Brahms Sonata for Cello and Piano in E Minor Opus 38

The cello part unleashes the grip of powerful emotions - sadness, loss, love - it allows me to feel the entire range and complication of grief...and then the piano keeps coming in - during the allegro non troppo - like a cascade of optimism, a waterfall of light - that lets my mind open to the possibility of going on...the piano measures time and time keeps moving on and we, the living go forward...but not without the sublime heaviness of the cello... by the allegro they are dancing so furiously together it just makes me apprehend life as fundamentally confounding!
9/11 confounds me - it confounded my city- there will be no resolution - it was another instance of man's inhumanity to man...why does Brahms piano part make me optimistic??? And why do I cling to the optimistic hope that no one will go through what I/we went through that day, when history has shown that these things happen again and again and again all over the world? The cello and piano allow for a kind of fatalistic optimism to co-exist: a bearable realism.

Katie