Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The rocking figure returns, doubled now by horn. In that pulse, the soprano finds her way back to the wide first theme: no hay extensión como la que vivimos. No place is greater than where we live. And for a few measures, down this stretch of generic interstate, it’s as good as true.

You’ve heard the piece before, three years ago, and on first listen, it sounded like mere sentiment. Movie music. Sprinkles of South American hue and charm, Villa-Lobos via Ravel. A place we couldn’t get back to anymore, even if it still existed. Now comes this radio reprise, served you by a programmer who likes to insist that first hearings are always wrong.

The culprits are known to you: Peter Lieberson, Pablo Neruda. But such names are at best composite pseudonyms. These phrases assembled over centuries, the work of more anonymous day laborers than history will ever credit. You’re in there yourself, down a branch of the self-spreading Net, stepfather of a fleeting mood or modulation, vector for new infections.

What might a listener never know about this song? How it was composed for the woman who sings it now. How she led the composer to this love, this poem. Love, if you die. . How the singer died just months after this premiere.

And does it change anything in these phrases, so shameless and lavish, to know that the composer is next? He’ll be dead in a few days. That’s why the radio plays these songs: a eulogy in advance. But listen, and the music forecasts another passing, one even older than the harmonies it uses.

Decades ago, this man, too, wrote like a believer in the infinite future. He studied at the feet of fearsomely progressive masters. Music poured out of him, splendid with math and rigor, music like a formal proof, heady stuff admired by dozens, perhaps even hundreds of discerning connoisseurs. He reveled in all those once-required shibboleths, now given up as so much discredited zeal. But this song — ah, this one will travel, go everywhere, get out and see the world, and even the tone-deaf will hear something forgotten in it.

So what to do with that failed revolution, the hundred years of uncompromising experiment? The need for something beyond the ordinary ear: Disown it? Discipline and punish? Shake your head and smile at the airs of youth? No: Strangeness was your voluntary and your ardent art. You fought alongside the outsiders for something huge, and knew the odds against you. No take-backs now. No selective memory; no excuses. There’s only owning up to everything you ever tried for, here at the end of the very long day.

But what to do with this —these love songs, the autumnal harmonies hurting your chest? What to call it? A repudiation. A return. A hedge. A sellout. A deathbed conversion. A broadening. A diminishment. Music to kill the last fifty miles of a cross-country drive.

Call it nothing, then, or call it music, for there are no movements or styles or even names for the sounds that wait for you, where you’re headed. Listen, and decide nothing. Listen for now, for soon enough there’ll be listening no longer.

The music tenses. A quick raising of stakes, a nervous drawing in: a gesture stolen from somewhere, sure, but where? From no one in a position to sue. The touch of conventional suspense breaks the spell; you would have built a different contrast. And that’s the curse of a life spent looking for transcendence: nothing real will ever suffice, nothing that you won’t want to tweak. And yet, and still — another swell, a rhythmic fault line, a change of instrumental color, and you think: Why not? Then even approval gives way to simple hearing.

El tiempo, el agua errante, el viento vago. .

Time, flowing water, shifting winds. The dying composer has gone on record: he wants to apologize to generations of his students for leading them down a mistaken path. Wrong back then, the music says, but righted at last, here at the finish line. It’s a happy enough story, and one that should hold until the flock wheels next and the changing winds of fashion declare again who’s in, who’s out, who loses, and who wins. There will be reverses still; that’s how music works. Listen, only listen, and do not worry too much about keeping score. Reunion has you now, for a while, and a while is all you get. The grip of this enchantment lasts no more than a moment. Pudimos no encontrarnos en el tiempo . Love, we might never have found each other in time.

They thaw you, the rays of this late sun. But soon enough these harmonies, too, will set and cool. Even beauty exhausts itself and leaves the ear wanting other sounds. Need will turn to something harder, some training ground for the difficulty to come. But for a while, this song, this one.

The first, expanding figure returns one more time. All the notes align, and it’s like you’ve written them yourself. Not here, not in this life, not in the world where you worked and lived. But maybe in the one you might have reached, in time. Esta pradera en que nos encontramos . In this meadow where we meet. The long, luxurious lines forecast your past and remember your future in detail. You can’t imagine how you missed the fact, for all those years. It might have been okay, even fine, to have written something so simple and pacific. To have made a listener want to be more than she is.

And yet: You did what you did and made what you made. Here you are. And to tell the truth, this meadow had its moments. Oh pequeño infinito! O little infinity! We give it back. We give it back.

YOU STAND IN the evening rain, on the steps of her trim gingerbread. The Voice got you here, a last, best act of navigation. She opens, a woman in the foyer of middle age. Her face freezes in the happy irritation she’s prepared for someone else. She, your cells’ lone heir and executor, is busy with joys and fears you don’t even have the right to ask about. But now her whole task is you. She swallows her half scream back down her throat and pulls you inside.

There’s anger and there’s excitement. Hurried questions, distress and fuss thrust at you, along with a serving of noodles left over from a dinner for one. She towels dry your hair. The words pour out of her, unbearable. But they won’t need bearing for long. Are you feverish? What happened to your lip? What’s wrong with you? Jesus, Daddy, try to eat something.

She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale. The curtains have just been ironed. The throw pillows pile up on the sectional in chilling symmetry. Photos of her crossing finish lines in tech clothing and various stages of pain grace the walls. Four posture-correcting ladder-back chairs surround the dining room table as if they’ve been lined up with a ruler. An umbrella stand flanks the front door and, next to it, a shoe rack with several identical coral-colored running shoes. All a gift from you, this rage for rational management. It’s what happens when you teach an eight-year-old that nothing — nothing at all — is secure.

But there’s a piano, too. A six-foot baby grand, its keyboard open, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood on the music rack, and the lid open on the short stick. It doesn’t seem possible.

You’re playing again? Why didn’t you say anything?

She doesn’t answer. She’s at the window, glancing up and down the street, then pulling shut the curtains.

On the near side of the music rack is a photo: A young man and woman amusing themselves together. The man crouches over a toy piano, arms above his head, fingers poised to pounce on the tiny keys. The woman holds up one hammy palm, eyes closed, her mouth a ringing O! You knew those kids, knew the photographer. How long did it last, that amateur duet? Not even ten years, from start to finish. Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado . But this love, Love, has no finish line.