An Actually Romantic Classical Music for Valentine’s Day Playlist
Every year, when stores clear their shelves of Christmas kitsch and bring out Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, I feel what must be post-industrial existential dread. Paper plates send out X’s and O’s. Companies I’ve never heard of peddle plaques, keychains, and jewelry that can be “personalized.” My social media feeds suggest romantic dinners and getaway experiences that don’t always look terrible, but express a certain ethos: love should be Instagrammable, a shiny package complete with diamonds, wine, and crème brûlée. I hate the materialism and tedious commercialism, yet somehow I’m still a sucker for this holiday. As I write, I’m helping my four-year-old lick the messages off candy hearts and write on new declarations. He wants hearts that say “Snuggle!” “Let’s Play House,” and “I.L.Y.T.M.A” (I Love You The Maximum Amount). I’m still into love and love notes too.
In The Dying Animal, Philip Roth wrote that “love”—in quotes—“is the only obsession everyone wants.” His novel’s narrator, David Kepesh—a lecturer at a New York college who has slept with numerous female students but avoided emotional involvement with them—comes to this conclusion after love undoes him. Pining for 24-year-old Consuela Castillo (and longing for her to desire him sexually, not just intellectually), he observes: “People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.”
In the film version of The Dying Animal, “Elegy,” the musical accompaniment for Kepesh and Consuela’s affair includes the Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, two of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” and most memorably, Satie’s “Gnossiennes” Nos. 3 and 4. The soundtrack is just right, given Roth’s passion for classical music and his subject as a writer. Classical music is in many respects analogous to the tugs, tortures, brutalities, and pleasures of sex and love.
To acknowledge the ascendancy of sex and love (“the only obsession everyone wants”) without clichés and market sentiment, I’ve matched types of love affairs to pieces of classical music.
