Hi, Tune-Up fans. It’s been a while. Yes, I am cranking this up again, but before I relaunch anew, I offer this meditation on a piece that recently blew me away. I hope you enjoy it. More soon.

It was the second variation that tripped me up every time. I hated practicing it. My fingers weren’t strong enough for the trills and it was just filled with them. Nothing but trills. Trills all the way down. No matter how much I used the medieval-looking finger strengthening device my parents bought for me, my trills mumbled rather than sparkled. So I always pile-drove my way through it until I could take a breather in the middle variations before bringing the piece home in the jaunty sixth. Taken altogether, Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11 was a whopper of a piece for fourteen-year-old me, a pianist with superb emotive playing but average technical ability, which – as one might easily guess – is precisely why my piano teacher assigned it. She correctly diagnosed me as a gifted but lazy pianist who hid my fingers’ physical weaknesses behind their ability to wring feeling from a piece like water from a washcloth.  So I did what many surly teenagers are wont to do: I practiced what I wanted to and ignored what I didn’t, which meant I wasn’t ready to perform it on time, which meant I had to perform during a special summer concert designed for delinquent prodigies. I blushed so hard it may as well have been a sunburn. I think I ran off the stage before the applause even started.

Even up against the torture of shifting social politics and the occasional failed test, that concert was still the most challenging moment of high school for a teenager whose private identity and public persona was “musician.” The former were bonbons of private anguish; the concert was a banquet of public humiliation. Almost 30 years later, practically to the day, I reconnected with that humiliated teenager. This is the story of how music made that happen.

As many things in one’s youth tend to be, that concert was temporarily awful. Its sting faded for good by the time I got to college, and I hadn’t thought about it since – though I would still play the sonata occasionally from memory, at the piano I received as a gift after getting my graduate degree. Then one afternoon last week, from a random playlist on Apple’s Classical music app, came a reinterpretation of the sonata. My albatross had come home. 

I should say upfront that I have a near anaphylactic allergy to reinterpretations. They are the fusion cuisine of the musical world: keep that jazz away from my Mozart, and keep that Caribbean jerk seasoning away from my sushi. But this interpretation…it blew the windows out. If I had been driving, I would have had to pull the car over. As it was, I ended up putting my head down on my desk and sobbing. Let me explain why by comparing the two pieces side by side.

The original pieces (and we’ll define “piece” here as the theme of the sonata, since that’s what gets reinterpreted) is of moderate tempo and shallow emotional depth. Were the pianist to overplay the melody, it would take something charming and make it mawkish. Mozart’s original piece is unsullied by worry, fear, anger, or regret – that is to say, experience. This is a young, smooth-browed piece.

The reinterpreted version wears its experience on its sleeve. It may be just as quiet, but this is not a calm quiet. This is a weary quiet. The swing is not jaunty – no spring in one’s step here. No, the inner mechanism has been shaken loose by time and use and damage. It may soon need a pacemaker to keep time. And in contrast to the interiority of the original, the reinterpretation is spacious. It’s rocking on the front porch as bursts of memories transport the melody into numerous modulations. There are peeking visits to real darkness where pain lies, remembered but contained through force of will. This piece is at once achingly sad, grateful, resigned, and hopeful, and yet feels no dissonance. It knows that many things are true at once. When it was younger, this piece was all-or-nothing. Things either were, or were not. It learned the hard way that it was incorrect. 

This reinterpretation of a Mozart piano sonata is like the musical summation of the past 30 years of my life, inclusive of today’s present moment. 

The big event of my fourteenth year was my first kiss – with my first crush, no less. Everything else was gravy. I had two parents. I had room to run and no one was chasing me. My responsibilities extended to trying my best in school, keeping my room in shape, helping around the house, and continuing to learn how to be a human being. 30 years later, I am now middle aged. Let’s round down a little and say early middle age, presuming I don’t let the horrors refill my glass of wine too often or sap my energy to go to the gym or weed the lavender patch or play tag with my son. I know how to be a human being after having been a bad one and a good one and a more or less fine one, sometimes even a great one. 

I’m on my second marriage, but this one stuck and we have a child who I gave birth to at the beginning of a global pandemic. I own a house that gives me great joy and requires constant attention and money I don’t really have. I have responsibilities I chose to shoulder, and every day I choose to shoulder them again no matter the weight. I’ve had a root canal so I floss more now. I have dealt with crushing student loan debt. I don’t have as many friends as I used to but the ones I have are deep. I’m on year three of not having my mother, who died out of the blue on a Saturday morning in July. I served in government and have since watched my old office get broken apart and would serve again in a heartbeat. I have a job and I could lose it as easily as my colleague lost hers the other day. Many of my neighbors, friends, and the parents of my son’s friends are out of jobs. Every day I wonder if I’m equipped to keep my son safe and healthy. My right knee clicks when I go up the stairs. Many things are true at once.

The time warp of that reinterpreted Mozart piano sonata is bidirectional. It turned me back into a fourteen-year-old who was then given a chance to see what life would do to, with, and for her, over the next 30 years. And it heightened my feelings of peril about this present moment by reminding me that I was once a child in a world, and now am myself raising a child in a world, and that is work – constant, unavoidable work. Every day is that second variation. It’s nothing but trills. Express the emotion, but do the work. Always do the work.

My mother had a saying: People don’t change, they just stand more clearly revealed. And this reinterpreted sonata revealed that though I may not have strengthened my weak fingers to the point of dazzling artistry, still they became strong enough to do the work required of humans in the world: to seize and hold onto joy when it was scarce; bravery when it was slippery; and love when it was elusive. And that is enough. And it is not easy. But it is enough.