On Musical Hunger

I

WE were playing quartets, upon a Tuesday night at the house of Dr. Retinus, as is our custom, and Joe Knoedler, as is his custom, had brought a girl. On this particular evening, when the quartet was ended, the girl asked a polite question about music — a natural question and innocent enough, yet received by Joe in scorn and astonishment, as though she had questioned the validity of his existence.

Joe Knoedler is our viola player — the best player, incidentally, in the quartet. He is a tall, dark young man, by profession a bridge builder; upon the fiddle he is what athletes call a ‘natural.’ He seldom practises and I am inclined to believe that when he sits down to play he automatically places his intelligence on the shelf, for fear it will get in his way. But by instinct or by some dark collusion with the angels, Joe Knoedler, whether the piece be strange to him or familiar, knows the proper tempo, he knows where a phrase begins and where it ends; under his perfect emphasis the dead rotes group themselves and spring to life. Impatiently, while he plays, he shouts at the three of us: ‘Wrong! You are playing it wrong.’ But when we put down our fiddles and ask him what is wrong, he is speechless. He blushes. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he mutters. ‘But I can play it for you. Here — listen.’

But with his girls Joe’s technique is at the same time more predictable and less inspired. ‘Dr. Retinus,’ he says, ‘Mrs. Bowen, Mr. Jones — meet Miss Delilah’ — and he puts the girl in a chair with a book and tells her to stay there. This particular girl behaved, we all thought, remarkably well; for two hours she had not spoken a word. At the end of that time Joe Knoedler laid down his viola, got to his feet, and shook his great shoulders like a dog coming out of the water. He heaved a vast sigh, lit a cigarette, and stood dazed and speechless. It was now that his girl broke silence.

‘Joe,’ she said brightly, ‘you certainly do enjoy the music, don’t you?’

Joe did not hear her. His face was flushed; he had sat down again and was polishing the viola with a large yellow handkerchief. It is John’s viola — a rare and glorious instrument — and Joe, from Tuesday to Tuesday, is very jealous of it. If I bring it to quartets with a speck of rosin under the bridge, he frowns. ‘What slapstick fiddler has been fooling with my instrument?’

His girl watched him as he turned the viola in his hands. ‘Joe!’ she repeated, louder this time. ‘You certainly do enjoy playing music, don’t you?’

‘Enjoy it?’ Had she asked him, ‘Do you enjoy that curious recurrent throb that takes place above four thousand times an hour just under your third left rib?’ Joe could not have been more surprised, He got up. T don’t stop to think about enjoying quartets. I don’t stop to think about enjoying music anyway.’ He wheeled and flung his cigarette into the fire. ‘I got to have music, that’s all,’ he said with surprising violence. ‘I just got to have it.’

II

‘It appears that a distinct appetite, different from hunger or the sexual appetite, is satisfied by works of art, and the satisfaction of this appetite is a source of pleasure greatly valued by its possessors. This appetite has never been properly investigated. We know practically nothing about its physiological conditions, and as little about its evolution. It may even be that it is confined wholly to man, although authorities differ on this point.’

Like almost everything that has been written about æsthetics, this paragraph of J. W. N. Sullivan’s is pure speculation. To ask the unmusical to believe in a definite musical hunger is like asking the unbeliever to pray for rain. Keats said he had to prove things ‘upon his pulses.’ Women possess a strong social instinct; they prove things, often enough, upon somebody else’s pulses. Sullivan called the satisfaction of artistic appetite a ‘source of pleasure,’ an insidious understatement which I am glad to disprove upon Joe Knoedler’s pulses. To sit down at table is a pleasure — but it is not for pleasure’s sake one seeks food. Granted that æsthetic hunger is not one of the primary appetites, and that the need for art does not appear until the belly is filled; granted that a string quartet is a highly civilized affair — then grant also that, without art, civilized man would perish. To say that art saves him would be as illogical as to say the feet are there to save the nose from many a hard bump on the ground; what I say is that man needs art, needs it fiercely, insistently, repeatedly, the way he needs food. Art is exciting and man craves excitement — seeks it, sometimes, even to the gallows’ foot. If he be lucky, he finds it in love, or he finds it flying upside down in a Fokker. But love is short and Fokkers crack up. Joe Knoedler found his excitement in music.

