Her Greatest Hits
February 18, 2025 at 03:30PM
Diane Mehta | Longreads | February 18, 2025 | 4,533 words (16 minutes)
“Her Greatest Hits” is a piece excerpted from Happier Far: Essays by Diane Mehta, published by the University of Georgia Press and on sale March 15, 2025.
My mother was no spendthrift, but her mind was rich. She loved going to the symphony but wouldn’t splurge on season tickets to the New York Philharmonic or the Metropolitan Opera, even on my father’s seventy-thousand-dollar research salary, a knockout for an immigrant in the seventies. She shared the cost of opera seats with two friends. Like her, they were teachers and children of the Depression. She was always a little starved. She hungered after Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Wagner, and Bach. Her fervor revolved not around her children or husband, or even around being Jewish. Her love hinged on listening. But what did she find, and what was she looking for in the first place?
My mother died when I was thirty-five. During my childhood our pleasures harmonized around going to the symphony. This promised the magic of tunneling east below the Hudson River and emerging in twilight in a city that had extruded itself from bedrock into a collection of silos and reed pipes. We left at dusk, between sundown and first stars tearing their way into retreating light, and raced to spotlights and historic sounds pressed into the wood paneling of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, the home of the New York Philharmonic. We were going somewhere important while daylight was still in motion, and by the time I returned to our night-sky driveway I would have violins and trumpets in my bones.
The philharmonic filled me with the sense of possibility and the romance of a glittery life where women performed in slinky evening gowns and heels and rich girls wore velour dresses with red sashes and tied their hair up with plaid ribbons. The minutes of practice and adjustments before the conductor walked out felt like an intimate part of the show, chaotic and lavish. My mother, an educator by training who had stopped teaching far too early, would quiz us before the overture started. I’d work hard for my mother’s praise, which I’d secure by identifying instruments, by sight or sound, in the orchestra. Violins were easy but a cello or bass demanded more of my attention and an educated guess. Trumpets were smaller and deeper and rounder in sound than their trombone cousins. How proud I felt when she pointed at a sound in the air, and I slid into the voice of the saxophone that paused there. Chords and melodies blew through its shiny brass body. The harp gave us pause—it was a giant antiquated instrument, cousin to the thousand-year-old lyre with roots in Ethiopia, Iraq, Scotland, and Wales, yet here it was. A bassoon seemed to come from the Serengeti itself.
When my mother tired of this, she explained what conducting was. For the same work, conductors took different attitudes. This was astonishing news. Each conductor had their own conversation with the music. This was the beginning of my awareness that I could become a fuller person by understanding how different artists approached the same piece of music. This perspective would later benefit me as an artist. Entranced by the magisterial auditorium, I felt struck, listening with strangers. A live performance sent shivers across my skin. This secret language of chords, counterpoint, C major, D minor, fortissimo, tension-heightening half-step sharps, and semitones. My mother was rapt, and I was often too frightened to look at her because the moments there seemed so intimate. My father slept. Rhythm raced like adrenaline through my mother’s operatic blood. Electrified, her eyes and ears seemed blue-fire red with possibility. In these extraterrestrially tuneful moments, I felt the unbearable desire of love, if only for collective sound and not for people. After the finale, my mother leaped up, clapping: Brava! She screamed with all her might and that crooked half-smile relayed omniscience, Brava! Brava! She never stopped clapping.
The return home was always the same. Fragments of what I had just heard played in my head while we entered and emerged from the Holland Tunnel onto Route 78 in New Jersey and raced west in silence. My father navigated our green Chevy Nova along smaller and smaller streets. Neon flickering traffic lights and octagonal stop signs screamed at me in terror. We pulled into the driveway where the pop and crunch of rubber tires on gray arrowheads of suburban-industrial gravel announced our arrival to our white .034-acre wooden house built in 1965, which had been waiting patiently for us all evening. A square home for round-peg people. Its saving grace was the maple tree out back, whose roots knotted a dugout filled with large rocks to leap along. I’d collect the leaves, which had five webbed fingers and brushed velvet skin, and examine the holes left by sap-sucking caterpillars and other critters. Omens of beautiful ideas to come, these marvelously outsize leaves turned blood-orange when they were nearly dead. Life crumbles in the yard before it blossoms again.
We were going somewhere important while daylight was still in motion, and by the time I returned to our night-sky driveway I would have violins and trumpets in my bones.
