The Zone of Interest

If there’s a single argument to be made in favor of The Zone of Interest being a great work of art, it’s the fact that I have walked away from each of my two viewings with entirely different impressions. The first time I watched it, I was at home, and I disliked the majority of what I saw. Save for the very end, I found it self-consciously arty and pretentious, a film that took two slow and tedious hours to say exactly what The Look of Silence had said a decade earlier.

Zone of Interest depicts the day-to-day home lives of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. It is not, and the movie will not be upset to hear me say this, interesting. He sits through a pitch meeting for work in the study, or takes his children fishing. She tries on a fur coat, tends the garden, receives her visiting mother. The children see daddy off to work as he mounts a horse. It is all achingly, intentionally quotidian.

The ending, in contrast, absorbed me completely. As Rudolf leaves an opulent Berlin party, he stops on a landing and stares off into the dark. The camera cuts to contemporary footage of staff preparing Auschwitz for a day of visitors. They sweep, and wipe, and vacuum. The sound of the vacuum was violent in the context of what had been a quiet, restrained film.

Despite my disinterest in the rest of the movie, I thought about those shots for days afterward. The staff of the museum echoed the staff at the house, bustling here and there on behalf of the museum’s visitors, on behalf of the Hösses, and, somehow, on behalf of me. The shots in the museum felt pointed at the viewer, asking me if I’m all that different from the people I’ve spent the last two hours watching.

I don’t mean that in a boring way. I’m not talking about the Banality of Evil. Events like the Holocaust are far away, we tell ourselves, separated by so much time and civilization. We put our memorials behind glass and tell ourselves that it won’t happen again, which isn’t really all that different from how the Höss family conducts their business. They separated themselves from the realities of their lives with trellises and vines. “This will grow and cover everything, you’ll see,” Hedwig says to her mother about the vines surrounding their yard.

What’s striking about the museum in that instant is the sanitation of the whole thing. The glass is a transparent barrier, that’s better than a wall, but it’s still a barrier. Plate glass separates you and me from piles of abandoned shoes, from thousands of ownerless suitcases, from the systemized subjugation and murder of how many millions of lives. The thing about plate glass is that it can, as we have seen recently, shatter.

As for the rest of the film, what struck me as pretentious at home felt finely-tuned in the theater. Dozens of smaller details leapt out. The Zone of Interest is all about those details. Auschwitz does not exist save for an ambience at the edge of their lives, an inconvenience that continually insists on making itself known. The fishing trip ends suddenly when he realizes that the camp, located upstream, has dumped incinerator ash into the river.

At home, I rolled my eyes. In the theater, I understood that I wasn’t meant to have a reaction to what I was seeing so much as I was meant to observe the characters’ reactions. Imagine having to scrub your children down to rid them of human remains and then going back to work.

A pair of scenes set at night, treated to resemble a photographic negative, show a young girl of about 10 hiding food in the fields where the prisoners work. She pushes apples into the soil and hides pears among their shovels while an ominous sound repeats over and over. Hers are the only altruistic actions in the film, the only time a character steps outside of themselves to think about others without resenting the implications.

Everyone else seems content with their lot, or content to look away. Hedwig’s mother has the most complex reaction of any German we see. At first, she is happy for her daughter, for her house and her successful husband, but that doesn’t seem to last. She vanishes in the night, after waking up to the eerie red light of the incinerator. That’s as close to an act of resistance as any of the Germans get, a quiet “nein, danke.”

The characters we spend the most time with have chosen to lean in, and none with more alacrity than Hedwig. “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice,” she offhandedly snaps at one of the Polish housemaids. She understands the hierarchy of this world. The cruelty, to borrow from Adam Serwer, becomes the point. The Zone of Interest isn’t talking about the Banality of Evil either. It isn’t about evil rendered with indifference. It is about evil realized with surgical precision, with aplomb, because it works. This is a depiction of evil as means.

In their last on-screen conversation, one held over the phone, Hedwig asks Rudolf about the party. “Who was there?” “I didn’t really pay attention,” he replies. “I was thinking about how I would gas them all. It would be a particular challenge, because of the high ceilings.”

As he descends the stairs, just before the contemporary footage of Auschwitz, he stops twice to retch. It is 1943. The worst of the Holocaust is about to begin. Höss has that day accepted responsibility for the military operation that bears his name, the transportation and extermination of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews. The retches seem to me his body’s last attempt to expel all of the evil he has so willingly imbibed. He swallows it down, fixes his cap, and continues to descend the stairwell into absolute darkness.

