A Musical Offering

Eyelids heavy with sleep are lulled to close by fatigue at the day's end but anxiety and fear wriggle recklessly inside the head forcing them to move apart. Wide awake and paying attention, I begin reading A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated from Spanish by Fionn Petch.

Right at the start, I encounter an insomniac Count Keyserling who demands he be put to sleep by musical compositions. Johann Sebastian Bach's variations come to the rescue. His thirty variations are performed every night by the famous German harpsichordist - Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. 

A Musical Offering in about 110 pages consists of seven chapters - like essays or fragmented stories meticulously interwoven by music. Maybe the number 7 signifies the musical notes 'do re mi fa so la ti' or 'sa re ga ma pa da ni'. This mini extravaganza by Luis Sagasti shows how music heals - during wars, when death is imminent like in concentration camps. 

Facts and fiction freely intertwine in accounts here as the author details whale songs that can be heard over a distance of 5000 km, signals emitted by stars, songs sent into space from the Earth in 1977 along with the Voyager probe, a giant organ that an entire village at the foot of the Alps built together (sometime in 1737) that created an avalanche 'literally' when played burying the very village that created it. 

The magical prowess of music is rendered beautifully through instances like 1) Goldberg variations played for the Count every night equated to Scheherazade's 'a story a night formula' from the Arabian nights 2) a famous scene from the movie Shawshank Redemption when Andy plays music from the jail administration office - a sweet and short of taste of freedom he offers his jail mates that earns him two weeks in the hole 3) a song in exchange for a piece of bread kind of deal between two inmates at Auschwitz camp. 

Historical events like the Spanish Civil War and the Siege of Leningrad knotted with musical endeavors from the time give the reader a handful to research. 

"Music promises the pleasure of the future: anticipating a melody that flutters a few steps ahead is the dessert we savour even as we raise another steaming forkful to our lips."

"Every mother carries a Noah’s Ark in her womb (after all, there are forty weeks of gestation and forty days of flood). We’ve all been the animals in the Ark before descending to the earth."

With beautiful lines like above and stunning musical revelations (many that aren't easy to comprehend) A Musical Offering works quite like the melody of a Tanpura, not explicit to its listener at the start but unravels slowly; the instrument's constant hum actually lends a framework on which everything in the concert rests upon. 

And as I finish reading A Musical Offering, there is a sense of calm, like the Russian Count I too slip into a good night sleep - Spokoynoy Nochi !