Swann hears the phrase again . . . And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again.”

Dear friends,

If you have been coming to our concerts for a while now, then you have heard me often speak of the role that my own personal memories play in choosing chamber works for our concerts. I can almost always remember the first time I heard and fell in love with a certain piece and how hearing it each time subsequently would viscerally bring back that moment of my past. So it should come as no surprise that when I discovered Proust as a twenty year old on a junior year abroad program in Paris, I was not only surprised that he wasn’t the dry, pedantic, incomprehensible writer I had expected, but I felt I had met a kindred soul.

Even with the constant need of my mini-dictionary (remember those?), his themes of childhood, involuntary memory, and the mysteries of the heart were a startling revelation to me. But most astonishing were his descriptions of music, and of the emotion and physical experience of listening to it. Throughout the novel, Proust writes about a fictitious composer, Vinteuil, an amalgam of many composers who left an indelible mark on his life and work.

  Early in the first book of the novel, the narrator’s memories of childhood are triggered by tasting a madeleine dunked in tea. The taste and texture of the tea-soaked pastry prompt involuntary memories, and remind him in a vivid and palpable way of the same experience he had as a child. This is Proust’s trademark, a profound sensory experience of memory, triggered by smells, sights, touch, but especially by music, and in particular a little phrase of music.

What has been the subject of endless, almost obsessive, speculation, is what pieces of music Proust might have had in mind when he wrote extensively about that “little phrase” throughout the novel.  Today we are not delving into this endless discussion, but instead, have chosen five composers that are known to be among his most treasured, as documented in his letters and throughout the novel.

–Julie