Ennio

Ennio Morricone, the beloved Italian film composer, left behind a remarkable body of work. Active well into his 80’s, Morricone’s scores are remarkable not only for their sheer quantity—he scored over 400 films and television programs over the course of sixty years—but for their quality. The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly; a handful of deeply influential gialo films; The Mission; Cinema Paradiso; Once Upon a Time in America; The Hateful Eight. On and on, the list goes. These are some of the greatest scores of all time. You could talk about Morricone’s work for days without running out of things to talk about.

So wealthy a corpus should be ideal fodder for a documentary, but Ennio, the 2021 Italian documentary, doesn’t know what to do with that much material. It’s far too long, too repetitive, and all while nothing that’s mentioned gets the time it deserves. We learn very little of consequence, about either him or the work. While you would hope a 2.5 hour documentary about one of the greatest composers of the 20th century would provide a buffet, it’s more a loose assembly of Costco samples.

That is not a knock on Costco samples, I was raised on Costco samples, but they don’t make a meal.

It started off strong, overlaying audio from various talking heads with footage of il maestro doing stretches. Exercise will keep you, it seems, pretty damn limber. I salivated at the thought of going through his office, lined as the shelves were with albums, scores, and books. The only real glimpse into anything profound comes on two occasions when Morricone reveals an exceptional sensitivity, something that he seems to keep guarded much of the time. It is easy to see how that type of sensitivity would have contributed to his work, which exudes raw humanity.

Despite my disappointment in the film itself, I found myself walking away consumed with thoughts about the magic of The Movies. This was only my second time hearing Morricone’s music in a theater, despite the fact that he has been one of my favorite composers for as long as I’ve had favorite composers. I’ve seen clips from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly dozens of times over the course of my life, and I have always had an academic interest in seeing it, but watching those scenes play out on the big screen, surrounded by darkness and those glorious sounds, having nothing else to distract me? I became positively desperate to see them.

I know every note of “Gabriel’s Oboe,” one of the main themes from Morricone’s score for The Mission, and I heard it in a completely new light on Thursday. How many times have I heard the coyote call from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly? Even in the midst of a documentary that was too long, during which I found myself dozing off intermittently, the power of those great scores wed to those great films, presented in a room in which I had no choice but to completely surrender myself to what I was seeing and hearing?

Fuck, man. The movies.

The Silence of the Lambs

It was impossible for me to read The Silence of the Lambs in a vacuum. I’ve seen the movie too many times. The book had to exist in conversation with its adaptation, which does seem unfair, the parent justifying their own existence to the child. I was immediately struck by the tone, and the degree to which the movie gets the tone right. There is a quality to the opening chapters, a studied remove, a sense that something nearby (but not here) is wrong. Director Jonathan Demme captured that perfectly. I have no idea how. How do you translate something as ephemeral as texture to a different medium? It’s a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned.

With the book fresh in my mind, I rewatched the movie. It has long been one of my favorites, and the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that I now experience the movie as an adaptation while I’m watching it. Just about everything I love about The Silence of the Lambs, it turns out, comes from the book. Even the way Demme explores the experience of women in male spaces, something that I’ve always understood to be Demme’s own exploration of the material, is right there on the page. The film is remarkably faithful to the source material.

Most, if not all, of the changes are about focusing the material. Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge of Behavioral Psychology, no longer has a dying wife, which makes sense. The movie is concerned entirely with Clarice Starling. No need to venture away from that. Exposition is far deadlier in a movie than it is in a book, and a number of adjustments are made to spare the audience an explanation. All in all, it’s entirely successful.

The one thing that suffers in this adaptation? Hannibal Lecter.

It feels as weird for me to say it as it probably does for you to read it. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an iconic performance, one that still reverberates within culture at large. More people know references to Hannibal Lecter than have seen the movie or read the book. Hopkins won an Academy Award, for god’s sake.

Nevertheless, if there’s one character the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs lets down, it’s the good doctor. A series of small and individually innocuous changes come together to turn Lecter into a bogeyman. In the film, he destroyed his medical records before the FBI arrested him, something the fastidious and studied Dr. Lecter of the novel would almost certainly never consider. It’s an act of impropriety. “Discourtesy,” as he says, “is unspeakably ugly to me.” They were destroyed in the book as the result of a court order, which also feels more in keeping with Harris’s worldview in a way that I can’t entirely articulate.