My mother ignored the moon reflected in the car window and melting at our feet. She ignored its display of magic on the grass, at rest after being decapitated all summer when my father mowed the lawn. Winter curled around my ankles and crawled up my skirt as I stepped out of the car. “First one in pajamas wins!” She flung open the front door and sprinted up the stairs in her black shimmer-shammer gown and double-wrap twenty-two-karat necklace of gold filigree balls jingling, sweet scent of Chanel in her wake.
I was determined to win. I’d march out proudly in my flannel Lanz of Salzburg nightgown, which felt like Christmas Eve, which I longed to celebrate. I smelled like laundry and buttons. There was my mother, victorious in her bedroom doorway.
She looked younger in her nightgown on those evenings—lit from within. It was as if she had briefly abandoned the clothing, lipstick, opinions, hair spray, costume jewelry, and thinking-silence she’d built around herself and suddenly was a proper mother who loved her children and functioned with ease in her middle-class life. Other nights, she was not so vivid.
Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns are made of the softest brushed flannel. Under the button-front placket with eyelet trim, and below the bodice, the material billows, wide as the frock that Laura Ingalls Wilder, with her rebellious freckles and strawberry braids, wore on Little House on the Prairie. My nightgown had green medallions made of tiny leaves and red and blue hearts and flowers. The pattern repeated itself up and down the gown, positioned between the stripes along which “Lanz of Salzburg” scrolled sideways down the body. It tattooed decorations all over me. I turned into a gift.
We bought the nightgowns at a small independent department store one town over. This is where I bought the Brownie and Girl Scout costumes that made me feel as if I were going to military camp; a training bra, which came in a box; slacks in wide-wale green corduroy; and a garnet-and-navy check blouse with a scalloped collar that made me feel handsome even in braces. On one outing, I found a Lanz gown that was part of a more contemporary line, with bold, saturated colors in place of the lake blues and half-serious pinks. Here was the thrill that life promised beyond the small-town Catholic values that seemed so constricting, the town that did not welcome me, and the classmates who called me names.
When I held it against my brown skin, it didn’t matter that like many Indian girls I had shadowy fuzz darkening my philtrum above my upper lip. It didn’t matter that I had knotted, frizzy curls. It didn’t matter that I was not beautiful because I was only a vehicle for the nightgown to be exhibited. The blood-bright gown called attention to itself and invested my teenage body with possibility. Red was an insanity color, all tongues of fire and throbbing Old Testament rage. Red showed up in every season: apple, tart cranberry, botanical rose, and the glossy candy cane of women’s lips when they left the house and demanded to be noticed. A red nightgown presented the possibility that I, too, might be worth admiring.
I wasn’t a fit for this small New Jersey town. I wasn’t a fit for anything. My mother encouraged me not to become a writer: a waste of time, a hobby, not a job. Be a window dresser or a marine biologist. Go into “the sciences.” But the rules and functions of science and math were lost on me. In mix-and-match chemical formulas, I saw temporal objects, born in flasks over Bunsen burners, that had other intentions for their brief lifetimes beyond showing preteens how colors change. A flame dies out, smoke disappears. Fire, that remnant of antiquity and Prometheus, is proof that more knowledge is always behind the scenes. Teachers pretended to have all the answers, but a deeper logic was locked up inside the chalkboard. If you existed in the third dimension, an A student, you understood the rules. If you existed in the fourth dimension, like me, the rules were confusing—I was interested in experience, and I could not understand the facts. At the end of the semester, I took home a memory of the pretty chalkboard and a lot of unscientific confusion about beautiful equations and a report card with a C.
My mother slipped on her nightgown after dinnertime. Her breasts swung a little in the bodice and I wondered if that was the style of all adult women, and if I would ever fully be a woman. It seemed curvy and strange to have extra sections of you that a nightgown didn’t bother to organize with zippers or clasps or structured waists. It was the opposite of math, which on its computational surface feels buttoned up. Your body could move like a lava lamp inside the nightgown and gain or lose ten pounds and the nightgown would cascade from your shoulders just the same. The flannel was so thick that it would keep you warm even if you ventured out to watch icicle daggers thicken on the eaves of your home after a snowstorm blew in and the temperature plunged. It was in my red Lanz nightgown that I mattered to my mother most. When I wore that nightgown, which made me feel beautiful, I felt certain that my mother finally thought I was beautiful, too.