It is an old story, the power of music — music that can drive men to war, to love, to God. According to each man’s essence is the direction thereof — and the definition. Sometimes it does not drive at all, but lays hands upon the troubled spirit, to soothe and to heal. Music has done that for me; all my life, music has been healer. As such it has never failed me, or I remember no such failure. When I was young, at unhappy moments I fled to the hills, to the woods, and found my comfort there; but now, in my middle years, it needs stronger enchantment to exorcise the demon, a message more urgent than the gentle melancholy of the wind, the far, quiet pattern of clouds against a high horizon. I hate to suffer this defeat at the hands of my old friends; I am impatient, then, with the wooded dark hills, the gentle meadows. I cry out to them, and they do not respond. They lie dead; their name is scenery.

But music — music never took a name and failed me. Music speaks, and I reply. Slowly my cold blood warms; in my veins I feel it swell and quicken. Once more the heart leaps eagerly, once more I am blinded with the glory that surrounds me.

III

If in middle life I turn consciously to music as physician, as a child the need was as great and the instinctive turn to music as quick; but the healing was not, I suspect, so much a matter of æsthetic satisfaction as pride of skill, joy of increasing control. Fiddle playing was my compensation I confess it with current psychological phrases snapping at my heels my compensation for a chin too long, a forehead too high. I had a beautiful older sister; I have her now, to my joy and pleasure; but she was not always my joy and pleasure. She was something more important; she was spur to my pride, whip to my ambition. That wide brow from which the dark hair swept in bold perfection, the nobly modeled, delicate curve of chin, the tapering fingers — artists, looking upon Victoria, drew in the breath. Other men than artists fell in love with her — fell in rows, like ninepins. It was the family joke: ‘Who’s coming, over Sunday?’ ‘Oh, Victoria’s Alec,’ or ‘Victoria’s Tom.’ And then, from my brother John: ’It’s all right, Infant. They’re not allowed in the parlor.’

In the parlor was the piano. With my fiddle under my chin, I too would have a lover. Lovers. Haydn, at first. Jolly, frank Papa Haydn, and Mozart, when my fingers grew more facile. What if, at parties, boys called me a good sport, instead of pretty? In the parlor was my refuge, in the parlor was something more powerful — I knew this in my heart — more powerful, if I but mastered it, than line of brow and line of chin.

I would never be pretty because my bones were all wrong. It needed no measuring tape to tell me; I had heard enough talk concerning other people’s very right bones ever to mistake, beneath my own skin or another’s, a right bone from a wrong one. One summer day when my aunt was in Europe, two ladies came to see her portraits; one was an artist and one was Cousin X, a dimly distant relative whom I have not seen since that far afternoon. Their voices drifted to me where I sat reading on the verandah.

‘Glorious painting,’ said the first lady. ‘Is this all the family?’

Cousin X replied that no, there was another girl, the youngest, but she had never been painted. About eleven years old. An intelligent child, but not, you know, paintable. ‘Not a forehead to paint,’ said Cousin X. ‘When I saw her in the cradle I remember telling her mother, “ There’s a forehead that will go to Bryn Mawr and write a book!“’

To Bryn Mawr and write a book. To Bryn Mawr! Rage filled me; rage burned to my finger tips and drove me indoors, that afternoon, to the parlor. To the cheap fiddle case under the old sofa and the brown magic that lay therein. Never, never to Bryn Mawr! I swore it, kneeling against the sofa. Never to any of their stuffy colleges, to be a spinster with a forehead and her skirts hanging wrong. I would play the violin. I would work and work until I could play like Kreisler, like two Kreislers; until I could play better — ten thousand times better — than any of them painted. What if they did paint kings and princes, and were paid for it? I would play for kings and princes, and they would pay me.

I never went to Bryn Mawr, and certainly I never played for kings and princes! I went through school failing at mathematics because I took time out to practise my violin; at eighteen I slammed the school door behind me and entered the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore — achieving the Conservatory, however, not without struggle. At boarding school near Baltimore my music teacher was Van Hulsteyn; he it was who fortified me in my swift and desperate attack, that last term in school, against the Bryn Mawr cohorts. I remember my father’s quiet warning, when at John’s intercession he agreed to let me ‘go on with my music.’ ‘I want you to keep your balance, child,’ he said, ‘and to remember that with us music is an accomplishment, not a profession.’

