Meanwhile, his aunt, on... «Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth»

Meanwhile, his aunt, on these usual Sundays when she must remain at home, played entire operas from Wagner on her small victrola.Most of the records had been given her by her two daughters, and during the week the voices of the music afforded her the only companionship she had. The boy listened attentively to all she said about music, because he knew little about it, and had got from poetry the kind of joy that music seemed to give to others.
Shifting the records quickly, his aunt would point out the melodramatic effervescence of the Italians, the metallic precision, the orderly profusion, the thrill, the vibration, the emptiness of French composition. She liked the Germans and the Russians. She liked what she called the "barbaric splendour" of Rimsky, but was too late, of course, either to have heard or to care much for the modern composers.
She would play Wagner over and over again, lost in the enchanted forests of the music, her spirit wandering drunkenly down vast murky aisles of sound, through which the great hoarse throats of horns were baying faintly. And occasionally, on Sundays, on one of her infrequent excursions into the world, when her daughters bought her tickets for concerts at Symphony Hall--that great --grey room lined on its sides with pallid plaster shells of Greece--she would sit perched high, a --sparrow held by the hypnotic serpent's eye of music--following each motif, hearing minutely --each subtle entry of the mellow flutes, the horns, the spinal ecstasy of violins--until her lonely --uand desolate life was spun out of her into aerial fabrics of bright sound.