The Loneliness of January

In New England, January is bleak and stripped of its holiday sheen. It’s the aging memory of lovelier times, all gone. It’s cold and gray, and its only promise is spring—too far off to be hopeful.

Loneliness doesn’t like company. In fact, it feels secure in it’s mire and doesn’t like being pushed around.

As a musician, I find that music does a better job describing loneliness than staving it. Sure, music is my first love, and it gives more than it asks for, but does it understand bleakness, or does it only describe? I’ve often wondered if we weren’t more invested in our “feelings” of loneliness than the thing itself.

When I was a young man, I tried to distance myself from certain works that I thought I was somehow above. As ridiculous as this now sounds, I wanted to be more evolved, not taken in by music with such mass appeal. There is music that I’ve naturally separated from (Ravel’s Bolero). However, Sergei Rachmaninoff just won’t leave. We’ve broken up many times, and somehow I keep taking him back. Or is it he who takes me back.

This week I was at the gym in some misguided notion that I’d get in better shape for the New Year. I’m certain this is a unique thought, and I’m thinking of patenting it.

Nevertheless, I watched my fellow sweaters elliptically “train” while watching CNN or the Food Network or whatever HGTV throws up, and I thought that if I had to walk briskly for 30-odd minutes, I was going to enjoy Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto.

I brought up a YouTube video of Yefim Bronfman and the Vienna Phil. My “lonely” workout wasn’t lonely after all—at least for the 39 minutes and 35 seconds it took to hear the entire work.

I’ve heard and played the piece countless times (in fact it was the first large-scale work I fell in love with as a child), and yet there are a couple moments that still catch in my throat. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps Rachmaninoff does more than describe loneliness and is, in fact for 39 minutes, my companion.

Bronfman dispenses with the usual trappings of a pianist out to impress. His economy of personal space fits in with my understanding of the myth of the “lonely hero,” as he allows instead of proves. Sure, he cajoles, but he also bears witness and lets the piano breathe, or more to the point, he allows Rachmaninoff to hold us in a tender but very firm embrace.

Oddly, I came to the second piano concerto later in my development, which doesn’t seem to be most people’s experience. Loneliness needs an embrace, and where there isn’t someone to ease the moment, there’s music. At a particular moment in the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto (first movement mm 125-140), the oboe plays a line of haunting beauty answered with such tender reflection by the piano. In ways this is less a comfort to the lonely as it is a beautiful description. It’s the essence of aloneness, and perhaps that’s its comfort.

Apparently, Eric Carmen found the second movement to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto the perfect vehicle for his 1975 hit “All By Myself." While I'm not a fan of borrowing from a classical tradition for pop ballads, I can see how this movement lends itself to the internally shuttered. Carmen sets his gentle words to Rachmaninoff and pulls off a '70s anthem of stoic acceptance.

Loneliness is part of the contract we all make for remaining on the planet. What we do with it speaks to our adaptive abilities and our willingness to bring along a companion. Rachmaninoff may just be that companion. He’s not the only one, but he’ll do when I’m “All By Myself."