A gauntlet thrown, could my father but have known it; no direct challenge could have struck swifter fire to my tinder. I was too ignorant of the world of real music to know that eighteen is far too old to begin serious musical preparation for a professional life. But for four years, the duration of a college course, I worked at music, and what I learned I did not learn easily. I had little natural ability for music; compared with the pale, black-haired youths about me, I was a mere ignoramus, dull-eared, slow-witted — and the youths did not hesitate to let me know it. ‘Why are you here?’ they would ask me, their lips turned out in scorn, and the question filled me, not with humiliation or any doubt, but with triumph and the sound of wings.

IV

My training, while it had been sound enough as to violin technique, had been old-fashioned, omitting all sight singing, car training, and harmony. To my chagrin I found I could not, except upon paper, distinguish major from minor; as to a diminished seventh, I had never heard of it. My first orchestra practice was a nightmare. The music before me looked easy — four or five notes to the measure. But when Strube raised his baton and my bow touched the strings, a blare of brasses arose and deafened me into unconsciousness. I was lost completely. I sat there trembling, my fiddle on my knee. Morning after morning this happened. ‘Put your fiddle in the oven and burn it, Gott-forsaken amateur!’ Strube shouted, pointing at me with his baton. He was a little round man with thick glasses, a fierce, intelligent expression, and a voice that on occasion roared like a wounded elephant; he had but to glance in my direction to reduce me to utter helplessness.

The second semester I was, to my surprise, moved up to the first stand among the second violins. At home that summer John helped me with rhythm, patiently teaching me to count out loud while I played — a habit that in later years has stood me in good stead. The following autumn I was delighted and a little terrified to find myself at the first orchestra stand with the Concertmeister, one Isaac Bernheimer. Isaac was twentythree; he was an excellent violinist, studying for a Master’s diploma; in the evenings he was to be found leading the dance orchestra at the Hotel Belvidere. When I sat down beside him he nodded briefly, told me my violin was no good and my bow was no good, and asked me if I wanted to buy new ones. He knew, he said, where they were to be had.

Strube, I think, must have put me at the first stand merely because I tried so hard. Certainly he had no illusions about my virtuosity. It was a case of ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.’ I was still a God-forsaken amateur, but I never missed a rehearsal, and, once seated on the platform, I never took my eyes off the conductor (a trick which my own subsequent experience in leading vagueeyed choruses has taught me will seduce any conductor).

‘Why do you work so hard?’ Isaac asked me one morning. ‘You can run all day and all night, but you will never catch up to me. You are not poor. Why do you work so hard?’

‘I like it,’ I told him. What else could I say? My eye was on no goal; a week at the Conservatory had sufficed to blot forever the vision of myself as a second Kreisler, or indeed a second anything, except a second fiddle. I knew only that, as drop by drop I devoured knowledge of music, I was assuaging a lifelong thirst. I was filled with a profound, a fervent satisfaction.

For me at last the sincere milk of the word! No wonder I was satisfied, have continued satisfied my life long whenever I have opened my throat to that everlasting warmth. And for this, whom shall I thank? How easy to have lived when man gave votive offerings to his god! I should like to fill my pitcher with wine, my cruse with oil; I would walk the path to music’s temple, and the way would be very pleasant to me. It would case my heart to pour the wine, the oil, upon that altar. And yet — in that day of votive offerings were no violins. Mozart had not lived and died; the Lord God Jehovah had not yet found his Name, that name to which Johann Sebastian was to lift up a song of praise as mighty, as immortal, perhaps, as the Name itself. . . . Four fiddles under a lamp — this voice of eloquence called a string quartet was only a zither then, a lute. I am well content, therefore, looking upon my violin, to give thanks less beautifully but no less heartily by the testimony of pen and ink.

For years, all unconsciously, I did this very thing. For years every page I wrote contained some transcription, some expression of my confessio fidei musicalis. These published testimonials did me more harm than good. Editors frowned at me: ‘That was a good story, but why bring music into it?’

