Longing, love and death

 At New England Conservatory, a night of longing and love...that ends in death, Juliet's in two small notes. 

What an intense experience! The Britten violin concerto that ravishes me with its slow pizzicato march backgrounding the violin's plunging and ascending. "Pleading" is a word in the program notes, but if so, it's for the fulfillment of some yearning. This is a young man's piece of music, but, I, so much older, feel it just as intensely as the composer seems to. The final movement is a gradual unfolding, a peeling off  petal by petal, and at the end, still no end of desiring. 

God in love, you seem never so real as when this kind of music wrings me. I need to refer to one as vast and deep as you to even imagine a relief. Yet, if engage with you as Other, do I believe that this yearning can be satisfied? that our encounter is satisfaction? Or will encounter over time diffuse and dilute the intensity of longing, render it more like a marriage than a mad romance?

Then Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, and those exquisite moments drawn with music brush and a palette of such orchestra color. Must, must the lovers die? Of course, death is the climax of love. Yet must it be so? God in love, aching as you are for the Beloved, is tragedy the only possible end that does justice to the intensity of desire?  Will the love move into a new key as yet unconceived and proceed into an open future?  

However my heart feels stretched taut like a string on the violin, I love the longing and would never want to live without it. There's a majesty in its vulnerability. Can I find it, even just glimpse it, in my everyday? Is it, however fleeting, in deeds of hospitality, friendship and exploration which look so forthright and admirable on paper, but in the field...? 

We can sing sometimes what we cannot say. You, the Other we aspire to know, may reveal yourself most fully in music. So be it.  What an evening.