Unrequited

Of all emotional territories that piano music has mapped, unrequited feeling may be the one it navigates with most authority — the instrument's capacity for simultaneous independent voices allowing the coexistence of what is felt and what cannot be expressed, the conversation one has and the one one wishes were possible. Mehldau's "Unrequited" inhabits that space with the specificity of actual experience rather than the generality of theme. The opening melody has a reaching quality — phrases extending toward something just beyond their grasp before settling back into the waiting register, the familiar gesture of someone who almost speaks and then does not. His harmonic choices possess a particular beauty that is inseparable from their sense of unresolvedness: major-seventh chords and suspended harmonies that don't quite arrive, that hang in the acoustic space with the quality of expectation that cannot be discharged. The tempo is patient, as unrequited feelings must eventually learn to be. There are no violent climaxes, no dramatized releases — just the sustained quality of attention directed toward something that doesn't return it in kind, examined from multiple angles over the course of the piece with something close to acceptance. This is emotionally intelligent music in that it offers no rescue, no catharsis, no transformation of the difficulty into something easier. It simply stays with the feeling. People who have loved without reciprocation will recognize this territory immediately — not the acute pain of rejection but the specific texture of sustained longing, which contains its own strange constancy. For the particular hours of solitude when absence makes itself most precisely felt.