Jonathan Biss

Jonathan Biss: The sadness and euphoria of playing to an empty room

My November was bookended by two characteristic displays of grace. I ushered it in by falling on all fours while out for a run, skinning both knees and demolishing my pride; masked and bleeding is not a good look, even (especially?) on Halloween. I bid the month farewell by leaving my house in a torrential rainstorm — having consulted the weather report — wearing socks and shoes with holes in them, and carrying no umbrella. It seems I’ve been distracted. In my… well, not defence, but perhaps something adjacent to it, it was a hell of a month. After a seeming eternity of nothing, everything happened in November. I played three live recitals (three more than I’d played in the previous eight months); finished writing an essay on the anxiety that I’d endeavoured to keep hidden for a decade or four; watched, over five agonising days, as my country finally decided to slow its creep into fascism or oblivion or both. Even for an artist — aka a professional intense person — this was a bit much.

I could have predicted that music would be the thing to sustain me in this strange, often traumatic year: it can be thrilling or consoling, aspirational or confessional, as the situation requires. It has so much to say about loneliness and, in spite or because of that, can make you feel much less lonely. And it is just the thing when you are one Zoom meeting or White House press briefing away from preheating the oven and crawling in. What I did not expect was that Beethoven would be the music that meant most to me in this time. Perhaps this was foolish: Beethoven has, after all, been my greatest obsession for much of my life.

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