Art, deep as memory / At the holidays, the arts become especially personal, shot through with ritual and family tradition. On these pages, six encounters with words, images and music that left their mark on our writers.

For New Year’s Eve in 2001, my wife and I were invited to a party at the home of old friends in Brooklyn. Their brownstone was near a firehouse whose firefighters had been among the first to reach the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers that Sept. 11. One of their neighbors was now a widow, therefore, and would likely be at the party. It was going to be another heartfelt evening in what had been a heartfelt time.

So after we accepted the invitation, I called the New York Philharmonic to see if there were tickets left to their New Year’s Eve concert, hoping we could attend it before heading to Brooklyn. Like opening night, New Year’s Eve is a benefit date for the orchestra, meaning expensive. The only available seats, if I recall, went for $200, $400 for a pair. But I quickly gave my American Express number. For the orchestra was going to play Beethoven’s Ninth.

In the months since 9/11, I had attended many cultural events organized in response to that day’s events. There was a comedy night put together by Jerry Seinfeld at Carnegie Hall, at which most comics tried to be topical but Bill Cosby offered up his ancient going-to-the-dentist routine, still so funny it brought tears to my eyes. I’d gone also to “The Concert for New York” spearheaded by Paul McCartney, at which the burly firemen who filled the floor of Madison Square Garden danced and sang along to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

But I’m one of those who believe that if a satellite had room for only one remnant of humanity to send into space and preserve after the Earth is no more, it should be Beethoven’s last symphony, the work that left the composer so disappointed after its premiere in 1824 because its box office receipts had fallen short. Before we headed out on New Year’s Eve, I again leafed through Thomas Forrest Kelly’s book on musical “First Nights,” which includes a diary excerpt from a nay-saying spectator at that candlelit concert in Vienna who found the symphony “lovely but tedious” and insisted that while “B’s disciples clamored, most of the audience stayed quiet.”

Right after Sept. 11, the Philharmonic had made one change to its season: the “Opening Night Gala” with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter became a “Memorial Concert” of Brahms’ “German Requiem.” But Beethoven’s Ninth had been scheduled already for New Year’s Eve by the orchestra’s traditionalist conductor, Kurt Masur, then in his last year at the helm. He held the view that there’s no better way to mark the onset of another year than with what the Japanese call the “Daiku” (Great Nine), whose beginning measures can he heard as the creation of the universe -- order out of chaos -- and whose “Ode to Joy” ending exalts the brotherhood of man, that optimistic take somehow coming from a composer who was approaching his own death as a lonely deaf man.

The Philharmonic’s 74-year-old leader was not doing well, either -- that November, he had to undergo a kidney transplant. Sir John Eliot Gardiner had to fly in from England to take the podium. Many men in the audience were in tuxedos, and the women in diamonds. For them too, this was a prelude to parties to come.

Rudy Giuliani, in his last hours as mayor, also was in the packed Avery Fisher Hall. He started with a joke, about how “When you bought your tickets, you didn’t know I was going to sing.” Then he noted how appropriate it was that we’d hear such a “life-embracing” piece. Though the New York Times critic later would debate the fast tempo -- the belief of “Sir John” that Beethoven symphonies are played too slowly nowadays -- he agreed that the finale was “electrifying” and that “as New Year’s Eve offerings go, it had the best of everything.”

But I preferred the elemental take of one of the orchestra’s lead players, when we later discussed that night amid a time when there was too much emptiness around us. “Music is the healer,” he said.

Indeed, at its best -- and the Ninth is that -- music grabs you, fills you up and stays with you. We left full that evening, ready to help console a Brooklyn widow in her sorrow.

--

paul.lieberman@latimes.com