Rachmaninoff. He loved the crystalline bricks of the chords, the choreography of each triad which whispered of mystic Russian moors; he loved it so much. I could never play it. He never heard me. He never knew I kept the Rachmaninoff anthology closest to my body when I carried my scores. It was just fine that way. Every so often I would pick up my bent score, mustard yellow and olive green in its glossiness, and stare--seeing his face in the shapes of the glare. I'd open to my favorite and play the first few measures in seriousness, forgetting that I had never learned it. I don't know if it was the complexity of the runs or the frosty evocations echoing from the lower strings that stopped me; but there was a nuance there too strong, too urging, and too reminiscent of the fog behind his eyes.
He spoke rarely to me. He spoke rarely to anyone. Maybe this is why he loved Rachmaninoff, who said everything you say in your dreams but never when you wake. The music was built of shadows just like the black, undulating curls that fell so sheepishly about his forehead.
But I grew accustomed, obsessed. The more distance between our bodies, the more lines between the melody of his soul and the melody of mine, the more I wanted them to touch and harmonize, and the more I felt the more I loved the agony. What is painless is heartless, pointless, I told myself, and otherwise there would be no music of Rachmaninoff. No counterpoint if there is unison. No harmony without empty intervals. I thrived on the potential of unrequited love: those syrupy and sensual moments when your hidden proclamations and those ones of your beloved become twin seedlings, planted in the shape of eternity, growing silently and wildly beneath the shadow of the crimson rose.
I never finished learning the piece he loved, but I will always clutch it as I did that wrinkled score because it had beauty in it that surpassed me. It had value and profundity that I can appreciate more when kept at bay.
The dissonance that lingers after the first few measures never resolves. That is Romance in music, and that is Rachmaninoff, and that is what speaks of tears and sleepless nights where images and colors of that one face seem to run past you at the speed of sound. This is the music that I love.