to heaven as anyone could ever get.

In the summer vacation before college, I went apple picking in Suffolk. The pickers were housed in a converted barn in the middle of the countryside. We ate great sloppy meals of porridge and stew and slept on hard pallets in long rows. One evening after work, the subject of music came up and a dumpy girl, still in her grubby work clothes, went over to a sturdy upright piano at the other end of the eating hall. She started playing a piece I knew must be Brahms, because I recognized his voice. I had been struggling with Opus 116, Intermezzo in E Major, one of a series of exquisite short pieces Brahms composed towards the end of his life. (His lifelong friend Clara Schumann described the B minor Intermezzo of Opus 119 as a “gray pearl.”) This one turned out to be the A Major Intermezzo, from Opus 118. Hearing it was like meeting a sister.

The next summer, I was a guide at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon, living in the cheapest bed-and-breakfast I could find. Attempting to make breakfast last until evening, I would buy a banana, a punnet of cress and a packet of biscuits for supper. One day, I spotted a record of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in a bargain rack outside a shop. I took out my change and scraped up the sum. The B&B didn’t have a record player, so I propped the record behind my pillow and let the imagined sounds, deeply melancholy yet infused with joy, waft through my sleep.

A few years later while teaching in Nepal, a German voluntary corps member suggested I sing some lieder by Brahms and Schubert, with herself at the piano. I had taken voice lessons by then and experienced the peculiar happiness of sharing Brahms at a concert in Kathmandu, sandwiched between performances on tabla, sitar, and classical Indian vocals.

Back in London, a boyfriend led me into the realms of theatre, and for a while I neglected music. But when that relationship was breaking up, it was Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor that brought me solace. Brahms had a reputation for being a bit irascible and although he suffered agonies for Clara Schumann and loved others too, he never married. I absorbed his pain and his great humanity through this music as never before. The lovely Andante of the second movement made me feel he was sitting in the room opposite me, talking quietly of his experiences.

Through the years, I grew interested in other composers and deserted Brahms for short periods. His friend Dvorak and Bach accompanied me constantly. Benjamin Britten, Stravinsky and Shostakovitch made my hair stand on end. William Byrd and Vaughan Williams led me willingly to glimpse what I can only call spiritual ecstasy. As a member of various choirs, I sang in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Rudolf Kempe and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in London, in Orff’s Carmina Burana at the Royal Festival Hall, and in Bach’s St. John Passion at Davies Hall in San Francisco. But I always came back to Johannes. When I had the chance to sing the Liebesliede Waltze once, it turned out to be one of the most exhilarating vocal rides I’d ever taken.

Recently, I was at a yoga retreat in a beautiful house among the redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. There was a large grand piano in the Great Room, and someone started hesitantly playing the first chords of Brahms’ Rhapsody in G minor.

I knew it instantly – it sounded as awkward as I’d made it all those years ago. I wanted to block my ears and run, but instead stayed and listened, enchanted, for each halting note. Despite the murderous technique, the calm yet passionate voice of Johannes Brahms came through.

Having lived with Brahms all my conscious life, it would only be fitting to depart with him too. Brahms was a regretful but firm agnostic, yet his music spoke of eternal love. Although I hope the occasion is still a long way off, I have instructed my sons and husband to make sure I have his Requiem in my ears when I breathe out for the last time. In light of that pleasure, the prospect doesn’t seem bad at all.

Diana Reynolds Roome, Biography
Diana Reynolds Roome writes articles about health, travel and the arts, as well as children’s books. She pursues music, in an amateur way, in the California Bay Area, where she lives. When she can, she also likes to hear and take part in musical events in England, her home country, where music abounds.

– Diana Reynolds Roome