Claudio Abbado Conducts the Silence at the End of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
By Wim Coleman
Ersterbend is written
below the last note of the score.
But the dying away doesn’t die away;
no groan or rattle marks the music’s passing;
for to be dead is but a contradiction,
and the Maestro continues to do
just what he always tells his musicians to do.
Listen.
Can we hear it too, that ethereal something
that buoys his baton?
No more music of celestial spheres;
he has left that paradigm behind,
conducting instead invisible symphonic forces
hitherto beyond hypothesis, counting pizzicato particles
strange and flavorful and charmed surpassing sound,
beguiling ten-fold vibratory strings
into some vast symmetry beyond any coda,
a unified sonority of the soul.
Wim Coleman is a playwright, poet, novelist and nonfiction writer. His first book of poetry, I.O.U., will be published this year by Adelaide Books. Novels that he has co-authored with his wife, Pat Perrin, include Anna’s World, the Silver Medalist in the 2008 Moonbeam Awards, and The Jamais Vu Papers, a 2011 finalist for the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Medal. Wim and Pat lived for fourteen years in Mexico, where they adopted their daughter, Monserrat, and created and administered a scholarship program for at-risk students. Wim and Pat now live in Carrboro, North Carolina. They are members of PEN International. Blog: playsonideas.com.