My mother was serious. She was a surly Brooklyn Jewish intellectual whose spontaneous and playful moments after the symphony were the chance of a lifetime. What did she like? Prune hamantaschen, white eyelet blouses, cottage cheese, Jim Lehrer, and drawing trees and naked women sitting on the corner of a bed. What did she want?
As evidenced by titles that she cataloged in a spiral-bound notebook and which listed the books she read over a ten-year period, one thing she seemed to want was sex outside her curdled marriage. The list throbs with longing, and the works on music are really about pleasure itself.
Here is a handful of titles that my mother recorded reading, among dozens of others, in the fall and winter of 1980:
Wagner, Panofsky
Richard Wagner, Taylor
Richard Wagner, Gutman
Beethoven: A Pictorial Biography, Valentin
Celebration: The Metrop. Opera, Robinson
Elektra libretto, Strauss
Portrait of a Marriage, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
The Adulterous Woman, Camus
The Courage to Live, Ari Kiev
The Ring librettos: Wagner
Speak, Memory, Nabokov
Tristan and Iseult, Bedier
Hamlet, Shakespeare
And the Bridge Is Love, Alma Mahler
That fall, she read Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives, his last book and the one I love most. A biographer struggling to start a book about D. H. Lawrence plunges into an extramarital affair, a nod to the idea that in order to understand Lawrence you must embed yourself in his life, and live it—but it’s no accident that it is yours already. More proof: Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf had a heady romance going while married to men, and Alma Mahler, off in a spa while her husband the composer was dying, fell in love with architect Walter Gropius, who sent Mahler a marriage proposal that got routed directly to her husband himself.
Desire has its consequences. My mother weighed those against her need for more affection, but she seems to have stifled this, and projected it into life-affirming music while thumbing through great books about the problems of humankind, along with others about adultery and its costs. In Camus’s “The Adulterous Woman,” Janine, the lead, finds her satisfaction not in the soldier she spies on a bus but by venturing into a fort in the middle of the night and laying on her back, enraptured at, by, the sky. We demand that our bodies give us the visceral pleasures we deserve, but the joy we seek is interior.
Around the time of my mother’s reading list, a lot of romance was on the radio—as well as plenty of adultery. Blondie’s “Call Me,” the title track for American Gigolo, was number one. If there was a real number for a Richard Gere escort who loved satisfying middle-aged women, I’m certain my mother would have called it.
I was also looking for satisfaction. The winter of 1980 was a time of my own first crude, if viscerally felt, romances. It was the era of disco and I was fourteen years old. Michael Jackson had three hits that year, a short afro, glittery pants, and rodeo hips, and to me, he was the sexiest thing on the planet. In Billboard’s year-end Top 100 list, the songs that stand out are “Shining Star” by the Manhattans, “Desire” by Andy Gibb, and “Working My Way Back to You” by The Spinners. All of these songs mourn love lost—or they demand more love. They were easy songs to rock to, and whether you were consumed or crushed by love, they were danceable and cheery. This provided a different picture of love than I saw in my family. You could pine away after a lover while the song uplifted you. It implied that love was always a hit, and in the wake of losing it, music was there to comfort you.
That winter of 1980, my mother also read critic Harold Schonberg’s book The Lives of the Great Composers, a fact I discovered on the day I was reading Schonberg’s successor at the Times, Anthony Tommasini. In his general-audience book The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide, Tommasini says that implicit in the general-interest books for music lovers Schonberg produced was “the assumption that music lovers cared deeply about ‘greatness’ and that we all knew who the truly great composers and performers were.” Tommasini said that he took “the educational component of being a music critic seriously,” and that his project came out of the realization that “many people who consider music central to their lives admit to knowing little about its inner workings.” He saw a “hunger for insight,” and so he set out on a Top Ten Composers project. “As I admitted from the start, the very idea of a top ten list was absurd.” He asked readers to weigh in, and some music lovers dismissed the idea as “outrageous” or “dangerous and despicable,” while other readers said “that, though engrossing, the series was frustrating, because they sensed I had much more to say about the composers I discussed.” And he did—he decided to explore the issue of “greatness” in Indispensable. All of it gave him a chance to figure some things out. Indispensable was a chance to discuss “what makes some extraordinary composers indispensable to me.” Tommasini seemed to enjoy nudging people into conversations, with one another and with him, about what they cared about most.
