"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley, Music at Night
Brahms.
He found the letter on a Wikipedia page and then traced it to its source -- a collection of Brahms's correspondence with Clara Schumann, translated, posted on a university website in Illinois that Bob navigated with the fumbling persistence of a man who had never voluntarily visited an academic site in his life. The letter was dated June 1877. Brahms had been sent a manuscript of the Chaconne -- a piano transcription, arranged for the left hand alone by a mutual friend -- and he had written to Clara:
On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
Bob read the passage four times, slowly, word by word, as though the sentence were a lock and each word a tumbler falling into place. Then he copied it in his handwriting onto a Post-it note and stuck it to the edge of his computer monitor, where it sat between the notification icon for fourteen unread fund emails and a yellow Post-it from the associate reading "ASIC -- please call." He did not call. Brahms -- who had written four symphonies, the German Requiem, the violin concerto, hundreds of pieces -- said the Chaconne would have driven him out of his mind. Brahms was not given to hyperbole. He was a burly, irascible man who lived alone in Vienna and expressed emotion reluctantly and through music. If Brahms said the piece was earth-shattering, it was because the earth had shattered.
Bob sat in his office on St George's Terrace, the Bluetooth speaker playing the Chaconne at low volume while the fund's voicemail counter climbed from fourteen to sixteen, and he felt something he had never felt in this room: the presence of a conversation that mattered. Brahms talking to Clara about Bach. A triangle of minds, separated by centuries, connected by the same 256 bars. And now Bob, sitting in the fourth point, the unlikely point, the stockbroker in Perth who had no business being in this conversation but who was in it because the music had reached him and he could not pretend it hadn't.
He discovered the chaconne as a form. Not the piece -- the form. He fell into the Wikipedia article and then into the citations, and then into a book called Dance and the Music of J.S. Bach that he ordered from Amazon and read at his desk while the fund's voicemail filled up.
The chaconne began in the Americas. In the Spanish colonies of New Spain -- Mexico, Peru, the Caribbean -- sometime in the late sixteenth century. It was a dance. Not a stately, courtly dance but a vulgar one -- fast, physical, the dancers moving their hips in ways that scandalised the colonial authorities. The word itself was disputed: some scholars linked it to a Basque word, chocuna; others to an Aztec word, chacona. What was not disputed was that the dance was sexual, popular, and banned -- repeatedly banned by the Inquisition, which was always a reliable indicator of popularity. Bob read about the chaconne's journey from the taverns of Mexico City to the courts of Spain to the dance suites of Italy and France, and he thought: a dirty dance from a colonised country becomes the vehicle for the greatest piece of music ever written. The low becomes the high. The body becomes the spirit. The thing that was banned becomes the thing that is sacred.
He did not examine why this resonated. A stockbroker's fraud becomes a musician's devotion. The thing that was hidden becomes the thing that is real. The parallel was there, and he felt it the way he felt the D major shift, and he did not articulate it because articulation would have made it smaller.
He read about the technical structure. Sixty-four variations built on a four-bar ground bass -- a repeating harmonic pattern, the same chord progression cycling through the entire piece like a heartbeat. The constraint below and the infinite freedom above. Each variation obeyed the same harmonic structure but what each did within that structure was entirely free. The piece was a prison and a universe simultaneously. He bought a score from Henle Verlag, printed on heavy cream paper, and began to mark it up. Red pencil for the first D minor section, bars 1 through 132. Blue for D major, bars 133 through 208. Red again for the return, bars 209 through 256. He numbered each variation in the margin. He circled the structural joints. The score began to look like a map of a country he was planning to invade, the red and blue territories marked, the borders identified, the terrain assessed. He did not yet know how to read music with any fluency beyond the simple. He was learning. The Chaconne was teaching him.
Maria Barbara.
He found the story in a biography -- Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner, a book he read in three days with the avidity of a man reading a thriller, because the life it described was a life that made sense to him in ways his own never had. Bach at Kothen, 1717-1723. The happiest years. Prince Leopold loved music. The ensemble was excellent. The salary was good. And Maria Barbara was there -- Bach's first wife, the mother of his seven children, four of whom survived. They had married in 1707. She sang. She played keyboard. She was, by all accounts that history has bothered to preserve -- which are few, because history does not preserve the accounts of women who stayed home and raised children and died -- a musician.
In the summer of 1720, Bach travelled with Prince Leopold to the spa at Carlsbad. He was gone for several weeks. What the record shows, with the brute clarity of a parish register, is that Maria Barbara died on July 7, 1720, and was buried the same day or the next. When Bach returned to Kothen, his wife was in the ground. His four surviving children -- the eldest, Catharina Dorothea, was twelve -- had been cared for by servants.