There’s a scene in the novel where Lecter discusses a fellow inmate with Starling, talking about how the poor fellow has been misdiagnosed by the viscously unpleasant head of the asylum, Dr. Chilton. You get the impression in that scene that Lecter does, to some extent, care about this misdiagnosis, even if it is because the misdiagnosis itself is more of an affront to him than this unfortunate individual being left to live an unnecessarily catatonic life.

The biggest change, a throwaway bit of exposition that explains Lecter’s awareness of the presence of a human head in a Baltimore storage locker, makes it sound like the locker is his. In the novel, the story is more complex, undoubtedly trimmed down for time, but Lecter had nothing to do with the head being there. He knew about it through a patient. The problem with this, only obvious once you see it, is that Lecter becomes, through that exposition, entirely monstrous. He is no longer a terrifying human being, but a sort of a bogeyman. He puts heads in the backs of cars of storage units. In the book, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying man. The movie is content to make him a Monster.

As for the book? Magnificent. Within 50 pages, I had stopped thinking about the movie at all. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs is incredible, full of great writing and memorable scenes. He knows how to do quite a bit with very little. I was sad every time the subway arrived at my destination. For one blissful week, any ten-minute pause in my schedule was an opportunity to make progress. In the last year and a half, I’ve read two other books I loved this much: The Grapes of Wrath and The Poisonwood Bible. That puts The Silence of the Lambs in remarkable company.

The Taste of Things

The Taste of Things begins with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in an estate garden, collecting vegetables. I immediately noticed the sound of her clogs clapping against the boards laid between the garden rows. That sound, it turns out, is a mission statement. This is a profoundly sensual film, one that forces the audience to delight in all the senses a movie can rally to its purpose.

The first 15 or 20 minutes revolve around the preparation of a lavish meal. There is little dialogue, and no real sense of who we’re watching. I was unsure if Eugénie and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) were servants, or a husband and wife working their own stove, or both. Director Trần Anh Hùng nurses that ambiguity. For these people, the preparation of food is the greatest creative act, the greatest act of love, possible. Their passion fills the screen.

I assume the opening sequence lasts about 15 or 20 minutes. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was transfixed. It may have been 10 minutes, and it may have been half an hour. I could have watched these four people—house servant Violette and her niece Pauline assist—cook that meal for the duration of the movie. It’s a perfect example of the magic of cinema, of something no other medium can do. I was in a shit mood as I walked into the theater, but the aesthetic spell cast from the jump is so complete that I was instantly carried away.

Hùng’s camera lingers on every detail. Every time a plate is scraped into a pot or mushrooms are chucked in a pan, I found myself overwhelmed. If the camera took a moment to peer into a pot, which it nearly always did, I cheered. “I should spend more time preparing my own food,” he thought to himself only two hours before buying a cubano and some oversized cookies in the foodcourt.

The Taste of Things is more accurately represented by its French title, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. We learn that the elaborate meal they’re preparing, a multi-course monstrosity spearheaded by Eugénie, is a dinner for Dodin and his gourmet friends. They are a kind-hearted group of enthusiasts, men who talk of food while dining, who discuss the history behind dishes and the latest gossip involving the employment of the great chefs. One of my favorite running jokes of the film is that the four friends seem an inseparable collective, nearly always around. There’s something of magical realism about them.

Food, then, is Dodin’s passion. After the meal, his friends pass through the kitchen, complimenting Eugénie for her efforts and asking why she no longer dines with them. “For it to be done right, I must be here in the kitchen,” she demures. At that point, I assumed they were married. The warmth pours out of both of them, helped I’m sure by the fact that Binoche and Magimel were together in real life for about a decade. It’s only later that night, when Dodin and Eugénie are sat outside by the lake for tea, recovering from the exhaustion of the day’s efforts, that we receive clarity. “I’ll ask again,” he says as he puffs his pipe. “Will you marry me?”

That’s more or less the temperament of The Taste of Things, content to reveal without ever focusing. Not only are Eugénie and Dodin not married, they aren’t even “technically” a couple. They are certainly in love. Through food and over time they have discovered the shared language that is at the center of any great relationship.

Dodin proposes to Eugénie again later in the film, during a marvelous scene in which he cooks a multi-course meal for her. He proposes with a dish, and it is in keeping with the movie’s overall sensibilities that this is the one dish we never get a glamour shot of. The Taste of Things avoids the moments of highest drama as much as it can. It’s fitting that we never see the only dish in the story with an agenda beyond the joys of feeding and eating. It occurs to me, that too is a good description of love.

