A Morsel of the Cake

Recently, I was standing in my kitchen early one morning, tidying it up a bit and getting ready to prepare my breakfast. I turned on the radio. The timing was perfect. The announcer was just starting a new piece. From the music’s opening bars, I was transfixed. It was as if I were paralyzed; I couldn’t move. I was lifted and transported almost seven thousand miles away and over fifty years back in time to the city where I grew up.

I was seated in the Municipal Auditorium in Jackson, Mississippi. About twenty students surrounded me, all of us music students. The concert had not yet begun. The auditorium lights were still up. We were a rather noisy lot, talking loudly and laughing. I no longer remember who was seated on my left, but to my right was a rather buxom young lady with cherry-red lips. Like me, she was a senior music major—a wonderfully talented singer. We had been good friends all through college. Already, she was the prima donna.

She and I had several friends in common and we often found ourselves together at parties frequently hosted by classmates. There would almost always be a piano in the house. In the course of the evening, I would make my way to the piano, sit down, and begin playing. I would not play a classical work but rather some piece popular at the time. Not long after I would begin, I would hear my friend’s beautiful voice singing the piece I was playing.

I often played musical tricks on her. For example, for a piece composed in a major key, I would play it in a minor key. Or, I would modulate the bridge up a half-step. But I could never stump her. She paused only for the briefest of moments, then came in, invariably on pitch. She was marvelous. I enjoyed those musical games enormously.

Back in the auditorium, the orchestra’s musicians were slowly streaming onstage. They would find their seats, adjust the height of their stands, flip through their music, and warm up their instruments. With the ever-vigilant radar of a twenty-one-year-old unattached male, I noticed a somewhat tallish, slender young woman come onstage to take her seat. She was wearing the long black dress that used to be de rigeur for female orchestra players. And she was blessed with beautiful brown curls, a la Carol King. I was smitten. I turned to my friend and, in a hopeful kind of desperation, asked if she knew the young woman. And wonder of wonders, she did! She said they were friends.

Then I asked something that even then was old-fashioned. I asked my friend if she would be willing to speak to the woman on my behalf and ask her if she would go out with me. My friend readily agreed. At this point, the auditorium lights dimmed, and the concertmaster stood up to tune the orchestra. As soon as he sat down, the late Maestro Lewis Dalvit came onstage, strode briskly to the podium, made an elegant bow to acknowledge the audience’s applause, turned, and faced his orchestra.

Dalvit was a devoted student of the noted French conductor Pierre Monteux. He studied with Monteux many summers at Monteux’s conducting school in Hancock, Maine. He had been a diligent student and adopted much of Monteux’s physical conducting style, which was low-key, with minimal movement and maximum effect. Dalvit briefly scanned his orchestra from left to right, raised his baton, and began to conduct the very piece of music playing on my radio in my kitchen, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Back in my kitchen, the piece had just ended on the radio, and my phone was ringing. It was my wife calling from her hotel room in Vienna. She was in Vienna for a few days to spend time with a friend she had known since both of them were three years old. She said they were going to a concert that evening. I told her what had just happened to me. I went on to say that it must have been part of a school assignment to write a review of the concert and that I was very embarrassed by what I had written. She asked why I was embarrassed by it. I said, for one thing, that I described the astonishingly beautiful Barber piece as sounding as if it began in the middle, went nowhere, and then stopped. She laughed but consoled me by saying there was a lot of truth in what I had written, but that the piece is indeed beautiful.

For me, over the years, music has often been a madeleine, a Proustian petite madeleine. And for this, I am grateful.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I: Swann’s Way & Within a Budding Grove (p. 48). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

May your life be filled with madeleines, beautiful ones. By the way, within two years of first seeing her, I married the young woman I had seen at the concert. The marriage eventually failed. But, it blessed me with two wonderful children, one of them a girl with the most exquisite head of curly brown Carol King hair I’ve ever seen.

All the best,
Gershon