Freigeweht
My story with Freigeweht begins in an artist’s living room. Paintings. A grand piano. Subdued lighting. Smoked glass. Vodka in our glasses. The jazz cassette had been bought almost by accident from a market stall, our host says. The blue cover had caught her eye…
I’m in the midst of a love-drunk haze, still utterly unaware of the destructive force awaiting me. Sitting on the carpet, I take a sip of vodka, and the music seeps into me together with the warmth of the drink. The music is painfully cold. Scandinavian abstraction. It dissolves you into a thousand crystals, and just when you’ve completely fallen apart, the cry of a wind instrument pierces your heart like a fishhook. An oboe instead of a saxophone, its sound spirals upward, pulling you with it, slipping you out of your wrapping and setting you adrift – bloodless, boneless, bodiless…
In time, other passions began to swirl around the living room with the grand piano. The piano had its pianist, and the pianist had her admirers. They fell in love with her, competed for her heart and for supremacy over one another. Jealousy simmered. Worship. Blows below the belt. Everyone adored her, and before long everyone wanted Freigeweht as well. Everyone longed to own it, until one day somebody walked off with it. The cassette was gone. The music disappeared.
Decades passed. So much happened in all those years. Time is merciless. It scattered both the lovers and the thief. The pianist left, and I never heard of her again. The grand piano was left alone, withdrawn. Then it, too, disappeared.
I was left with the memory of the music. It slowly faded, until at last it was forgotten. But the feeling remained, and it had a name: Freigeweht. I came to call that state of love Freigeweht – the kind of love that lays you completely open, painfully draws you beyond your own boundaries, and carries you into another dimension. It sounds trivial, but anyone who has felt it knows. Anyone who has reached the summit of a high mountain and stood there alone, if only for a moment, knows. And so do those who have wished to die of happiness.
Meanwhile, many other kinds of music flooded into my life. I love people because they can create music.
Sometimes I hate them – for their deafness.
But it happened to me, too, I went deaf. I withdrew so tightly into myself that I wanted nothing but silence. “To know silence perfectly is to know music” – one of my favourite musical speculations, echoed by Carl Sandburg and Emily Dickinson, who, in her feminine way, at one moment catches every vibration of nature, at another, freezes in the awareness of her own solitude, and remains in constant argument with God.
I revere Dickinson’s innocence, her need to pour herself out onto the page without sharing her finds with anyone but the kitchen drawers, where she hid her poetry – created, and therefore no longer needed.
I began to revere silence as well, because once you understand what to do with it, you can cleanse your senses and find a new point of comparison. Perhaps that was precisely what allowed Freigeweht to reappear more than twenty years later.
The word came to me after a concert. I am sitting alone in the half-empty back rows of the hall. My whole being is charged because I know my last ruined love is sitting somewhere far below me. How does this music speak? I wonder. What thoughts does it awaken? Does it still bring back the memory of those sounds that once bound us together? We are listening, each on our own, to a magnificent cosmic saxophone, sustained by a stellar rhythm and piano sounds cascading like crystals. Then I realize that the pianist is that… impossible-to-remember German name from the cover of… Freigeweht!
The word returns to my mind. A few days later we meet to clarify, confirm and somehow legitimize, for the hundredth time, our necessary separation. We sit down in a small tavern and, instead of quarrelling, talk breathlessly about the emotions stirred by the music we have just heard. It is then, for the first time, that I tell someone about Freigeweht – how I discovered it, and how I lost it…
More days pass. Silence settles in once again, only to come to an abrupt end one night when I learn that the virtual world has reopened and a gift already on its way to me is waiting to be claimed – Freigeweht. A wave of love, exhilaration and existential fear sweeps over me… What will my senses hear after two decades? What is left of me after all the landings and renunciations? Was Freigeweht merely an illusion of youth, or an intuition of the infinite?
And now I am listening to this music. My first encounter with it was strange and hesitant. I resisted. I listened with the overloaded ears of someone who already knows too much… and is tired. Then I stopped and smiled at myself. On the second attempt, the magic happened. The rhythm of timelessness began to flow beneath the keys, and the oboe lifted me upward, towards that boundlessness you feel only on the highest mountain peaks—or when you love someone very much…