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Rating: Today is one of those days I wish I had never experienced, one of those days when even an untied shoe lace becomes nourishment for a voracious anger. It happens often, to everyone. To me.
I want to stop thinking, to forget for a moment the awareness of not having become what I wanted to be, to silence the remorse for a moment. I cast a distracted glance at my CDs, they often talk to me; and I am there, listening to them. I know each of them has an emotion to gift me, like a dose can give oblivion to a heroin addict. But tonight I am deaf.
I cannot hear their song, the musical instruments are suddenly silent, the thin layer of dust covering the shelf that holds them has wrapped the piano strings, filled the guitar bodies to make them anechoic chambers, covered the drum skins as if they were one of those old tables full of photo memories. I feel alone.
I take out, one by one, my favorite records, soon I have a small pile in my hand. Crimson, Caravan, Yes, Van Der Graaf, Oldfield, the music I've always adored is fading away. I know perfectly well that tomorrow I will be back to seeing the multiple and kaleidoscopic chromatic varieties of prog, but life is made of moods, and mine tonight lets me see things only through an old black and white Nordmende. This didn't prevent me from spotting with the eye a CD that I hadn't listened to in a long time. It was there, like an unprepared schoolboy who doesn't want to be called to the board, hidden in the last row behind his companions. Bach's Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue BWV 564 immediately caught my attention and with it the desire to find some peace. Sic fuerat.
The incipit of the Toccata is calm, discreet, a prelude to a series of vertiginous scales. All the notes of the staff, like the infinite shades of gray between white and black, are touched; they chase each other like gazelles during the estrous period. Then all is silent to make way for the adagio. As the phrase progresses, a deep melancholy grows within me, that little man with his fingers is not touching the keys of an organ but plucking the deepest chords of my soul. My moist eyes poorly conceal the whirlwind of emotions crossing me. The sadness that pervades this movement is surpassed only by its restless sweetness. The long note that closes the adagio takes my breath away. I am in ecstasy.
I haven't yet recovered from the dizzying plunge into the crucible of my feelings when here comes the Fugue, on tiptoe. Two notes, alternating in a feeble phrasing, are the voice that opens the movement. Thirty seconds of enchanting words, almost as if announcing, as if they were angels, the arrival of the Lord. God begins to speak, and He does so through the organ. A heavy and majestic tone bursts in imperiously, His are words of unheard-of beauty, a voice imbued with sacredness and unsurpassable sweetness responds to the angels who invoked Him.
The Fugue is about to close, those who had called are now there listening, in deferential silence. It is time to bid farewell to God. I am exhausted, the emotions have given way to a great emptiness, I feel like a stadium after a football match, the wind lifting papers and newspapers abandoned on the seats. But I know I have witnessed an unforgettable spectacle.
Thank you Johann Sebastian.
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