I remember her competent hands as we played duets on the piano. Dextrous fingers periodically brushing mine as the music wound around us. The exquisite, exposed familiarity of making harmony together. It is a thing to be shared between lovers, those who have love for each other.
There is a legend that Brahms wrote his Hungarian Dances to play with a woman. He was shy for such a rugged man, unable to make advances. Instead, he let the music dance their fingers in an almost-chaste courtship. The sly fox wove the notes so that his left hand flew over her right, her right slid under his left.
We played Brahms’ Dances, my dear friend and I. Her husband contemplated from the couch, resenting us our bond. There could be nothing of concern. She, with him for decades. I, a nervous youth besotted with men’s eyes.
Still, at the piano I could share something barred from him. An intimacy from which he was excluded. A sacred space he could not enter. Of all the touches just for him, this one was denied.
It is a higher place where music can begin. Of catharsis and upheaval, desperation and euphoria. In creation with a special other, the world recedes as we take flight. The rickety grand piano luxuriates in use and the room fills with feeling.
But these are fluffy, abstract thoughts. Poets can characterise music no better than delineate the flavour of love, the colour of death. I’ll add a failure of my own. Music is crystalised human expression. Our resonant vibrations with the universe.
My friend and I did not have enough time. A snatched fistful of encounters adding our melody to the universal clamour. An unexpected friendship with a gentle touch, we played Brahms Dances and then she was gone.