How could I keep music out of it? The first publisher I ever met quashed me flat with this kind of indictment. He had turned down a manuscript of mine, a novel with the traditional plot of art versus domesticity; he said he wanted to see me, and on a hottest August day I crept downtown on a trolley and was ushered into his sanctum. Because he was the first publisher I had ever met, I was shy and frightened and wore, to bolster me up, my best Paris dress, given me by Victoria, and gloves. When I came in, the publisher and his cigar were seated behind a big desk; they remained seated. I stood up, and I still think this gave the publisher an unfair advantage; also, he was coatlcss, tieless, with no gloves on. All the same, he was fatter than I by a stone and he must have been fully as hot — I hope so. Anyway his forehead simmered visibly.

He said, ‘ Well-Mrs.-Bowen-I-readyour-book-three-months-ago-and-I’mnot-going-to-publish-it-but-I-remember-it-very-well-there’s-entirely-toomuch-music-in-it-have-you-writtenanother?’

At this time I did not know how publishers talked; I did not know that to a publisher, as to other men, business is — and quite properly — business. I said, ‘Oh!’ — and it sounded inadequate, not at all the way an author should sound talking to a publisher, so I took off my gloves and shifted from the right foot to the left (all fiddlers stand on the left foot to give the bow arm more freedom) and said feebly:—

‘Too much music? But that’s what the novel is about! It’s about music.’

This publisher had an extraordinary facility with a cigar. With both hands occupied at the desk he could, merely by moving the muscles of his lips, shift a cigar from the left side of the mouth to the right. He did it now. He said: —

‘Oh, you put all that music in just for effect! You wanted to show off how much you know about music.’ And while the blood roared in my ears he reached for the telephone on his desk, barked a number, and was hurling insults at an author uptown. He said, ‘Listen, Mr. Blank, perhaps you’ll make two hundred dollars on this book, but I doubt it. Listen, that dirty joke you took two and a half pages to tell, you should have got it all in one paragraph. . . . Yeah?‘ — and shut off the telephone and glared at me, up and down, Paris dress and all. He said: —

‘Are you really going to write any more books, Mrs. Bowen? What do you do for a living, or don’t you work?’

I said, ‘Certainly, I’m going to write more books, and I’m a music teacher.’

(I was not a music teacher, but only yesterday John had asked me if I would teach his youngest child to play the violin.) And then I said, very sweetly, ‘There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you, Mr. Linotype.’ And when he asked, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘How do I get back where I came from?’

v

I still burn, three years later, with unsaid replies to this publisher, with unuttered repartee and insults unflung. When he said, ‘You put in all that music to show off,’ I should have said — I should have said . . .

Anyway, the novel was published. The man that published it — and in the publishing world his name is Solon — told me, ‘What, I like about your book, Mrs. Bowen, is the very genuine way you let music run all through it.’

But Mr. Linotype — alas for revenge — will never know what Solon said, because, even if Mr. Linotype chanced to see this article, he would not read it. There is too much music in it.

Nevertheless, after that I was more careful. In a story where the heroine and the villain fell in love while playing string quartets, on first writing I permitted the villain this: ‘We’ll play the F Major, darling,’ said Desmond, ‘Opus 59.’ I changed it to read, ‘the Beethoven with the grand adagio,’ and then I remembered that publisher and took out the name of Beethoven and the term adagio, although my lip curled in self-scorn as I made the erasure and I thought, ‘Why is America reared to look upon good music as bluestocking?’ But, being in need of immediate sales, I caused Desmond to say, ‘Get out your fiddles; we’ll play a classical quartet’ — which turned my blood quite cold with embarrassment, the word classical, misused, being to a musician what hand-painted is to a painter.

But, although I have no patience with people who decry good music as bluestocking, I understand a little the origin of their discomfort in the presence of music’s high priests and priestesses. None of the arts is more widely abused by the æsthetic poseur. While your musical poseur is instantly detected by a musician and ignored with a sigh and a shrug, he cannot be exposed by a person ignorant of music. Hence your unmusical person of intellectual honesty goes about scowling and putting up the lip at every amateur who professes enthusiasm for music not made by Victor Herbert.

I knew a college professor who fell into fury at the name of Mozart. ‘Motesart, Motesart!‘ he would mutter. ‘Why can’t you call him Moseart like a good American?’ It must have been sheer perversity — for he was an educated man — that prompted him always to speak of a sonato and a concerta This man had the strangest attitude toward music. He scorned it, and said so with a really amusing eloquence, but he went stubbornly to symphony concerts, and when he got there he always fell asleep. He was an excessively nervous man, high-strung; I have seen him sleep through the Tchaikowsky Pathétique, cymbals and all, and come away smiling. Once I saw him, the day after such a sleeping symphony, sleep all morning on the sunny terrace opening off John’s music room while John and some other enthusiast banged away at two-piano duets with every door and window wide.

