December 2, 2013
Monday
We’ll call him Jake. We’ll call her Leanne. He lived down the street from me, but we went to different schools, so I didn’t know him well. She lived on a horse farm in what was so rural an area then it was nicknamed “Cow Valley.” He played the French horn. She played the oboe. I played the violin, and that’s how I knew them. We played together in the Harrisburg Youth Symphony, and the year I was a junior in high school, 1963-1964, we played Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.
Tchaikovsky’s Fifth was composed in 1888. It takes about 50 minutes to perform. It is lush, sonorous, romantic. In his notebooks, the composer wrote that the introduction is “a complete resignation before fate, which is the same as the inscrutable predestination of fate.” You will note that I have not read Tchaikovsky’s notebooks, which are probably written in Russian, but I have read the Wikipedia article about the piece, an article which is labeled “too technical for most readers to understand.” Except for the most esoteric references to compositional theory, I think most people with a background like mine would get most of it. Nevertheless, I am at a loss to explain what is meant by the assertion that
some critics, including Tchaikovsky himself, have considered the ending insincere or even crude. After the second performance, Tchaikovsky wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure.” Despite this, the symphony has gone on to become one of the composer’s most popular works. The second movement, in particular, is considered to be classic Tchaikovsky: well crafted, colorfully orchestrated, and with a memorable melody for solo horn.
It’s that solo for horn, with a complementary solo for the oboe, and the way the two instruments come together in a brief duet, that draws me to this piece. Jake and Leanne were dating that year we played the Tchaikovsky Fifth. It was obvious that they practiced together. That was about the most romantic thing I could think of, and I would watch them in rehearsal, imagining having a relationship like that.
There is an arrangement of the main theme for SATB voices called “God of All Nature” that I sang the next year with my school chorus. I can’t find the lyrics anywhere online, but I remember that they fed my beginning efforts to position myself as a twentieth century Thoreau, observing nature closely and endeavoring to live, and to write, deliberately.
The Tchaikovsky Fifth is not a Christmas piece. But this is a season of remembering, especially this season, when so many people my age are remembering where they were and what they were doing fifty years ago. I’ve spent some time walking the neighborhood I lived in then, seeking what energy from those days might still linger. I usually park in front of a house around the block from mine, a house where I did a fair amount of babysitting. I walk north then, around a curve. I always stop in front of the house I lived in. In those days the view across the street was an unbroken vista of farmland beside a creek. It’s a huge office complex now, and the view is obscured anyway by houses that line what was once an empty cul-de-sac. Then I continue south along the street where I lived. At what was Jake’s house I stop again, as if I am on my way to look after the Lenker kids while their parents are at choir practice, certain that I can see him arriving home from school, his horn case slung over his shoulder, nodding to me as he operates the cipher lock that lifts his garage door.
Last week, after I’d taken such a walk, I went to a shopping center that has a particular specialty store I needed to visit. The store is in a huge shopping complex at a congested intersection that hosts also a smaller strip mall and a Sheetz Octoplex. Fifty years ago that was the two-lane crossroads where Leanne lived. The Sheetz occupies the spot where the barn was, but the house is still there. It’s not a good place for walking. Instead, I bought gas, and then lingered a moment to peer through the trees, remembering the several times I’d been there.
I wish I could thank Jake and Leanne for the joy their work together gave me. Instead, I’ve added the Tchaikovsky Fifth to my holiday playlist, and I sing while I drive through these busy days.