I’m particularly drawn to film scores composed by Alexandre Desplat and Ennio Morricone, both known for lush orchestrations in the tradition of romanticism. The solos are often poignant and serve as thoughts of an individual character. They do the same for a character I am creating for a novel. While writing The Valley of Amazement, the track “Wong Chia Chi’s Theme,” from Desplat’s score for the film Lust, Caution took me and my narrator seamlessly into the languorous life of a first-class courtesan house. It opens with an ominous tone set by cellos and bass, and then the piano comes in, just the right hand, playing the simple melody. Those are the internal emotions of a woman who is isolated, frightened, and losing resilience. She moves forward into danger, and now two hands play the melody in octaves, recalling a parallel moment from the past. For another scene, I chose the opening theme from Desplat’s score for The Painted Veil to simulate a nervous mood on a long journey to an uncertain future. I listened to “Gabriel’s Oboe” from Morricone’s soundtrack for The Mission as the spiritual complement to exultant relief and joy at the end of the journey. That particular piece was later rerecorded for another album, but instead of the oboe solo, Yo-Yo Ma plays the melody on cello, and his rendition is especially good for expansive emotions related to spiritual revelation, epiphanies, infatuation, and betrayal. A slight change in tempo, key, and bowing technique conveys how falling in love is similar to falling into an abyss.
I’ve become more discerning about my selections over time. One of my favorite pieces fell out of favor when it was used in the film Master and Commander. The movie was quite affecting, so much so that afterward, whenever I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” I pictured a drowning sailor fruitlessly waving his arms in a stormy sea as a majestic ship sailed away. I cannot write to pop, hip-hop, rap, or rock. They have throbbing beats that do not match contemplative moods. Any song with a singer doesn’t work for me—even if it is the most tragically beautiful of opera arias sung in Italian. I can still see the singer, and he or she does not belong in my story. I would not be able to listen to a gavotte or waltz unless I was writing a scene that includes gavotting or waltzing in a seventeenth-century castle. Although I am a devotee of bebop jazz, I cannot listen to it when I write, not even a piano solo. By its nature, improvisational jazz is unpredictable and wonderfully quirky. I hear its music as a personality with strong opinions. I need to be my own version of quirky when I write. The opinions I hear in my head have to be my own.
My favorite Rachmaninoff piece is the Concerto No. 3 in D minor, the “Rach 3,” as it is known among my friends who are as rapturous about it as I am. It is in my top five. I read that it was Rachmaninoff’s favorite, too, and for reasons I wish I knew. I believe it was written when he was anguished that he could not return to Russia. But what did he want to return to? That’s what is in the music. Did he feel that it was musically more interesting? The melody seizes me by the third measure and becomes emotional circuitry. There are days when I play the concerto on auto-repeat and listen to it all day, even when I am not writing. I love this music so much I have five recordings, including the scratchy one in which Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff, and at such speed I imagine his fingers whipping up winds that blow the audience’s hair askew. His performance of the first movement takes a little over ten minutes, whereas most pianists cover it in about sixteen or seventeen. Was that the tempo he had intended? I read speculation that Rachmaninoff’s large hands, ones that could span thirteen keys, enabled him to play faster, and thus he did. But what musician, let alone composer, allows hand size to serve as the basis for tempo? Another hypothesis pointed to pure commercialism: a 78 rpm record could accommodate no more than a ten-minute performance. Someone else suggested that Rachmaninoff played faster because the derrieres of most average symphony-goers could not remain seated for a full concert played at normal tempo. I prefer to believe that these are apocryphal tales whose origins lie in gripes and rumors spread by conductors and musicians who could not keep pace. I want to believe that what shapes any composition and its performance is a deeper and intuitive sense of beauty and not the lowest common denominator.
The recording of the Concerto No. 3 that I love best is by the London Philharmonia, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Yefim Bronfman on piano. I have seen Bronfman play live on the symphony stage. I once nearly leaped out of my chair with an odd feeling of fright and ecstasy, as his fingers tread through low bass notes and then crashed against them. He can also play with astonishing delicacy. In one passage of the Concerto No. 3, I always sense a millisecond of held breath between notes that feels like the missed beat that sends a heart into palpitation.
Yesterday, I listened to the Concerto No. 3 again and took notes by hand on the story I saw. I wanted to understand how my imagination plays freely with music. When the song ended, and I looked at my notes, I saw that the story had many cartoonish and fable-like qualities. But I did not think the character was my familiar. She is unstable, needy, in constant crisis, and exhausting to be around. If my husband has a different opinion, he has yet to tell me. The story bears some similarities to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary—a female heroine with a fatal flaw when it comes to disregarding everything, including society, for the sake of passion. The character in this story does a lot of internal wailing. I would not want to read that in a novel or hear a real person go on and on like that. But here, the excess is wonderful. There are sudden gaps in the narrative. The male character is nearly nonexistent. If this were judged by the standards of a novel, it would be viewed as overly dramatic, soppy, and a little too easy in what happens at the close of those victorious chords. As private reverie, I found it emotionally whole, a complete story. It was a crazy wild ride and I could actually see a little bit of my younger self in there.
So here is how the story played out. I’ve given a name to the character, Anna, although in my imagination she does not need one because I am the first-person narrator. The approximate times are based on Bronfman’s performance. The comments in brackets denote what I think are the origins of the imagery.
00:00 The orchestra opens with an ominous undercurrent. The piano melody enters soon after, a simple, clean diatonic played in octaves. Anna, a young maiden in a cloak, is alone, trudging up an incline on a countryside road. Today is different, she tells herself. Her life is about to change. She is sure of it. She hopes. She is uncertain. She fears she may be disappointed or rejected. She must resist this nauseating hope. But when she reaches the crest, she sees the town on the other side of an open valley. [In my mind, it looks very much like the Land of Oz on the other side of a vast poppy field.] Her lover is waiting. Anna shrugs off the weight of fear and races forward with such determination she feels as if she is barely touching the road. [I see her walking as Neil Armstrong did on the moon.] She recognizes what has eluded her all her life—the knowledge that there is no greater meaning than to fulfill desire. Buoyed by this realization, her dress fills like a balloon and carries her toward love.
1:00 As Anna draws closer to the town, dark thoughts arrive and confuse her. She thinks about the wretched dark days when she existed with nothing to desire. She pictures in her mind the lonely life she has in a large lifeless house with white walls and tall ceilings. The rooms are nearly empty. Splayed books in white covers lay scattered on the floor. She has read each halfway through before throwing them down in disappointment. They did not tell her the reason she is alive. She has roamed for years from one room to another, calling to God to tell her why she deserves such loneliness, then cursing because she receives no answer. She has no memories of life with others, not even her parents.
2:10 As Anna walks toward