I never could persuade this man to give music credit for easing the taut pegs of his nerves; a tom-tom, he declared, would do as well, not only for him, but for all of us, and the only reason he paid for symphony tickets was because none of his friends possessed a tom-tom.

Your genuine musician gives to ignorance fairer treatment than ignorance gives to him; perhaps this is a mere truism, a comparison of wisdom’s tolerance with the fool’s impatience. Your musician is always hoping, hoping to find yet another enthusiast, and he will listen patiently to much nonsensical flattery on the chance that it is mere embarrassment covering up a genuine appreciation. On the other hand, I often wish musicians would be a little less patient.

Once a professional string quartet was engaged for an evening of music at a private house of enormous wealth. They played in a huge, brick-walled, stone-floored room hung with tapestry and carpeted with priceless rugs — the worst room, acoustically, I have ever experienced. I was in the front row, but even here the notes fell muffled, as though the place were lined with velvet. At rehearsal the cellist, casting about desperately for some means of relief, removed the rug from under the musicians’ four chairs, rolled it up, and asked a servant to dispose of it. The night of the concert the rug was back again, and, the lady of the house being busy with several hundred guests, our cellist sought her social secretary and requested that the rug be removed, explaining patiently that nobody could hear the music with it down. The secretary said briefly, ‘Mrs de Smythe knows how music should be arranged in her house,’ and the rug stayed where it was.

Now, in the name of toil and its reward, in the name of money paid and service rendered, should the musicians have submitted to this? Who was I to judge this complicated question of social economy—I, an amateur, sitting in the front row with my green velvet bosom heaving in rage?

Strange, indeed, the crimes which are committed against music. But one pleasant result of that evening’s atrocity against Debussy — for it was Debussy over whose singing mouth Madame Secretary had clapped her hand — one pleasant result was that when the party was over, and the lobster-champagne consumed, we repaired, half a dozen congenial souls and the musicians, to Zimbalist’s house and had some music. We had the Brahms Piano Quintet and then we had Viennese waltzes, whirling solemnly round and round in couples, the musicians, their fiddles under their chins, circling among us, grinning delight at their own gypsy slides up and down the fingerboard.

Only the true musician knows how to take music seriously enough to be able to take it lightly. If prayer is an art, so is flirtation: only your true artist, to whom music is a thing serious as his own life — only he knows how to flirt with music, to follow up a Bach fugue with a café waltz and derive, as it were, equal pleasure from both. The giant can afford to laugh at Lilliput; perversely enough, it is more often the pygmy who is heard cracking jokes at the giant. Strong men are notoriously good-natured, as are the wise. As for me, I am neither strong nor wise, and my performance on the violin is so unequal to my passion for that instrument as to make the gods themselves laugh.

VI

But I have worked hard and joyfully in the service of music; I shall go on working, and this gives me, I think, the privilege of airing a grievance, of listing with emphasis—perhaps with venom — certain things I wish, musically speaking, that people would not say to me.

The actual number of these remarks seems, happily, to diminish with the years. Nobody sighs to me, nowadays, ‘ Oh, please play “Humoresque” — you know, the one that goes dum, de dum, de dum de dum.’ And it is seldom I endure the familiar coo, ‘You do love your violin, don’t you?’ I thought I was rid of the bird remark, too, and then at one of John’s singing parties it came sourly back to me. With windows wide to June we had been singing, some hundred strong, the Brahms ‘Requiem’ — had, indeed, just ended the tuneful chorus, ‘How lovely is thy dwelling place.’ We paused, and while the slow heavenly refrain still hung upon the air a robin called from the garden and my most cherished friend, my pal, my crony, turned from the music in her hand and said dreamily, ‘All the same, that bird can beat Brahms hollow.’