“What do you love most?” is a moving target of a question. Answers vary and new loves take precedence, but we try to sum up anyway. Schonberg for my mother learning about composers, Tommasini for me trying to figure out what I was hearing, Tommasini reflecting on Schonberg’s mission, and everyone tackling big questions: What is great? What are the greatest hits of life? How do you gain influence? How do you become more loved and less dismissed? How do you become indispensable?
I started listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas, occasioned by a date with my partner at a recital by pianist Judy Huang at Carnegie Hall. Jerry had sent me a list of possible activities to choose from one Wednesday, as agreed on, in anticipation of spending time together that Saturday. We were planning an outing to create more meaningful moments together in our busy lives and torqued interactions. My choices: Cooking 101, art glass crafting, Ludwig Kirchner exhibition, John Singer Sargent Portraits in Charcoal exhibition, a trip to the KGB Espionage Museum, pianist Judy Huang in recital at Carnegie Hall, and the New York Philharmonic playing Salonen, Bach, and Hindemith at David Geffen Hall.
I chose Judy Huang because she was playing Beethoven. I never liked Beethoven. I’d dismissed his music as bombastic and thunderous—not nuanced enough. His symphonies refused to become background music and enraged me for being violently unpredictable, and they reminded me in personality of my mother. She loved Beethoven, and I never understood why. I existed in only half of her life, yet I have all of mine to fill in the blanks. The facts I have to work with are so limited, but maybe I recognized that in his way, Beethoven would help.
Huang would play the following: six Scarlatti sonatas, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major Op. 110, Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor WoO 80, Tchaikovsky’s Dumka in C Minor, and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 in E Major. Huang, who had looked bored with Scarlatti, came alive when she began playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31—and so did I. There was a lot happening at once. It was not the Beethoven I had expected. If I was looking for something to shake me out of my growing dismay that I was not getting back from my life what I was putting into it, this was it. I could feel Jerry feeling what I was feeling, both of us sawed apart in our own solitary ways. I was glad he was there. In those twenty minutes, I slipped into some sort of apotheosizing fever that I am still trying to understand, but I know that people have moments of deep listening that changes what comes next. I felt pummeled, like strings inside a piano, by the small felt hammers Beethoven controlled when he pressed the keys on the other end of the lever.
This set me on a course of listening to the sonatas for the next few months: on the streets, at home, at work, in the elevator, on the subway. I longed to buy a piano, crawl inside the music, and figure it out. The chestnut-colored baby grand of my childhood waited for my body to slide onto the bench and open the page to C. P. E. Bach’s Solfeggietto. It’s a relatively easy piece for piano students because you only play one note at a time. The toccata, from the Italian toccare, “to touch,” is all about fast-moving, light-fingered dexterity. For amateurs it is an achievement and for experts it is a warm-up. I was a serviceable pianist for five years, though in possession of no special talent. Even as an amateur pianist, it was enthralling to connect notes fluidly, to climb up and down the keys and execute an entire composition, and to feel pleasure at my muscle memory when each note entered on cue. I still miss being the person in whom a tune emerged.
One evening, I listened to a Gramophone podcast with pianist Jonathan Biss, who was discussing his experience recording all thirty-two of Beethoven’s sonatas. When they took up Opus 111, Sonata No. 32, the final sonata, the interviewer said quietly, you must realize there are people in the audience who are hearing that sonata for the first time.
Maybe it is only when you don’t know what you are listening for that you find what you were waiting all along to discover. I put on my headphones to listen to Sonata No. 32 for the first time.
While I was married, I lost my access to music and my independent spirit, too. The CDs I had collected were shoved to the side for my husband’s pop bands, and I lost track of where everything was. But even then, listening to music was painful and brought emotions flooding in that were entirely inconvenient for a life with a new baby. We all give up something to parent our children, but I gave up everything. My CDs slipped to the back of the pile, and in the process of shelving my needs to prioritize those of my husband, I just stopped listening. It took a divorce seven years into the marriage and seven more years for my son to become a teenager before I began opening my ears again. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out how to belong in your own family.
One night, we were walking around a park in Saratoga Springs, New York, and he offered me one of his headphones so we could listen to music together. Soft jazz flooded my ears. After that weekend, I promised myself that I would go to the symphony again, just like when I was younger. I would bring my son. He was at the age when he no longer wanted to hang out with me, but he agreed to see Brahms’s Requiem, which I promoted as an hour long. I had given myself permission to listen to music again, and he enjoyed the performance.
