"Providentially, though, it was music that helped save her, as it had in the past. On the fifth or sixth day-- she recalled only that it was a Saturday-- she awoke after a restless night filled with confused, menacing dreams and as if by old habit stretched out her hand and switched on the tiny Zenith radio which she kept on her bedside table. She had not meant to, it was simple reflex; the reason she had shut music out during these days of malignant depression was that she had found she could not bear the contrast between the abstract yet immeasurable beauty of music and the almost touchable dimensions of her own aching despair. But unknown to herself, she must have been open and receptive to the mysteriously therapeutic powers of W.A. Mozart, M.D., for the very first phrases of the music-- the great Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major-- caused her to shiver all over with uncomplicated delight. And suddenly she knew why this was so, why this sonorous and noble statement so filled with peculiar, chilling dissonances should flood her spirit with relief and recognition and joy. For aside from its intrinsic loveliness, it was a work whose very identity she had sought for ten years. She had been smitten nearly mad with the piece when an ensemble from Vienna had visited Cracow a year or so before the Anschluss. Sitting in the concert hall, she had listened to the fresh new work as in a trance, and let the casements and doors of her mind swing wide to admit the luxuriant, enlaced and fretted harmonies, and those wild dissonances, inexhaustibly inspired. At a time of her early youth made up of the perpetual discovery of musical treasures, this was a treasure newly minted and supreme. Yet she never heard the piece again, for like everything else the Sinfonia Concertante and Mozart, and the plaintive sweet dialogue between violin and viola, and the flutes, the strings, the dark-throated horns were all blown away on the war's wind in a Poland so barren, so smothered with evil and destruction that the very notion of music was a ludicrous excrescence.
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| Author William Styron, former U.S. Marine during WWII |
"So in those years of cacophony in bombed-out Warsaw, and later at the camp, the memory of that work faded, even the title, which she ultimately confused with the titles of other pieces of music she had known and loved in time long past, until all that was left was a blurred but exquisite recollection of a moment of unrecapturable bliss, in Cracow, in another era. But in her room that morning the work, joyously blaring through the plastic larynx of the cheap little radio, brought her abruptly upright with quickened heartbeat and with an unfamiliar sensation around her mouth which she realized was a smile. For minutes she sat there listening, smiling, chilled, ravished while the unrecapturable became captured and slowly began to melt her fierce anguish. Then when the music was finished, and she had carefully written down the name of the work as the announcer described it, she went to the window and raised the blind. Gazing out at the baseball diamond at the edge of the park, she found herself wondering if she would ever have enough money to buy a phonograph and a recording of the Sinfonia Concertante and then realized that such a thought in itself meant that she was coming out of the shadows."
We have the ability to find our own musical medicine at any time. Let's enjoy Sophie's-- it truly is a sweet back and forth between instruments. Let's also remember any kind of music that has ever brought us back to our smiling, melted selves. Your special elixir will be yours to discover and recapture.
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