Of Stories and Debussy

I'm not a great listener of “Classical” music, more modern classics, such as Elvis, Guy Mitchell and the musical re-tellings of Andre Rieu taking first place within my heart. Yet there are days where the peaceful flow of the music of the Romantic and Impressionist eras are what I crave.

So I go and uncover the worn collection of classical records (not literally records of course because I listen to music on my laptop and back then we listened to Cd's and later the computer) from my childhood.

First, I play a Hungarian Rhapsody, which also happens to be the one most recently listened to. I've listened to it a dozen times of late because Osbert Gaunt in The Daughter Pays plays one, and ever since my first reading of it the strength and passion of the song sends me away to the dark of an English evening a hundred years ago. I'm there looking in upon the sitting room where Virginia (the heroine) lies upon the couch looking out into the stars of the night, the firelight flicking around her, the swell of the song sending her spirit in flight with the freedom of the stars.

Music and story are so earnestly intertwined: the theme song of a movie that you love (or don't) but for which the song still makes you laugh or weep in ecstasy as the case may be (Love Me Tender anyone?), the endless round of a tune stuck in your head when one is attempting to sleep, and the music of a wedding day.

The treble notes of Debussy's Clair De Lune flutter through the room. It is in songs such as these that the quiet speech of the music enters into your spirit, between the steady fall of rain outside your window and the warmth of dreaming within.

Dreams of the ages, of all the generations who have listened to this song, my heart fills to overflowing with the glorious ache of it, but it is not a painful one. It is an ache that makes me reach for my favorite tales as words for my own flick into my head and flow out of my fingers into the document upon my computer, translating the electricity of the storm and rain without, the humming wonder of imagination within and the trembling glorious gift of music which twines amongst everything.