During that opening sequence, Eugénie briefly reveals that she is hiding an illness. We assume she will die later, and indeed she does. When she dies, she takes Dodin’s joy for (not of) cooking away. He loses all interest in food. “You haven’t eaten in two days,” Violette admonishes. That’s a bad sign no matter who you are, but for Dodin, that’s cataclysmic. This is a man who came home from an eight-hour meal to request some simple dishes from Eugénie before going to bed. “He didn’t want to sleep on the memory of that meal,” she says with a smile.

A few hours after getting home, my mind is marinating in the images and sounds of The Taste of Things. It makes the argument that life is what we experience, for however long we manage to do that; it should all be taken in to the fullest extent possible. I’m also thinking about Eugénie and Dodin, about their love for one another, about the language they share between themselves, and about Dodin’s loss.

“I have a very important question for you,” Eugénie says.

“Yes.”

“Am I your cook, or your wife?”

Dodin takes a moment before taking her hand. “My cook, of course.”

Eugénie smiles. “Thank you.”

Taylor Swift got it right when she wrote, “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else.”

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

I had a bit of an unusual experience with A Man’s Place, Nobel Prize–winner Annie Ernaux’s 1983 book inspired by her father’s death. I started out reading La place in the original French, in one of those handsome Gallimard editions that are the exact kind of anonymous that I’ve come to associate with luxury goods. I made it about 20 or so pages over the course of a week before deciding I was over it. The writing felt somehow too mannered, too self-possessed, like I was watching a pretentious art film.

I had a copy of the English translation, A Man’s Place, and decided to give that a quick look before ditching the book entirely. I started from the beginning, and a strange thing happened: I was so absorbed by what I was reading that I kept reading, clearing 20 or 30 pages of book while standing at the dining room table. What had initially seemed overly mannered and affectedly brusque in the French suddenly felt like an author maintaining the necessary distance to keep herself together.

I still can’t account for it. The French is not particularly difficult, and the English translation is nearly word-for-word how I myself would translate it were I given the task. Why, then, was this the case? More confounding, when I mentioned the issue to my friend Sara, she told me that over the years she had had multiple friends tell her that Ernaux is best read in translation. These were all French speakers, with a variety of native languages. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.

A Man’s Place is about Ernaux’s father. In the process of depicting his life, it cannot help but be about class and family relationships, and how those intersect. The first passage I underlined came some 30 pages into this 90-page book, when Ernaux imagines the moment her parents met. “My mother must have been impressed…when she met him at the rope factory. Before then she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’”

Something about Ernaux’s mother using “my husband” while talking to Ernaux about her father struck me as remarkably intimate. It feels proud, warmly possessive, and immensely personal. It’s almost uncomfortable to read. I’m realizing now as I write this that Ernaux never tells us her parents’ names, and somehow that serves to make that passage all the more moving. All we are, all we have, is our relationships with those who love us, and so the people here are defined in those terms.

While Ernaux’s parents began life as working class, they managed to work their way up. They opened a grocery store and café, becoming fixtures of the local community in the process. A lot of the most interesting material here relates to the difficulties that result from successfully achieving what I guess we can’t quite call the American Dream, from managing to make more of your financial situation. Relatives appear from time to time, expecting groceries for free while referring to the pair as superior.

Most touching is the impact their transition has on their relationship with their own daughter. When her father visits her as an adult, “I described the flat, the Louis-Philippe writing desk, the hi-fi system and the red velvet armchairs. He soon lost interest. He had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy, but the antique dresser and the Dunlopillo mattress meant nothing more to him than the signs of social success. He often cut me short by saying, ‘You’re quite right to make the most of it.’” He has spent his life working so she can became a part of a world that holds little for him outside of the aspirational possibility of getting there. “Every time I did well in [school], he saw it as an achievement and the hope that one day I might be better than him.” [Italics hers.]

That theme is even reflected in his language, with frequent references to the ways he would oscillate back and forth between textbook French and his native Brittany dialect. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s protagonists in the Neapolitan Novels, individuals who manage a similar upward climb over the course of their lives, who would resort to dialect when angry. We are who we are. We can change the surrounding circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can change ourselves.

Revisiting Promising Young Woman

I watched Saltburn. Because I watched Saltburn, I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Saltburn. Because I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Saltburn, I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Promising Young Woman. Because I ended up getting into conversations with a number of friends about Promising Young Woman, I decided to revisit 2020’s most resilient cultural product.

