My Jennifer Sonata
In my piano studies with Dr. Guy Duckworth of the University of Colorado, I learned to create metaphors for pieces that I was to perform. The metaphor was an image or story that was meaningful to me that fit with the music. While we never spoke to the audience of the content of the metaphor, it put an individual stamp on the performance and, hopefully, created a more emotional and meaningful performance. Once when I was performing in a master class in a Ohio university, a metaphor thrust itself upon me in a vivid and unexpected way.
The master class group included another pianist (who had learned and memorized his Mozart sonata in the car on the way to the conference) and a tenor. I turned out to be the final performer of the three. Just before my performance, just before our group went onstage, I received a phone call from my home. Little 9-year-old Jennifer from my church had died.
Jennifer had had leukemia and the parents and medical personnel had taken all of the measures possible during the 1980s to help her to live. Despite all efforts, she continued to weaken and pain wracked her little body. One day, her mom, dad, and doctors were discussing the next stage in her treatment. They were standing outside her hospital room when they heard a little voice: “Daddy, don’t I have a say in what we do next?” “Of course you do, sweetheart,” he replied. “I just want to die and go to be with Jesus,” she said with heartfelt sincerity. So the parents and staff made the heart-wrenching decision to let the cancer take its course. Just before walking onstage that day in Ohio, I received word that Jennifer had passed to the arms of Jesus.
The musical performances in my lesson were brilliant and edifying. The tenor’s performance of a Beethoven aria was particularly striking. The text focused on the “Elysian fields” and the afterlife, pagan as the lyrics were. When I got up to perform my piece, the third movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 109, I was in rather a state. As you can imagine, the death of this sweet, young girl rather affected me. As I began to perform the opening theme, my mind flooded with an image of an empty tomb, the stone rolled back, flooded with the growing, amber glow of sunrise. My eyes filled with tears as I continued to play, more images of resurrection and hope and transcendent joy rushing to mind. Beethoven’s music, as one can hear in the recording, progresses to a wonderful, supernatural glow. My playing was beautiful beyond what I had ever experienced as I felt new and profound meaning in the beautiful score. I concluded the piece with a sense of satisfaction and completion.
Following each master class, Dr. Duckworth asked the audience to make comments on what they had heard in the lesson. These comments usually involved teaching technique and a sense of awe at the master teacher’s insights into the music. However, following the class in which I participated, the audience tended to ruminate on the meaning of the music it had heard. One member of the audience, whom I knew to be more or less agnostic in his religious beliefs, said, “To me this lesson was about the promise of eternal life.” Not a word had been spoken about eternal life, that I recall, and no one knew about the death of Jennifer. The music itself, without words or poetry, had communicated something both deeply human and at the same time profoundly divine.
Forever after, in my mind this magnificent sonata is my Jennifer sonata.