Bob read this and stopped. He pushed the book away from him on the desk. He stared at the wall -- the Bloomberg terminal, the telephone, the framed photograph of Jeannie and the children at Rottnest -- and he thought about the distance between the leaving and the knowing. Bach had left his wife alive and come home to find her dead. He had been somewhere else, playing music, and while he played, Maria Barbara had sickened and died and been lowered into the ground, and the world had not paused to inform him, and the children had stood by the grave without their father, and when Bach walked through the door -- the specific, physical moment of walking through the door -- everything he thought he was standing on had been gone for days.
Bob thought about Jeannie. Not with love, exactly, or guilt, exactly, but with the sudden vertiginous awareness that you can live beside someone for twenty years and not know them, and they can die, and you can be somewhere else entirely, and the world will not pause to inform you. He thought about the separate bedrooms and the locked door and the twenty years of performing a marriage that was neither a marriage nor an ending but a holding pattern, a slow orbit around a dead star that neither of them had the courage to name.
He read the memorial theory. The Chaconne as tombeau for Maria Barbara -- a monument in sound, composed in the months after her death. The Partita No. 2 in D minor was almost certainly composed at Kothen, probably in 1720 or shortly after. The Chaconne was its final movement, its longest, its most profound. He read Helga Thoene's theory: that the Chaconne encoded fragments of Lutheran funeral chorales -- Christ lag in Todesbanden, Jesu meine Freude. He read the scholars who disagreed.
The scholarly question was irrelevant. What mattered was simpler. A man lost his wife. A man wrote this music. The two facts existed in the same life, and that was enough. The music did not need to be about the death to be shaped by it. A man who has buried his wife does not compose the same way he composed before. The grief enters the wood. It enters the horsehair and the rosin and the ink on the page and the weight of the chord and the length of the silence between phrases. The grief enters everything because grief is not a feeling you have but a substance you carry, and it gets into everything you touch, the way smoke gets into clothes, the way salt gets into timber near the sea.
He was driving home, the river visible through the gaps between the glass towers, and he was thinking about Isaac Stern.
He had found the story on a website about the Chaconne's performance history. November 22, 1963. Dallas. Stern was in the city when Kennedy was shot. The next evening, in San Antonio, Stern stood before four thousand people. He did not play the scheduled programme. He said he would pray. He would pray by playing the Chaconne.
He wept through the performance. The audience -- most of whom had probably never heard the piece -- heard a man standing alone on a stage with a violin and making a sound commensurate with what had happened, a sound that met the unspeakable with the only language adequate to it. When it was over, Stern asked the audience not to applaud. They didn't. Four thousand people sat in silence.
Bob, merging onto the freeway, thought about that silence. The Chaconne as prayer. The Chaconne as the only adequate response to the thing that cannot be spoken. He thought about what it would take to stand on a stage, on that stage, on that evening, and play that piece.
And then Joshua Bell. January 12, 2007. Washington, D.C. The L'Enfant Plaza Metro station, morning rush hour. Bell -- one of the greatest living violinists, playing a Stradivarius worth three and a half million dollars -- set up as a street busker. He opened his case. He played six pieces in forty-three minutes. The third piece was the Chaconne.
One thousand and ninety-seven people walked past. Seven stopped. He earned thirty-two dollars and seventeen cents.
Bob pulled off the freeway and drove to Cottesloe instead of home, and he read the Washington Post article on his phone in the car park, and it did something to him he could not name. Not anger. Not sadness. Recognition. The world walks past the most beautiful thing it has ever heard because the most beautiful thing it has ever heard is not wearing the right clothes, is not in the right room. Bell in his jeans and baseball cap, playing the greatest piece of music ever written for a solo instrument, and a thousand people walked past because they were late for work and because beauty without context is invisible.
He sat in the car, looking at the ocean. The sun was low, the sky turning copper -- the Cottesloe sunset, the daily miracle Perth takes for granted, the light falling on the water the way Milstein's D major section fell on the minor, quiet and unhurried and offering nothing the world was required to accept.
He thought: I am not Joshua Bell in the subway. I am the thousand people who walk past. I have been walking past my own life for thirty years.
He sat until dark, and the evening star appeared above the horizon, and he did not go inside the house because inside the house was the life he had built and the life he had built was the subway platform and the people walking past and the music that nobody heard.
He would learn, in the weeks that followed, that the Chaconne was many things. A technical impossibility. A structural marvel. A theological statement. A grief-work. A prayer. A mirror. But what he would never forget -- what the recordings and the research and the late nights had deposited in him like sediment -- was the feeling of hearing it for the first time, in a parked car on Rokeby Road, with cheap earbuds and the neon of a bottle shop, and knowing, with a certainty that preceded reason and survived every argument against it, that the sound was the sound of his life, and that the only response to it was to play.