Rufus Wainwright: Pull Over and Listen!

Listening to music while driving is one of life’s great pleasures. A journey gifts you uninterrupted time to be away from the distractions of everyday life. Sometimes, however, the music can be just too incredible to drive and listen. Rufus Wainwright, the American singer-songwriter and composer, knows this problem only too well. “There are pieces of music that, while driving, I am immediately struck by and have to pull over in order to listen to,” he tells Apple Music Classical. You, too, may have to pull over to listen, thanks to Bach’s fizzing energy, the liquid beauty of Satie or the lyrical mischievousness of Prokofiev. There’s quirky, otherwordly Messaien, a fiery Verdi Requiem and a classic recording of the heart-melting second movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet. All perfect excuses to steer into a lay-by, turn off the engine and crank up the volume. There’s plenty of opera, too, which features in one of Wainwright’s earliest memories of hearing music in a car. He remembers his mother driving him when the Intermezzo from Franz Schmidt’s 1906 opera Notre Dame came onto the radio. “At that point you still had an antenna on the car,” he explains, “and she got out and started violently fiddling with it so we could hear the music better.” Wainwright is thrilled by the way opera composers drive their stories forward, singling out music from the opening act of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly (“The music here perfectly illustrates her delicate and doomed character,” he says). He highlights, too, the uplifting, triumphant Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin. “The composer gives the listener a shot in the arm musically,” he says, “and deftly advances the plot of the opera.” You could say he shifts things up a gear.