January 27

In a house on the Getreidegasse in Salzburg, on January 27, 1756, a child was born who would spend his short life turning silence into the most fully realized music the world had yet heard, and whose name, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the calendar would not let rest. For one hundred forty-five years later, on the same January 27, in 1901, Giuseppe Verdi died in Milan, and an entire nation lowered its voice; the city is said to have spread straw on the streets near his hotel so the noise of carriage wheels would not disturb him as he lay dying. One date, then, holds two of the largest facts in the history of music: the arrival of one of its supreme beginnings and the departure of one of its supreme endings. Composition and its silence, bound together by the accident of the calendar.

The date keeps returning to the theme as though it cannot help itself. Lewis Carroll, born on January 27, 1832, composed music of an entirely different order, the patient nonsense and inverted logic of the Alice books, where a mathematician’s mind set ordinary language singing against itself. And the date reaches back further still into the working life of music: on January 27, 1726, Johann Sebastian Bach led the first performance of his cantata Alles nur nach Gottes Willen, BWV 72, in Leipzig, closing out his third Christmas season on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, a single afternoon’s labor in a lifetime spent filling churches with sound that would outlast every congregation who first heard it.

What gives and takes composers, fittingly, is also the date on which we began deciding what to keep. In 2003, the Library of Congress announced the first selections for the National Recording Registry, the formal beginning of an effort to preserve recorded sound itself, so that the performances would not vanish the way the performers do. It is a small bureaucratic act with an enormous premise: that what is composed and played deserves to survive its silence.

This is a date that also carries a heavier kind of survival. January 27 is observed widely as Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz, and it is also the date the Siege of Leningrad was lifted in 1944, when a city emerged after eight hundred seventy-two days of starvation, having endured rather than ended. Against that, the music seems both fragile and necessary. The date that opens the score and closes it, that begins the work of preservation, finally asks the plainest question there is: what we choose to compose, what we let fall silent, and what we are willing to carry through the long siege and refuse to lose.