Say what you will about the film, but Promising Young Woman has stuck around. I had a (pretty good!) date back in August where we spent probably half an hour talking about it. Most people have an opinion on it, and not of the “Oh, yeah, I saw it, it was good” variety. People have theses. They walk around ready to spout off, in one direction or the other, about Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut.

The first time I watched it, I didn’t think Promising Young Woman was very good. I’ve softened on it a bit with this rewatch, but my opinion remains mostly negative. Most of the characters sit in an uncomfortable space between caricature and fleshed out individual. I can’t tell what level of heightened we’re sitting in from how they’re portrayed, and I don’t think the movie knows either. It would benefit from either a firmer grounding in reality, or embracing outright its pulpier impulses. I vote for the latter, but that may not have been in the cards. Saltburn serves as Exhibit B in the case that Fennell isn’t particularly good at register.

I find it alienating that the characters speak and exhibit Fennell’s arguments so directly. Promising Young Woman isn’t a story that’s concerned with themes, it’s themes that tried to cobble themselves together into a story. These aren’t characters, they’re evidence. That is part of why the movie did so well with the audience who responded to it, everything is right there, but while I respect very much the degree to which people have found something to love in Promising Young Woman, it strikes me as a case of loving something for what it wants to be rather than for what it is.

Give me a movie that’s sublimated this movie’s arguments, and we’re talking. Having seen Saltburn, I’m not sure I think Fennell has that in her as a writer.

It’s not even that the film is so heavy-handed. With enough good intent and vision, I can work with that. It’s the combination of heavy-handedness and clumsiness. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) hinges her entire plan on the U.S. criminal justice system following through on her murder. What in the film would lead me to believe that she’d be inclined to do that? This is clearly a woman who doesn’t believe in the established powers that be. She confronts the dean of the school she used to attend about the fact that the school didn’t take her friend’s rape claims seriously. I don’t buy it, and it speaks to a lack of attention.

I spent most of my first viewing on shifting ground, moved by the intent of what I was watching while struggling with the results of that intent. The catastrophic failure for me, the moment we lost all cabin pressure, was Ryan’s (Bo Burnham) heel turn. Towards the end of the movie, as Cassie takes the final steps in the plan that will lead to her death, she discovers that Ryan was there on the night that her best friend was repeatedly raped.

Prior to this, Ryan has been the movie’s source of light. Texturally, he brings something different. The “Stars Are Blind” montage, when the two of them sing in a pharmacy, intercut with footage of their time together, remains the highlight of the film for me, because it is the only scene where I feel like anything opens up beyond the parameters of the essay Fennell is writing.

So now he’s a beast, the same as anyone else. He calls her a bitch. Okay. I don’t buy it. I’ve heard the argument that Ryan’s malignancy is there the whole time, and I specifically watched for the clues on second viewing, but I don’t buy it. Maybe the issue is Burnham’s performance, but I think it’s deeper than that.

Ryan’s turn changes Promising Young Woman into a movie in which all men are irredeemable. Yes, Alfred Molina’s lawyer exists, and he regrets all the hurt he’s caused women over the course of his career, but even he used to be what sounds like a cartoon monster. Burnham’s character serves as an antidote for much of the film, a charming and seemingly decent guy who tries to woo Cassie. She, as a result of her obsession and trauma, is mostly unreachable. That’s making an implied—and compelling—argument that the issues this movie is about effect everyone.

Cassie’s character is meant to be consumed by the past. She is meant to be lost, and disengaged from the world. The scene with Molly Shannon makes it explicitly textual that the film doesn’t want us thinking “Yas, queen, I love all this for you.” Ryan turning into a mustachioed villain makes her right! It removes the tragedy of her specific tragedy.

She’s no longer consumed by revenge to the point of missing out on life. There’s nothing to miss out on. So what if the university had taken her friend’s complaints seriously? At this point, it’s all evidently a lost cause anyway. And she might as well get caught up in revenge and die. In the world of this film, there truly is nothing else. 

I think I’d mind it significantly less if all men in the movie were awful all the time, actually. There’s something specifically about Burnham’s turn from genuinely nice guy—there’s not even anything in the writing or performance to suggest he’s a Nice Guy™, which would also be more interesting—to mustachioed villain that just…I was disappointed. It flattens the movie’s emotional and philosophical worldviews to absurd degrees. The movie suddenly became uninteresting.

