Crescendo

The second movement (Allegretto) of Beethoven's 7th symphony is my favorite. Not my favorite piece of music or my favorite piece of instrumental music. Not my favorite symphony or a product of my favorite composer. It's just my favorite. 

When I was little it was hard for me to get to sleep at night sometimes. If you've ever seen the movie "What About Bob?" and you remember the therapist's son Siggy, you might also recall that he wore black all the time and had a fear of death. Well, I did too for about a year during the age of 10 or 11. At one point in the film Sig and Bob are laying awake and Sig says something like "We're all going to die one day. You are going to die. I am going to die." It describes the fear perfectly. Because unlike monsters under the bed or bullies at school, you know that this realization can't be fixed and isn't ever going to go away. 

I used to sit awake at night, inevitably the thought of death would creep into my thoughts. It's not like I imagined how I would die or thought of myself in heaven or hell. In fact, I was pretty sure there was no such thing as one or the other. I just felt like you die and that's it. It was the void, the finality of death, the inevitability of it, that was so shocking to me. There was no boogey man fantasy attached to my fear. Just the knowledge itself was enough to make my heart skip a beat.

And so, I found a CD in my mom's music collection of Beethoven. I figured classical music would help drown out the pesky thought of the end of my life. And it did. And I discovered Beethoven's 7th. If I had to describe the symphony in words, I would fail utterly. 

Never has any piece of music I've ever heard flowed like this. The beginning, barely audible, starts out in such a bittersweet way. Light, but dark, uptempo and yet somehow still foreboding. And then there is the addition of strings, following the same melody as the woodwinds and a crescendo that takes measures and measures to come full blown. It's as if it's saying, everything starts out okay, but it gets more serious. Just when you think the climax is coming up stage left, the strings have more to say. It's something quietly whispering in your ear. It's dancing, it's enticing you to come along and listen. The oboes follow, drawing the point out, supported by other woodwinds. And then a descent into something quite more punctuated happens. Just the horns now with a delicate stacatto of strings behind them. You're being fooled. The original melody mocks you in the background. And then it comes and BAM! Timpany! There's hope! From such small, humble beginnings the piece finds its own inspiration and achieves greatness.

This is the symphony of life. Because life is like that. Up and down, quiet and when you least expect it, extremely loud. But, it all flows together in a way that turns out to be seamless. Though, while we're living it, we perceive enormous crevasses. As I've gone through moves and broken hearts and ambitions that turned into nothings and forged new ambitions and been humbled over and over again, I go back to that second movement that ends on three perfect notes whispering,  "to be continued."