There have been only a few before-and-after situations dramatic enough to change my life. Before my mother died, time was open-ended. After she died, the world came into high focus. Before my son was born, I cared for others in limited or temporary ways. After he was born, I felt elation again, and learned to love in new ways.
There has also been a before and after Beethoven. I’d been doubling down on my efforts to locate my tender feelings inside a romantic relationship. I had chosen Beethoven accidentally and not at all accidentally. I went because I thought I might not like it, and something about that made me impatient with myself, so I gave it a chance. No one ever told me how to feel better, how to appreciate music, or how to learn what love is. Beethoven was not a composer I discovered through my mother but in spite of my mother. Listening to Beethoven now, I am beginning to understand her joyful experience of his music, and understand why she preferred listening to music rather than listening to me.
While I cannot tell you much about Sonata No. 32 itself, I can tell you that four minutes into the second movement, he starts swinging, and it feels peculiar and confusing. He goes on for a time and the chords get fuller, jaunty, as if I were listening to Scott Joplin—but this is one hundred years before ragtime exists. Suddenly I’m dumbstruck, and lost, inside it, wondering what the hell he’s doing. Beethoven had been deaf for years by then, but just like I returned from the symphony with violins and trumpets in my bones, when I was young, he had the piano in his bones when he was old. He put this sonata in the world using sounds he had memorized over years, and whose tones he understood—he was deaf, but he heard them in his mind.
We spend our whole lives learning that we already have everything we need to survive. We torture our spirits and try not to bleed out, hoping that we have gambled on the right life with the right people. We rack up failure and disappointment and disbelieve what we demand of ourselves. We are never good enough. Beethoven didn’t do this. He worked tirelessly and revised his work, in his sketchbooks, to get themes right. Even the simplest notes crush expectation. Now I am a good six or seven minutes into the second movement of Sonata No. 32, and he levels those chords up, orchestral, colliding and renegotiating time, and some kind of harmony, before narrowing again into a lyric.
We spend our whole lives learning that we already have everything we need to survive.
I hear what he is saying: wretched pain, jazz, tenderness, death, love, difficulty, romance, work, unrelenting passion, rebelliousness. What I hear, when Beethoven races along the edge of what seems possible in music, is the music that I played for so many years on my piano, serviceably but enjoyably. I hear the sound of my own weeping in shock at what he accomplished and at having missed the chance to listen to him all these years. I hear, at age fifty-three, for the first time, genius. I hear more things than I can follow and more than I imagine. I hear all the doubt in the world and none of the doubt in the world. But I doubt I will ever have another conversation that rivals this one.
Pianist Daniel Barenboim says, about harmony, that the difference between a conversation with words and a conversation in sound, with music, is that in music it can happen simultaneously, and one voice does not have to wait for the other to finish.
What we want Beethoven to tell us is that our lives are meaningful even when our relationships are not. That our conversations yield joy, discovery, kindness, closure, clarity, complexity. That our parents love us dearly. That the conversation is not one-sided—all the musicians are there, warming up before the overture. That there is more to discover beyond love. I don’t believe it. It is not inaccurate to say that we are lost and uncomfortable much of the time. The rest of the world, or your children, may think your life is ugly, that you have not accomplished much, that you are ordinary, that you missed your opportunities, that what you’ve read, and how, misses the point. Too bad your greatest-hits moments of life according to the consensus didn’t create nobility or compassion in you or make you famous. Too bad, too bad you didn’t do enough. You’re an emotional shambles. It is in your bones, it is unusual, and it does not come by often. Everyone is talking. It is 1822 and 2020.
What I hear in the chords of my mother’s life, now that I have listened to Sonata No. 32 hundreds of times, is that in her forever-sadness was a life not fully lived. I have no proof that this is true, except what she showed us on the outside, which is only half the person.
I know my mother was not as whole as she would have liked, but her desire was not empty. Those sonatas must have filled some of it. She had undeniably intimate moments with music when love did not come crashing down the way it did in her marriage. I am listening to thirty-two sonatas in which love does not come crashing down. I have gone more than two decades without hearing her voice.
Civitella and Yaddo alum Diane Mehta is the author of two poetry books: Tiny Extravaganzas (2023) and Forest with Castanets (2019). Her writing is in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and A Public Space. She is poet in residence with the New Chamber Ballet in New York City.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/18/happier-far-essays-diane-mehta/
via IFTTT
Watch