At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

“Music is like that too. After you follow a musical theme to the end, looking back, what do you see? Beethoven’s diary contains a mysterious line: ‘Ascertain all in the evening.’ I forget offhand what the original German is. Yoko, you could probably help me there. Anyway, I think he meant something similar. Listening to a musical theme develop, you come to see that it contained a certain potentiality all along. Once you follow it to the end, the theme never sounds the same again. A bud that you look at knowing nothing of the flower to come isn’t the same as the bud you look back on in memory with the flower before you. Music doesn’t just progress forward in a straight line but works backward into the past as well. Without understanding that, you would never appreciate the fascination of the fugue.”