BY CHRISTOPHER HEALEY, COMPOSER
The cohabitant of my house and heart returned home this evening from another rehearsal as the repetiteur for an upcoming production.
The work was Puccini’s La Bohème.
He sank wearily into a dining chair, even though he had been sitting behind a piano most of the day already. “Each day, I go to work and have to live through Mimi dying all over again,” he informed me with a wry quirk of his lips: “It’s exhausting.”
I could sympathise, though I must confess I have never properly seen or heard La Bohème. I know only because, as he sat reading through the opera at the piano earlier in the week, there came a moment when the music suddenly seized me with an inexplicable melancholy.
It began with a simple C# minor chord, played in the middle octave of the keyboard. A single note changed, and there was now an E major chord. The shift itself might make one’s ears prick up, but it is not a particularly surprising choice of chords for modern ears.
Then came the addition of a simple repeated G# (a note already heard in both chords); and with it, my heart broke suddenly and without warning, and no explanation can be found as to why.
The gesture is so simple. There is no secret composers’ trade craft at work, nor can clever rationalisations explain it away. There is but a chord, and a single repeated note that – even without context, voice, text, or acting – still manages to stir something. (A primal sense of grief, perhaps?)
I didn’t need to know, for example, that at this exact moment in the opera, one of the central characters, Mimi, has just died; and that the repeated note is her lover, Rudolfo, crying her name. I didn’t need to know it to still feel the anguish.
As a composer, I couldn’t help but be troubled by this. How can it be possible that something so simple could have such an immediate effect? The passage is the musical and emotional equivalent of a stiletto knife: simple and sharp enough to slide between your ribs and pierce a vital organ.
Later, I sat myself at the piano for a time, gently strumming through the shifting chords for the passage and thinking about how that G# manages to cut so deeply. The simplicity of the music is itself a challenge: “Explain me if you dare,” it taunts.
I dared.
I attempted to peer behind the veil — to look up the magician’s sleeve — but to my dismay, there was no trick concealed there; and no explanation, either. All there was to find was a transparent inexplicability that no music theorist, composer, or academician will ever be able to explain. And if one cannot explain something so simple, what can we explain, really?
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Featured image of the death scene in La Boheme painted by Cipolla.
