Amor Towles injects real people and places into his short story “The Bootlegger,” in which an imagined couple attend an imagined recital at Carnegie Hall by cellist Steven Isserlis. In the moments before he plays the prelude of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, Isserlis delivers an on-stage speech that – in combination with the music that follows – has a life-altering effect on the story’s narrator.
Before beginning, the cellist gave a brief history of the suites, noting that for hundreds of years they were all but forgotten until they were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Pablo Casals. Apparently, Casals had happened into an old music shop near the harbor in Barcelona and found the suites buried under a stack of musical scores, crumpled and discolored with age. Years later, as a world-famous cellist, Casals championed the suits at every opportunity, bringing them the attention they so rightly deserved. […]
I never studied music or played an instrument. I rarely sang along in church. So, I don’t know the proper terminology. But once Isserlis was playing, within a matter of seconds, you could tell you were in the presence of some form of perfection. […]
And then, it was over. Oh, how we applauded. First in our chairs, and then on our feet. For we were not simply applauding this virtuoso, or the composition, or Bach. We were applauding one another. Applauding the joy which we had shared and which had become the fuller through the sharing.
A thousand blog posts and a thousand examples wouldn’t exceed this endorsement of the potential of words to enrich an audience’s experience with music.
P.S. If you’re not familiar with Amor Towles, start with A Gentleman in Moscow.
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