If you're suffering from a broken heart, can classical music help you move on? Let's consider a couple of scenarios.
(1) A lover has left you, without explanation. Anger sweeps in, and your inner being transforms into a desolate landscape of peppery clouds and a cold sea with no waves. While your outer being is sitting with a friend at an upscale lounge, your friend is desperately trying to lighten the mood, piling you with superlatives about how wonderful you are. This understanding friend buys you a cocktail while ordering another round of appetizers. Your thoughts begin to stray as you pick at the egg rolls.
Instead of the Martini and fried finger-food, you should consider listening to Franz Schubert's Standchen; there are lyrics by the German poet Ludwig Rellstab, but I would recommend the instrumental version.
The composition will reflect exactly how you feel. The lyrics themselves are about heartbreak, but that's a different matter. What concerns us is the music, and the music is everything.
Listening to Standchen will put the circumstance into perspective by brutally dealing with the pain of your loss. The song wants to share your experience, and when you cry through it, thinking of your lover's face in the half-light in the early autumn morning or late summer sun, you will have found your loss lessened by the end. It's time to move on, and the song will have acted as a shower, removing the scales left by your new life experience.
(2) A lover doesn't love you back. O, the subject many a poet loves! What better material than loving someone who doesn't want to return that love — or any affection, for that matter? In this scene, your friends probably won't return your missed call or answer your text, because they're most likely tired of hearing about your crush — and also because they know you definitely deserve someone who wants to love you back. Your friends are usually smart.
You find yourself on the couch, eating lots of dark chocolate and drinking a boxed Pinot Noir and re-watching Lost. As you sympathize with the character Hurley or — major trouble — John Locke, thoughts swarm on top of one another, and you'll be severely tempted to text the person you think you were born to be with. Don't do it! Instead, turn off the TV, put the chocolate down, stop sipping the wine, and listen to Antonio Vivaldi's Flute Concerto in C.
Unlike the previous example, where the song shares your grief, this will be the complete opposite: it'll distract you. You'll start to think of undulating green hills, of bees flying around tulips, sunshine, tall trees, cool warm wind, and nature unraveling itself before your eyes. You'll being to realize that there is more to life than your unrequited obsession — and you'll be right.
Heartache comes in varied forms, and the dynamics are different with each person. I'm not a trained professional in grief management, but I am a professional listener to classical music, and I know the strength it can give. Classical music can help remind you that falling in love with yourself is most important — and that's how you really move on.
Nasir Sakandar (@poesyprose) is a writer living in Minneapolis.
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