Is it really over?

In every beginning, there is already an ending. In life and in art. In everything we are, do and wish to leave behind. It is not only the beginning that is home to the spirits who give us a prickling sense of excitement. They are still there 
at the end, insisting on their immortality. These are the same spirits who whisper enticingly to us that there is no end, no final curtain. Everything lives on, indeed even more freely and with greater promise than before. And if we take a closer look, we will understand that we are deluding ourselves. Nothing ends at the end, nothing disappears into nowhere – perhaps there is not even such a thing as nothing. And where there is no nothing, there can also be no end. In our hearts we have long sensed that it is not the beginning that counts, but the finale. This is the case not only in a football tournament, but also in a classical symphony. Regardless of what happens in the first movements, everything is just a prelude to the grand finale. This is the part that matters, where boundaries are crossed and we pass from the earthly to the other-worldly.

That is why composers do not present a cosy little Garden of Eden but focus instead on the core aspect of the other-worldly, which logic­ally enough lies beyond our imagination. But how can this be portrayed or even made ex­perienceable? Musicians have found a way that is both: a symbol and a means of experiencing the unimaginable. It is as it were mathematics rendered in sound, perfect abstraction and yet an understandable pattern of movement in the form of the classical counterpoint. Up to and including Beet­hoven and his Romantic epigones, the final fugue was the ultimate last movement. Mozart by contrast, though he likewise pays virtuoso homage to this tradition in his major Jupiter Symphony, shows us another historical approach. At one time, a sinfonia was merely the orchestral prelude to an opera. And this is how it came about that the pragmatic Mozart decided without further ado to turn a two-movement opera overture into a three-movement symphony. Strictly speaking, what he did was to shorten the original symphony comprising instrumental and 
vocal movements so as to create an instrumental miniature that, rather than featuring the limitless expanse and grandeur of the final movement – namely the opera itself – now had only a brisk finale. In his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven restored the balance by having the choir and solo singers perform in the finale. He doubtless sensed that grandeur can have no end, and certainly not a jauntily banal one. What has passed must remain endlessly present; and for as long as we can give it a name it cannot be beyond this world.

Marcel Proust did not in fact write about lost time, as the modern English title suggests, but about time that has passed. He presumably realised that we ultimately live only in the past, and above all for the past. Unless, of course, we pluck up all our courage and contemplate the end, and thus the future. If we do this properly, we will not see visions of new technologies and artificial paradises, but – if we are honest with ourselves – nothing at all. When Franz Schubert wrote his piano sonata in B major, knowing that his death was near, he had a hallucination of the final movement as a freely oscillating panorama of sound on a cosmic scale. Schubert already perfected the painful farewell in the second movement, in a forward-looking other-worldly andante of free-floating slow-motion arpeggios. Frédéric Chopin composed a more radical form of this rollercoaster ride of the soul in his sonata in B 
minor – namely, as a three-minute frantically-paced final dance. Listening to the young pianist Ivo Pogorelich performing this finale makes one immediately aware of just how close heaven and hell are to one another, and how very short the connection is between the two. The music’s iridescent and whirling confusion whisks one away, without any indication of where to. And there we have it again, the excitement of the opening, a tingling sense of panic that is even more marked and disturbing at the end than at the beginning. Is it really over? We have left banality behind us. The end? A beginning. ▪