Solace in A Minor

WETA radio host James David Jacobs has known tragedy and triumph. Music is his constant.

Jacobs Adjusting Child
Jacobs, adjusting a tiny cello for a young musician. Courtesy photo.

Another ongoing interest—one he inherited from his late foster mother, Milly Rosner—is producing performances by mass cello ensembles. “When I was 13, I played in an ensemble of 200 cellists [honoring] Mstislav Rostropovich for his 50th birthday, shortly after he defected from the Soviet Union,” Jacobs says. (Rostropovich, considered one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, was music director and conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C. from 1977 until 1994.) “Milly helped organize that. She would produce an annual Cello Bash with these large cello ensembles.”

Carrying that torch, he has organized outdoor cello ensemble concerts for the amateur music festival Make Music New York, and has conducted cello ensembles in Boston, Minneapolis and D.C.

He enjoys public speaking, too. In 2019, he introduced a performance of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus at the Folger Shakespeare Library with a lecture about the relationship between competitors Mozart and Salieri.

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More recently, Jacobs just completed his second season of lectures for Levine Music, where he collaborates with faculty to preview school concerts, providing historical background and context around the music that is being performed, as well as interviews with student musicians, and short excerpts performed live.

One of his favorite composers is Claudio Monteverdi, an Italian contemporary of Shakespeare. He considers them to be equals in their respective genres.

He relates on a personal level to Beethoven—an obsession that was rekindled in December, when he produced a series of features for WETA about the nine symphonies in honor of the composer’s 250th birthday.

“I find it so inspiring that, despite his feelings of profound alienation in his world of deafness and social isolation, his works celebrate joy and brotherhood,” Jacobs reveals. “In revisiting the symphonies, I was astonished to discover how much he posed a question in one symphony that he would answer in the next one. They flow from one to another.”

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Amid the pandemic, he’s found particular solace in Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor for Strings, Op. 132. “The piece contains material that was left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, of his work on the Ninth Symphony, and is on the same exalted plane,” Jacobs explains. “The slow movement is a long hymn Beethoven called a Holy Song of Thanksgiving, in which he expresses his gratitude for recovering from a severe illness. The music is about healing and forgiveness, and plumbs the depths of those feelings in a way that’s unique in all art.”

Of course he has many loves, noting an affinity also for Handel, Brahms and Stevie Wonder.

Though he has played and listened to all kinds of music, he says he inevitably circles back to classical.

“I find inspiration in classical music, the greatest of which reveals new depths every time one listens,” he offers. “There’s no better way to meet people and establish a community than through the music one is passionate about.”

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Slaterslane Ita 649081598640729John Adam Wasowicz, an attorney and former Arlington prosecutor, is the author of the Mo Katz mystery series (BrickHouse Books). He met Jacobs while producing the audiobook edition of the third book in the series, Slaters Lane (2020), for which Jacobs provided the musical notes. That audiobook recording is narrated by fellow WETA radio host Nicole Lacroix.

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