I read a few days ago that Alfred Brendel had died at the age of 94. To be honest, I was shocked that he was so recently alive. What was a guy like that doing alive at a time like this? I can’t so much confess to any personal sense of loss as a vague sense of bewilderment that Brendel and I ever inhabited the same world. It takes effort to convince oneself that Alfred Brendel and say, Ted Cruz were members of the same biological species and historical milieu. But it turns out they were.

I discovered Brendel’s performance of Liszt’s Anees de pelerinage sometime in college. It’s the only album of Brendel’s I owned, the only performance of his I really knew, and the only version of that piece I ever listened to. I went through a Liszt phase in college, a kind of quasi-religious mania, really, during which I listened to Liszt and only Liszt, night after night, for months on end. Even so, it was years before I discovered that the cassette of Anees de pelerinage that I owned represented only the second year of the voyage, the Italian one, and that there were others. It didn’t much matter. Liszt-Brendel’s Italy was like a self-sufficient Arcadia incompatible with the idea of departure. Once there, why leave?

Alfred Brendel in 2010 (photo credit: Jiyang Cheng, Wikipedia)

Anees de pelerinage became part of a kind of quasi-religious ritual for me, brought out on the aesthetic equivalent of the High Holidays, a precious emotional commodity one couldn’t afford to waste. It almost seems insulting to call listening to it a “religious experience”: I’m hard-pressed to think of an actual religious experience that ever measured up. Despite my attempts at restraint, I ended up playing the Brendel cassette so often that it eventually wore out and would start to creak a couple of minutes into the pelerinage. I somehow couldn’t bear to throw it out, so I still have it somewhere, superstitiously tucked away, as though to safeguard the memory of the music I once heard.

There really is no way to put Brendel’s performance of Anees de pelerinage into words. Smart, learned people have tried, but none has ever succeeded, and no one ever will. Even Brendel’s own learned words fall far short of what his piano says when he plays it. I haven’t in fact listened to Anees de pelerinage all the way through in years, maybe in more than a decade, and am no longer sure I can. It seems too pure to be sullied by what the world has become. A minute’s experience of Brendel’s playing elicits emotions–joy, delight, repose–made incongruous by the war, famine, and mendacity that have become the trademarks of the modern world. If anything, Brendel represents a world ill lost, the world we lost when we surrendered it to the monsters who now rule us.

Brendel’s music is paradoxically available but inaccessible: you can call it up at a mouseclick nowdays, but it takes a lot more than that to let it sink in. I’m not sure it can sink in any more, and not because the pace of life today is too fast to make tranquil listening possible. The problem is that Brendel’s music requires a receptivity that’s now become aesthetically self-defeating: you have to open yourself up enough to let the music in, but having done so, you let other things in that interfere with the experience of the music itself. Anees de pelerinage is an idealized musical depiction of a voyage through Europe, drenched in memory, reverie, dreams, and nostalgia. What room is there for such things nowadays? What voyage could you take in space and time that didn’t cut all of that to pieces, and make a travesty of the piece itself? What purely mental voyage could you take that didn’t call to mind the brute realities that make five minutes with Liszt seem like a gluttonous self-indulgence?

Brendel’s music awaits the day when we can return to it in the spirit in which it was made, when it makes sense again to speak of “years of voyage” without calling to mind the death, atrocity, and horror that’s now the accompaniment of so many voyages. Maybe some day, the word “voyage” will no longer signify a panicked flight from terror, but represent the thing it was supposed to be, the thing you hear in Liszt when Brendel sits at a piano to play it. When and if that day ever comes, some lucky cohort, maybe even some of us, will be able to greet the sound of Brendel’s music with the shock of recognition. It’s because Brendel was one of us that he was able to reach us. Maybe some day, we’ll be able to voyage far enough to reach him.