Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your very good letter. My transient distress
at Nathaniel's having chosen Yale over Harvard did not reflect
my estimate regarding the quality of the colleges, much less
my concern for their reputations. My sadness stemmed from
my awareness of a loss whenever a family member moves away,
or - more rarely - when I move away from the family. That,
after all, was the affliction that made me so unhappy in
Chappaqua and Canaan. I'll leave the psychoanalysis of my
separation anxiety for another occasion. When I built the
2100 sq. ft. addition to our house in Belmont, I had in mind 
the calculation that the expense was well worthwhile if
it would provide each of the four grandchildren with ample
living space for the eight anticipated years of college and
graduate school. My father's comment would have been: "Da
hast Du die Rechnung ohne den Wirt gemacht." (You figured
the bill without the proprietor.) Events turned out much
different from what I (and Klemens) had planned. Because
of Laura's intransigence, the Addition was never occupied
by any member of her family at all, but she found it a 
very convenient storage facility. I don't complain, but
I relish the irony that we are ignored by the grandchildren,
except when they need taxi service, or when they ask to
borrow a car, or come to supper on days when Momma is working,
and the irony that to this day our basement and our garage
are crammed with items from "next door". I don't complain,
and if there is fault, I assign it to myself for my
unwarranted resistance to the centrifugal forces that scatter
_all_ families, as children become adolescents and adults, as
parents age and grandparents die. I interpret the inevitable
disintegration of the family as an expression of its natural
history, unavoidably tinged with disappoinment, regret and pain.
Like life itself, it has no "ideal" solution; the death of the
family is as inescapable as the death of the individual.
Ultimately all attempts to forestall death of any kind, 
prove to be "wrong".

It's in the context, I suppose, of my rereading some of my
college essays, that Nathaniel's rejection of Harvard, which
is premised on the belief, that his opportunities for conducting
ensembles and orchestras are better at Yale, has lead me to 
consider that my life would had been somewhat different, if
my teachers at Harvard had been more sympathetic with my
aspirations, or perhaps if _I_ had gone rather than to Harvard,
to Yale. Not even to mention the cold shoulder from the
philosophy department, my teacher Karl Vietor opined that I
was too young when I asked for his endorsement of a project
to review and to edit the Houghton Library collection of the
literary estate of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (the wonderful
Viennese poet who wrote the libretti to the operas of Richard
Strauss) a treasure which I have always assumed had been given
to Harvard as a quid pro quo for the undergraduate admission
of Hofmannsthal's grandson. Werner Jaeger, when I tried to
broach some issue of Greek philosophy, rebuffed me with a
reproof which _his_ mentor Wilamowitz-Moellendorf had made
to him: "Junger Mann, eh sie zu philosophieren beginnen, 
machen sie erst einmal ein Paar Konjekturen." (Young man,
first make a few conjectures, before you undertake to
philosophize.) I'm just meditating; I'm not critical of
anyone, - including myself.  

Last Sunday, Nathaniel came over with the orchestral score
and a CD of Mahler's 2nd Symphony, and suggested we listen
to it together. On Monday, - Nathaniel was already on his
way to an introductory visit at Yale, I wrote him a letter,
which might interest you:

===================================================

"It's almost 5 o'clock, and I've spent all afternoon reading
about Gustav Mahler on the Internet, and downloading some of
the poetry which he wove into his music. Obviously the literary
aspect of his work is more accessible to me than are his symphonies.
But I think I get the point, and I thank you very much for
helping me understand, for sharing your enthusiasms, for
listening and following the score with me. I expect to continue
to listen to Mahler's music, and perhaps, in the course of the
years that are left to me, my understanding might grow.

"My immediate reaction to the music we listened to, and especially
to the score that we followed, is that Mahler was above all a
conductor - there's nothing wrong with that, - whose profession
brought him into very intimate contact with the music that preceded
his; he absorbed not only the work of Mendelssohn and Schumann,
but of Schubert and Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach. I thought
I heard phrases and harmonies of various older composers that find some,
albeit fleeting expression in his work. Even more: the literary tradition
and spiritual ambience which shaped his life resounds in his music,
unmistakable, loud and clear. In the Second Symphony, the pietist
stanza "Urlicht" from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, that thesaurus of
popular fantasy which was for decades the raw material of Romantic
poetry production; "Auferstehung" (resurrection) an extract from
Klopstock's Geistliche Lieder (spiritual songs), which is the
conventional title of the hymnals that are stored in brackets on the
back of each pew of German Protestant churches. Most remarkably,
Klopstock's pieties were insufficient for Mahler to an extent that
he felt compelled to supplement them with poetry of his own, such
as is worthy of a Lutheran Pastor's ordination, or perhaps a Catholic
priest's consecration. I don't know that much about the Catholics.
What I've read of Mahler's poetry strikes me as being quite good.
I can sympathize with his preoccupation with resurrection, when I
remind myself that 6 of his siblings died in childhood, and his
parents died before he was thirty. I'm convinced that Mahler's
expressions of religious ecstasy were sincere; and I suspect it's
the sincerity of Mahler's passion that has caught your ear and has
enchanted you. Arguably Mahler's contemporary popularity might be
explained by the circumstance that his music expresses a spirituality
which is deemed by modern standards to be politically and socially
incorrect. Remarkably, your appreciation of Mahler is quite analogous
to my parents' appreciation of Bach, whose music expressed for them
an intangible reality to which they had no other access.  Accordingly
I hear in Mahler's music a trumpet that summons from my past into
your future.

"By a strange conincidence, while web-surfing the history of American
symphony orchestras, refreshing my memories of Serge Koussevitzky,
I came across a reference to a concert performance recording in
Symphony Hall in March 1937, of the Saint Matthew Passion. My parents,
had been in the habit of making an annual Good Friday pilgrimage to
the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig to hear this work, and when year after year
the winter's snows melted and spring came to the Virginia mountains
they felt increasingly trapped and deprived. Leipzig lay in ruins
and the local radio had nothing to offer but gospel preaching and
hillbilly music.  On the occasion of my first escape from there,
in the autumn of 1942, the year I went to Germantown Friends School
as an eighth grader, I made it my business to find a Saint Matthew
Passion recording for them.  Of course, I would have preferred one in
German, but the Koussevitzky recording in English was the only one
available. The 78 r.p.m. discs came in three volumes, the first with ten,
the third with about nine, and the second with about eight records,
which sold for a dollar a piece; there was, if I remember, no charge
for the album. It required several trips to the record store,
H. Royer Smith, on Walnut Street in downtown Philadelphia. (the oldest
music store in the US, founded in 1759) Finally I was able to bring
the last of the albums to Konnarock. They were much listened to and
much appreciated by my parents; but none of the locals whose ears were
attuned to hillbilly rhythms, could understand what it was all about.
One of the records' edges had been sheared off.  I remember exactly
which, and the aria "Sehet Jesus hat die Hand uns zu fassen ausgespannt"
did not become familiar to me until years later when as a college student,
I bought an LP version in German at McKenna's in Harvard Square.
The old 78 r.p.m. discs have been transferred to 3 CD's, which I have
ordered from the Belmont library. After I pick them up, I'll listen again
and let the music take my memory back sixty-five years.  Maybe if and when
you listen to the English version, you won't fall asleep.  It might
even remind you of the chorale in one of Gustav Mahler's symphonies."

===================================================

I hope all this isn't too much for you and that it doesn't give
you epistolary indigestion. Each time I get a throw-away journal
with a front page article on some new complication of cataract
surgery, I think of you, and hope that the operation on your other
eye is a long way off. Stay well and give my best to Ned.

Jochen