Music

Anyone who has learned a piece from the page knows the stage where every note is right and nothing is happening. The fingers find the keys in order. The rhythm is counted, the rests observed, the dynamics marked in pencil and obeyed. A teacher listening from the next room would hear no mistake. And the player knows, with an embarrassment hard to name, that the piece has not yet arrived. The sequence is correct. Something else is missing. …

There are nights when Plácido Domingo has made me cry — real tears, the kind that arrive uninvited at the exact phrase where the voice opens and the whole room tilts. And there are other nights, more than I can count, when Domingo could do nothing for me, and what carried me across the road was a Vallenato by Diomedes Díaz, or Pedro Infante singing a bolero as if the song were a small lit room, or The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” I used to apologize for this. I have apologized to people who expected me, at a serious hour, to reach for something serious — Mozart, Wagner, Philip Glass — and caught me reaching instead for Shakira, or Julio Iglesias, or Juan Gabriel. I am done apologizing. Not because my taste improved, but because I finally understood what the apology was confessing. …