I don’t have a strong take on the end of the film, and Cassie’s death. I was deflated by the time that happened, both times I watched it. Saltburn is a movie that desperately wants to shock me, and I think the same impulse underwrites some of what’s going on in Promising Young Woman, but, again, I don’t have thoughts to dive into.

What I’ll give Promising Young Woman, even at my most uncharitable: it is clearly an impassioned, honest work that was trying to say something, and I respected that. If Promising Young Woman hadn’t been interesting, I wouldn’t have cared about Saltburn. Saltburn has more or less ensured that I won’t be seeing any of Fennell’s movies in the future.

There’s a moment in Promising Young Woman, right at the end, when Fennell remembers that movies can relate their themes without explicitly stating them. After Cassie dies, her body is burnt to hide the evidence. Ultimately, the police identify the remains, ensuring justice will be enacted this time, because they find her half of the friendship necklace she and her best friend used to wear. This, I thought, was a beautiful choice. When all of the world is against them, the only thing women can count on is each other.

All of It with Alison Stewart

I appeared on All of It with Alison Stewart today to discuss board games, game night etiquette, and to answer questions from callers! You can listen to the episode on the All of It website.

"The Space Between the Notes"

On Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

At one point in Every Good Boy Does Fine, pianist Jeremy Denk’s wonderful memoir about his years studying the instrument, a professor mentions the old Claude Debussy chestnut, “music is the space between the notes.” I’ve heard the line before, it’s entirely possible you have too, but something about the context here caused it to click.

There are a few competing interpretations of Debussy’s sentiment. One of the most common understands it as advocation for minimalism (not Minimalism, that didn’t exist yet): write as few notes as possible. Emperor Joseph II would certainly appreciate that parsing. “The space between the notes” can be thought of as the literal space on the paper. If we take this as correct, Miles Davis was getting to a similar point when he said that music is the notes you don’t play.

That interpretation serves composers well, but it doesn’t do much for performers. The other interpretation, the one the professor was using at the time, relates to the lateral and temporal distance in between notes. He was talking about the pulse, about rhythm and phrasing.

After reading that chapter, the way I was listening to classical music changed dramatically. I went from passively hearing and appreciating moments of rubato—when a performer stretches a note for longer than indicated by the sheet music—to actively seeking them out. They have suddenly become the key to understanding something bigger. While only time can tell if this fever will settle in for the long run, at the moment I think of the application of rubato as the heart of classical music performance, if not classical music itself.

Look at Krystian Zimerman’s astonishing rendition of one of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus. This has been one of my favorite recordings for nearly a decade now. It is impossibly moving. Zimerman’s technique is impeccable. He is able to separate the voices, the melody and the accompaniment, completely. You would almost believe there were two pianos at work here, one simply plonking out the melody while the other quietly works away. That’s all masterful, sure. What makes this recording sublime, ultimately, is his use of time.

When Zimerman heads for a melodic climax, he milks it. The music slows ever so slightly. It’s almost too much, frankly. Music with too much rubato either becomes camp or, worse, ceases to be coherent. He pushes the freedom of Romanticism right to the edge, but never over. The music breathes. You could play the same passage with identical technique to a metronome, and it would be lovely, but it wouldn’t feel the same. This is the difference between describing a feeling, and embodying it.

Take a listen to Denk’s own recording of the Goldberg Variations. Pay particular attention to those first two measures, and how that music looks on the page. Notice how the left hand notes, the bottom row, always fall squarely in line with a note in the right hand.

There are many, many recordings of Bach that follow that timing with zealotry. Lord knows I do when I fumble my way through the Aria. With Bach in particular, there’s a pressure to be sehr genau, for everything to be exact. That’s not how Denk plays it, though. In that second measure, he brings in the left hand just a hair, almost imperceptibly, earlier than the right. As a result, the melody pulses with subtle life, a life missing from many otherwise excellent recordings.

To be a performer is a strange thing. You express yourself through the works of others. You have to balance your thoughts, your opinions, and your instincts against their intentions. The space between the notes is the most immediate, and personal, mode of expression musicians have. “Rubato can’t be planned,” a friend of mine said. “That’s the point.” It is an immediate, urgent expression of feeling. In those moments, the boundary between the musician and the sound vanishes.

Every Good Boy Does Fine is an excellent memoir. If you are a music performer, or interested in performance, it is indispensable. It has changed the way I listen to music. Now, the space between the notes is all I can think about.