In the mist of a chill night years ago, when I was reading Middlemarch for the first time, I took one of my frequent late-night walks around Eastport and heard this version of the Prelude and Fugue in C Sharp Minor by Hélène Grimaud for the first time. Until then, I had exclusively listened to Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord recordings of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, and I had loved their upright, regal severity. But hearing Grimaud play them, I was struck by the tenderness of her playing. In her performance, I heard for the first time how this pair reflects reminiscences on loss and grief. The Prelude introduces a theme that is taken up again in the Fugue, gentle and simple at first, like when recalling a tender memory. As the Fugue proceeds, each of the voices enters in like a growing storm of thoughts and associations, and they build into a bittersweet tempest, joining joyful tenderness and contemplative rage at the departure of what was, both the actual and the still yet potential.

Hearing it now, I think at times of those poems of half-prospective mourning like Larkin’s Aubade (“An only life can take so long to climb // Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never”¹) and at other times of the varied lives in Eliot’s story, where some do in fact climb clear of their own wrong beginnings and of the holes dug by the dead hand of people who have gone. In my listening, I often fall pray to a recency bias and think primarily of the maelstrom of the Fugue, but at times I remember to go back to listen again to the gentle hope of the Prelude, which shines like a light to remember and to follow in the blusters of the night.