GRAND PRIZE CREATIVE WRITING

Eugenio Monjeau Forms of Consolation

My father, Federico Monjeau, died on January 23, 2021. A few days later, his physician wrote to my mother: “As befits our human nature, we escape misfortune as much as we can, but sometimes that escape is like a dance to the wrong music.” The phrase brings together two topics, music and health, which had always been central to my relationship with my father. Indeed, I feared my father’s death all my life. And yet, when it was finally close, I didn’t think it would happen.

This May, I went with my mother to a concert at the Teatro Colón. It was the first time since my father’s death. He was a music critic and a university professor, and we had been there together countless times. The first of those family visits took place while I was still in the womb. It was a concert by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra playing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

When I was born and my mother took me home for the first time, my father played a recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a gesture of a gravity unusual in him. He was also quite solemn when he told me one day: “Tomorrow, you are going to miss school. They are playing Mozart’s Requiem at the Colón, and it is important that you see it live.”

Twenty-two years later, I was again in that hall. Among the works they played was “Kuleshov,” a concert by Argentine composer Oscar Strasnoy. One of my father’s last articles had been a review of Alexandre Tharaud’s rendition of “Kuleshov,” where he coined the term “Strasnoy effect.” This effect, my father explains, “begins with the materials themselves, which, beyond the procedures of montage or juxtaposition, retain a powerful ambiguity. Everything is this and more than this; nothing is exactly what it seems; everything flows mysteriously in this work of hypnotic beauty.”

Today I received a copy of Strasnoy’s latest score. Its title is “Tombeau de Monjeau,” in the manner of Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin,” in tribute to his friends killed during World War I. Like “Kuleshov,” “Tombeau de Monjeau” carries significant ambiguity, and the “Strasnoy effect” is immediately felt. The last minutes of the piece consist of nothing else than the sound of bells, made with the piano but enhanced by the placement of magnets on one of the strings of the keyboard.

When a performance of the piece by Mara Dobresco, a Romanian pianist my father was very fond of, was made available online, I sent the link to my mother. She told me it sounded too much like a funeral march. It did, but that was the musical tradition my father loved the most. After all, one of the works he studied and taught about the most was Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Short Pieces, op. 19. The last of the pieces, which also evokes bells, was Schoenberg’s “tombeau” to his mentor, Gustav Mahler.

My father was hospitalized for the last forty days of his life in a state of semi-consciousness whose precise nature we will never know. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year before. On the morning of December 12, 2022, he felt sick, and they called an ambulance. With my mother by his side, he went into cardiac arrest and was rescued from it when he got to the hospital, but the ensuing brain injury was so severe that he never fully woke up again.

The night before, my brother had dined at my parents’ house and sent me a picture of my father smiling, with an expression that made him look like his mother, my grandmother. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, almost completely unbuttoned, showing on his chest the scars of the open-heart surgery he had at 40.

The months before my father’s death, I took a seminar on Wagner’s tetralogy with Carolyn Abbate. There we read “Phantasmagoria,” one of [Theodor] Adorno’s most famous articles. My father came into contact with Adorno’s philosophy during his exile in Brazil, and among the names that surrounded me from my earliest childhood, that of Adorno always shone with exceptional brilliance.

I wrote an essay as the final paper for that seminar. The memories of its writing process are as painful as they are dear to me. During one of my father’s hospitalizations (just one month before the final one), my father sent me a 12’41” voice message about Adorno, Wagner, and Nietzsche, which I still haven’t listened to again — I haven’t heard my father’s voice since he died. The message, delivered under the intoxicating effect of morphine, was full of brilliant ideas, several of which ended up in my final essay. My mother told me that the essay had become an obsession for my father. He kept telling her they had to help me find a good topic for the essay. The topic ended up appearing thanks to those WhatsApp exchanges: the connection between cowbells in music and the concept of natural beauty in Adorno. While I was writing the essay, my father wrote to me, “There’s a moment when you begin to feel Adorno’s effect on your life.”

I then brought my father a printed copy of the essay. Bedridden, he made the monumental effort to read it to the end (in those days, he found it almost impossible to read even crime stories, which to him was second nature, to use an Adornian expression), asking me a few questions now and then.

In 2016, my father wrote in an article, “The literary critic Frank Kermode argued that, by an aspiration for concordance, the endings of works of art provide us with a kind of consolation. But this is not to say that things are always heading in the same direction, and perhaps there are as many forms of consolation as there are works of art.”

The ending of “Tombeau de Monjeau,” indeed the whole piece, and “Kuleshov,” Wagner, Mahler, all my musical memories, the musical and spiritual adventures I shared with my father for thirty-five years, of which these words give minimal testimony, are my forms of consolation.