Transformed By Absence

As the Midwestern fall turned into a frigid, icy winter, I listened to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and read Philip Kennicott’s Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning. Alternating between listening and reading, I found myself overwhelmed by emotion and flooded with the desire to do something. I wanted to clean house, dance around the room with my infant son, and, in certain moments, weep. After a week of being transfixed by Bach’s music and enchanted with Kennicott’s story, I wondered if I might even return to the piano (like Kennicott, I began playing at four years old) and begin learning the “Goldberg Variations.” What kept me from dusting off the keyboard was Kennicott reminding me that Bach’s music “doesn’t tolerate any kind of bluster, and ruthlessly exposes inadequacy.” I decided the “Goldbergs” would be too difficult for me to attempt, but living vicariously through Kennicott—that is, reading his memoir about learning the variations after his mother’s death—I began to feel like less of an outsider to Bach’s universe of beauty. Which is to say that Counterpoint is not just an astonishingly moving memoir about losing a parent; it is an uncommonly graceful, precise meditation on learning a very difficult piece of music. In fact, the book accomplishes through language something I’ve thought absolutely impossible: it makes Bach’s keyboard masterpiece vivid.