A quiet toast

When I was small, we lived on the edge of endless (to a child) wide-open spaces in rural Minnesota. The view from the living room-cum-library ran down a hill and into wide (to a child) woods, through which a child’s imagination could just see the lake glimmering in the distance, the red barn on its shore, the long bike path meandering around and past it. At night we lit a fire in the fireplace in this magical room with all its inaccessible books, and sometimes my father or my mother carefully extracted a big vinyl disc from the teetering pile stacked against the bookshelves. The ancient turntable inspired awe in me — it was already almost an artifact of another age, an age whose inaccessibility to me rendered it, indeed, entirely magical.

The first piece of music I clearly remember hearing scratching and wobbling its way around that old turntable was the complicated, but haunting and lovely (and therefore, to a child, magical) voice of a lone cello. I asked my parents to play it again and again. Something about that voice, keening alone into the long, dark northern night, something wild but controlled, full of agony but joyful in its expression of that agony, something in that voice latched on to small me and was the beginning of my love affair with music.

I quickly forgot that voice in favor of the bad pop of the early nineties — who needs all that complication, that unbearably intense emotion, when you can have Ace of Base and be superficially happy?

Years later, after several moves, I dug a box out of my parents’ basement and went to work sorting which records I’d like to keep. Now these articles were fully consigned to history and nostalgia, or some kind of hip retro style. I set aside Rolling Stones album after Rolling Stones album, thrilled at how cool I’d be for having these in “the original” and being able to play them on that brave old turntable, miraculously still soldiering on at more than twice my age.

Then I found it. I recognized the cover, though the words on it were foreign to me: Rostropovich. Bach. Cello suites.

I played it over and over and over. Lying on my back on the hardwood floor in the heat of a New England summer, for hours and hours, closing my eyes and letting that terrible voice wash over me. Later, when I started driving, I bought the same recording on CD so I could hear it in my car in the course of my endless (to a teenager) rovings over long and winding New England roads, so that voice could accompany me in my restlessness. I was shocked to find the recording cold and sterile — the crime of the digital age. The warmth, the lived-in, loved uniqueness of the voice of the record on the turntable had disappeared.

Today, Mstislav Rostropovich died in Moscow. The New York Times says that we owe him something politically. This may be true, but, uncharacteristically, I have trouble relating to that.

I owe him some of my wildness, my restlessness, some of my love of solitude. I have never seen him play, and his other recordings and vast repertoire did not register for me, though I possess some of them, as I read his obituary. Those long, cold northern nights, that awakening to the voice of the cello, did register. I remain deeply grateful to the man who delivered that voice, across time and space, into my young heart.