The Greatest Gift of All

The Srebnik Dining Room Table — suitable for dining, reworking lectures, and listening to Beethoven

When I made my annual birthday (March 25) call to my Dad, I thought long and hard about how to put together the perfect and profound sentiment worthy of the man of the hour. My father did not suffer fawning gladly. He was a man of few words, and would quickly shut me down whenever birthday-gratitude message went on to long, or became too sentimental.

While English was his second language, my Dad was a master at creating something majestic and expressive in a few, meticulous words, or in a single sentence.

I first heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 sitting with my father on a warm Sunday Berkeley afternoon at the dining room table. He was reworking one of his lectures, and I was just sitting with him listening to the radio.

The Beethoven symphony’s slow movement is a simple but melodic funeral-like procession. It's main theme repeats, builds each time the theme returns. The cumulative effect of its measured crescendo, and its aching melodic beauty, lowered an emotional boom on my entire body and soul on that day. “HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN…how could anyone write something so beautiful?” I practically shouted.

He lifted his face up from his lecture and looked at me…paused… “Once in a lifetime, someone comes along who can create something like this.” He resumed editing his lecture as if nothing had happened.

His response would likely be underappreciated by academic and other aficionados, but what he expressed in those 13 words is possibly the only real explanation for the Second Movement for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

My father once belonged to a Three Musketeers-like band of inseparable teenagers, each an escape artist from 1930s Germany. Like many European teenagers, Herbert, Heinie, and Martin pursued soccer, pretty girls, and classical music. They would often take turns playing orchestra conductor. While one Musketeer conducted the music playing on an old 78 record machine, another musketeer cranked the huge handle that spun those overweight records on the phonograph.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 was one of the pieces my father liked to conduct the most. There was a piano arrangement of the symphony that he played on the sturdy upright. in the family's Berlin apartment, and he occasionally played it on the piano in our Berkeley home. The genuine charm and ingenuity in the 3rd Movement is another "once in a lifetime" moment, as Mozart composed a dynamic march, but magically. in waltz-time.  

OOM pah pah…OOM pah pah…

I loved seeing him banging it out joyfully on our piano, and the visual imagination of my bespectacled teenage father conducting to the record on the 78 phonograph contributed to it becoming my own favorite Mozart symphony as well.

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Dear Parents: 

He never tried to force me to love classical music – That, I did on my own. And that was my father’s greatest - and wisest - gift of all. Herbert H. Srebnik (1923 – 2016)

Hands on instruction in the Anatomy Lab at Cal Berkeley