I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much

Host: The concert hall was nearly empty now, the echoes of the orchestra fading into the velvet dark. The stage lights glowed faintly, revealing the traces of what had just occurred — the stands, the bowstrings, the sheet music scattered like fallen feathers of sound. Beyond the quiet, there remained a vibration — something that refused to die, trembling invisibly through the air.

Host: Jack sat halfway up the aisle, his face dimly lit by the last amber wash of the stage lights. His hands were clasped, as if in reverence or disbelief. Beside him, Jeeny sat leaning forward, her eyes luminous, the expression of someone who had just seen a glimpse of eternity and didn’t know what to do with it.

Host: Between them lay a printed program. Alban Berg’s words were printed on the back page, beneath the movements of the Lyric Suite:

“I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love, and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music — should there be any left — would go mad with joy.”

Jeeny: “Smuggled,” she whispered. “He says it like love itself was contraband.”

Jack: “In his world, it probably was.”

Jeeny: “A forbidden symphony.”

Jack: “A confession disguised as structure.”

Host: The faint hum of the hall’s ventilation filled the silence — a mechanical sigh beneath the memory of music.

Jeeny: “You know, I’ve always thought that art is a kind of espionage,” she said softly. “You hide what’s sacred where no one thinks to look.”

Jack: “You mean emotion wrapped in form?”

Jeeny: “Yes. Passion hidden in counterpoint. Grief tucked between crescendos. Love encrypted in melody.”

Jack: “Like he did — every measure a message.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. A secret written in sound.”

Host: The light flickered above the empty balcony. The concert hall, stripped of its audience, had become a temple of echoes and ghosts.

Jack: “It’s strange,” he said. “We still talk about Berg as if he were just another modernist — dissonance, tone rows, all that intellectual machinery. But underneath all that, he was bleeding.”

Jeeny: “Bleeding beautifully.”

Jack: “Do you think he wanted to be caught?”

Jeeny: “No. He wanted to be understood. There’s a difference.”

Host: A faint murmur of wind outside brushed against the tall windows, like the softest applause of the night itself.

Jeeny: “I love that he used the word friendship. It wasn’t just romance he hid there. It was connection — something too human for academia to dissect.”

Jack: “Maybe that’s what he feared — being reduced to theory. He wasn’t composing systems; he was smuggling souls.”

Jeeny: “And friendship was his currency.”

Jack: “The one form of love that can survive translation.”

Host: She smiled faintly. The way she looked at him now — it wasn’t romantic, not exactly. It was something rarer, deeper: the kind of gaze reserved for two people who have crossed the threshold of understanding together.

Jeeny: “Do you realize what he’s saying? That music — real music — is a vessel for every secret a person can’t say aloud. Friendship, love, guilt, transcendence… he hid them all. That’s why his compositions still hurt when you listen closely.”

Jack: “Because you can hear the confession beneath the craft.”

Jeeny: “Yes. It’s the sound of a man trying not to drown in his own feeling.”

Host: The silence that followed was not empty — it was alive. The kind of silence that musicians call sacred: the breath after the final note when the world holds still.

Jack: “It’s funny,” he said, “how people think emotion weakens art. As if precision can’t coexist with tenderness.”

Jeeny: “It’s not funny,” she said. “It’s tragic. Because emotion is what gives form its purpose. Without it, you’re just painting a skeleton.”

Jack: “You think that’s what he feared most — being forgotten as a man who felt, not just a man who calculated.”

Jeeny: “Yes. And that’s why he smuggled love into his scores. It was his rebellion against the sterility of genius.”

Host: The light dimmed further, leaving only the faint glow of the exit signs — red, like quiet warnings or distant hearts.

Jack: “You know, I think all great artists do that. They embed their real lives inside the architecture of their work. The world thinks they’re talking about sound or form — but really, they’re writing love letters.”

Jeeny: “Or eulogies.”

Jack: “Or both.”

Host: The echo of their voices merged with the lingering resonance of the last violin. Somewhere deep in the hall, a note seemed to hang — invisible, persistent, eternal.

Jeeny: “I read once,” she said, “that Berg’s Lyric Suite was for Hanna Fuchs — a love that could never exist openly. That’s what he means by smuggling — not just metaphor, but survival. The only way he could tell the truth was in secret.”

Jack: “That’s what makes art human — the things we can’t say directly. Every masterpiece is a coded letter to someone who may never read it.”

Jeeny: “And yet, somehow, we do. We feel it. Even if we don’t understand the words.”

Jack: “Feeling is understanding.”

Jeeny: “Exactly.”

Host: The rain began outside, a faint patter against the windows. It sounded like applause that refused to fade.

Jack: “You ever think we all do the same thing Berg did? Smuggle ourselves into what we make? Into the conversations we have, the gestures, the silences?”

Jeeny: “Of course. It’s the only way to exist truthfully in a world that demands masks. We hide our tenderness in metaphors, our grief in jokes, our longing in logic.”

Jack: “And if someone recognizes it — that’s friendship.”

Jeeny: “The truest kind. The kind that hears the unsaid.”

Host: The stage lights went dark. Only the memory of music remained — invisible but undeniable.

Jeeny: “You know, Berg called it ‘a world of human and spiritual references.’ That’s what friendship is, too — a symphony of unfinished understandings, harmonies we never quite resolve.”

Jack: “And love?”

Jeeny: “The unresolved chord that keeps the piece alive.”

Host: Jack smiled — tired, grateful. “Then maybe that’s what we are,” he said. “Two musicians of the soul, trying to translate what can’t be spoken.”

Jeeny: “And failing beautifully.”

Host: The rain thickened, its rhythm almost musical. The hall was nearly dark now, but the space between them glowed faintly — not from light, but from something shared and wordless.

Host: And in that lingering silence, Berg’s confession — his secret, his coded tenderness — seemed to fill the air once more:

“If it became known how much friendship, love, and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements…”

Host: For in the end, perhaps that is the essence of all art — and all human connection:
to smuggle fragments of our souls into something lasting,
to build sanctuaries of sound and silence where feeling can live safely,
and to hope, against all logic, that someone — someday — will hear us.