What is this eternal, idiotic argument of art versus nature? Why do people think they have to stand up for the bird? I wish I could infect one of these bird provers with an aphasic toxin which would cause her to forget utterly the sound of a violin, rendering unrecognizable the sound of bow on catgut. Then I would sit in a tree outside her window and waken her, some May morning, to the first measures of Beethoven’s ‘Spring Sonata.’ Especially I should like to try this experiment upon the latest offender — a writer who spends her days, not appreciating nature, but outwitting nature, out-speaking, outheralding the bird. How avidly she would reach for her notebook and the pencil under her pillow, and with what eloquence she would write of the miracle she had discovered! A bird with throat more liquid than the nightingale, with deeper bell-tone than the thrush.

The bird remark is not intrinsically wicked; it is never made except by persons who cannot read music, and it is spoken idly, without malice aforethought. It is a species of sigh, an explosion of the breath — a defense, perhaps, against unpleasant sensations of ignorance or against capture by the music that has been played. ‘I am slipping, I lose myself, I smother under this new thing. Quickly, quickly let me deny this beauty and save myself! . . . Beethoven? — Ah, but that bird can beat Beethoven at his own game.’

But there is another remark more deadly by far, and not so amiable of analysis. Not a week passes without its being breathed in my ear; even now, at the ten-thousandth hearing, my teeth grit in my jaw: —

‘I adore music, but I don’t know a note.’

A letter containing this remark came to me only yesterday from a woman who has earned a brilliant worldly success in her chosen artistic field. And so, madam, you adore music? Lady, lady, you lie in your teeth! You who know ambition, who know hard work, and who through hard work have learned that artistic appreciation is not to be had for the asking, how dare you so confidently approach the throne? Now Pan, God of the Reed, now Memnon, Son of Morning, I adore thee — but I have never troubled to learn the simplest rites of thy ceremonial altar, the simplest song with which to worship thee. Boldly I approach the sacred fire, loudly I acclaim its divine heat. . . . You? Why, lady, you can’t even play a mouth organ. You don’t know — it is your boast that you don’t know — the notes of the musical staff. You adore English literature, too, but I observe that you took time to learn to read. You adore gardens — and you found out long ago which plants come up in May and which lie hidden until September.

An hour after I had read this woman’s letter I went to a party, and a painter came up and began telling me about an exhibition of modernistic paintings that had just opened in the

B—— Galleries. The man was not

only a good painter, he was a good talker. What an exhibition of modernistic paintings means to me is tired feet dragging exhausted backbone through mile after mile of bleak rooms lined with flat, gaudy-colored symbols of something incomprehensible; under the painter’s spell this prospect became golden, lightsome, and desirable. I was keyed to the very mood: I adore pictures, but —

‘Will you,’ the painter was saying, ‘go with me to the exhibition?’

This man did not want to pilot me through an exhibition any more than he wanted to roll an egg through it with his teeth; he wanted at the moment to talk about what he loved, and I was the nearest person. Just in time something came to my rescue, something entirely outside and beyond me. I heard my voice, firm and loud, saying, ‘ I only like pictures one at a time, and sitting down.’

The painter stared, then he blew out. his breath in a whistle. ‘What a relief,’ he said. ‘ What a relief! ’

My declaration had been stupid; it was like the professor and the tomtom ; deliberately I was permitting my ignorance to bar me from the delight, the excitement of exploration in a new field. I know also that in his heart the painter was sad because someone — no matter who — had denied his god. But a good loud denial, a hearty curse, has in it the seed, the very virus, of future affirmation. It may lead to something; it possesses, at any rate, more virtue than the weedy gush of insincerity. With me, that day, denial had its birth in horror lest I approach a serious thing too easily, with too cheap a familiarity — I adore music, but I don’t know a note.

Must Apollo, then, be clapped upon the back, and Rotarian fellow feeling be proclaimed? Is not love compounded also of respect, or is the word outmoded? To me, at least, respect is the heart, the very essence, of passion. The difficulty is that respect, once admitted, takes up so much room in the mansion that is ourselves. Cluttered as it is with the proud furniture of worldly affairs, with goings and comings and givings and takings, what place remains for humility, for the reception of that guest who visits only the meek? The habitation of the pure in heart — what disciplined sweepings, what sacrificial storages, have made it ready for the high company it may receive! The pure in heart, we are told, shall see God. And, by that same token, thrice blessed are the pure in heart because, when the fiddles are tuned, they can truly hear the Fifth Symphony!