Open City Read Online Free

while others clutched the shiny plastic packages to their chests. The store’s stereo was playing Purcell, a rousing anthem I recognized right away as one of the birthday odes for Queen Mary. I usually disliked whatever was being played on a music store’s speakers. It spoiled the pleasure of thinking about other music. Record shops, I felt, should be silent spaces; there, more than anywhere else, the mind needed to be clear. In this case, though, because I recognized the piece, and because it was something I loved, I didn’t mind.
    The next disc they played, though utterly unlike the first, was another I immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler’s late symphony
Das Lied von der Erde
. I returned to my browsing, moving from bin to bin, from reissues of Shostakovich symphonies played by long-forgotten Soviet regional orchestras to Chopin recitals by fresh-faced Van Cliburn Competition runners-up, feeling that the price reductions were insufficiently sharp, losing any real interest in shopping, and finally beginning to acclimatize to the music playing overhead and to enter the strange hues of its world. It happenedsubliminally, but before long, I was rapt and might have, for all the world, been swaddled in a private darkness. In this trance, I continued to move from one row of compact discs to another, thumbing through plastic cases, magazines, and printed scores, and listening as one movement of the Viennese chinoiserie succeeded another. On hearing Christa Ludwig’s voice, in the second movement, a song about the loneliness of autumn, I recognized the recording as the famous one conducted by Otto Klemperer in 1964. With that awareness came another: that all I had to do was bide my time, and wait for the emotional core of the work, which Mahler had put in the final movement of the symphony. I sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement,
“Der Abschied,”
the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it
schwer
, difficult.
    The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood, a stronger, surer mood. It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes. It simply wasn’t possible to enter the music fully, not in that public place. I placed the small pile of discs in my hand onto the nearest table and left. I made it into the uptown train just as the doors were closing. By this time, the crowds from the marathon were beginning to thin out. I sat down and leaned back. The five-note figure from
“Der Abschied”
continued on from where I escaped, playing through with such presence that it was as though I were in the store listening to it. I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line. My memory was overwhelmed. The song followed me home.
    Mahler’s music fell over my activities for the entirety of the following day. There was some new intensity in even the most ordinarythings all around the hospital: the gleam on the glass doors at the entrance of the Milstein Building, the examination tables and gurneys down on the ground floor, the stacks of patients’ files in the psychiatry department, the light from the windows in the cafeteria, the sunken heads of uptown buildings from that height, as if the precision of the orchestral texture had been transferred to the world of visible things, and every detail had somehow become significant. One of my patients had sat facing me, with his legs crossed, and his raised right foot, which twitched in its polished black shoe, also somehow seemed a part of that intricate musical world.
    The sun was setting