To be clear, I have no doubt that Crowley especially would sacrifice his own happy ending to give the humans a fair shot at things. Where I have my doubts is that the narrative required he be put in the place to do so.
I wanted to like the ending of Good Omens 3. I really did. It ends â as it began â in a garden, there was a nightingale, there was a cottage in the South Downs, and before the universe got rebooted, Aziraphale praised Crowley as âthe best of usâ to Godâs face. I could go into issues of pacing, seeing the seeds of storylines that could have flourished given a whole season, and other factors at play.
But at the end of the day, the fact remains that Crowley and Aziraphale *died*. Without having time to fully reconcile, heal, and have joy together afterward. We are meant to take Asa Fell and Professor Anthony Crowley as the two characters weâve loved â with all their shared history, memories, arguments, romance, sacrifice, silliness, and yearning â as these two humans who found each other later in life and got a happy ending. And donât get me wrong, Iâm happy for Asa and Anthony, but thatâs not Aziraphale and Crowley. You know why?
Because it feels the same as this conversation about Jobâs children:
Michael: Those ones will be dead.
Aziraphale: Weâre not⊠bringing the old ones back?
Gabriel: Of course not. But weâre giving them new ones.
Nope. Nope - even if I laughed at moments, and found the ending scene sweet, because how could David and Michael not be? I enjoy an AU as much as anybody, but if anyone deserves their love confession, their kiss, their happy ever after, itâs the canon characters who've been through so much together, not a pair of stand-ins.
I know the line forms to the left. Here we go anyway.
What I got from the original book â and specifically the parts that Pratchett obviously put into it, the underlying theme, the humane perspective â is that the worldâs not saved by grand heroics, by the procurement of a McGuffin like the Book of Life or the killing of an Antichrist. Itâs saved, little piece by little piece, through the compounding effect of small, good things, of kindnesses performed by imperfect beings and the love of random beauty and the cherishing of the day-to-day. Aziraphale and Crowley thwart the Apocalypse not because they feel the call to be heroes, but because theyâve gotten used to humanity with all its flaws; because they love a bookshop and a car and gravlax and bebop and little restaurants where they know your name. The things that multiply and intertwine in our lives, that hold us and our world together the way roots fix the soil. The shared meals and the do-you-remembers, the problems muddled through, the arguments made up; the love of a child for his home and his friends, for a familiar wood and apples stolen from a neighborâs tree. How does it save the world if you destroy the world?
(Iâm old; I was born in the Fifities, and oh, I remember the heavy irony of âwe had to destroy the village In order to save it.â But thatâs just what this story did.)
Saying âthis is all broken and wrong, and the only thing to do is wipe it all out and start over from the beginningâ: thatâs been the recipe for some of the worst horrors of the world. That was the entire fucking message of the original book. The world is flawed, the systems we live under imperfect and even cruel in their origins, but it can be healed, bit by bit, if you love enough â even if you love in seemingly trivial ways. Good Omens is about mending â mending the consequences of folly, mending friendships, mending the damage people inflict on one another, like an angel mending the spine of a beloved old book. Mending the error in the assumption that sides mean more than individuals, leaving two beings like Aziraphale and Crowley free to treasure all the small things about each other, as friends or lovers or however you choose to see them. The meet-cute of their human counterparts in the remade, blind-watchmaker universe is, well, cute, but it doesn't reward the characters we came to love, who evolved along with humanity, became who they are by outgrowing the artificial opposition imposed on them, and bonded through rising above it. (And neither couple ever gets a tender kiss to cancel out the angry one that left us all ravaged in 2023; more articulate voices than mine have gone to town on the way that narrative choice dilutes the queer representation that stunned us with its promise in the original TV adaptation).
So I see the whole progress of the sequel series as misbegotten â most likely, for all the usual reasons of cupidity and vanity â leaving us with a couple of pieces of tone-deaf fan fiction that literally lost the plot. Good moments here and there, clever bits of banter and comic turns; two lead actors with dazzling chemistry that most of us would pay to hear read the phone book for ninety minutes; but all in all a disjointed story compounded of fan tropes, that did not seem to love its characters or have a point beyond churning them around for ninety minutes.
Where in this story are characters comparable to everybody that made the original so rich and endearing to begin with? The bumbling, sincere romances (Anathema and Newt, Tracy and Shadwell, even the wholesome marital bond of Lesley and Maud)? The tweenage energy and candor provided by the Them? Eleven-year-old Adam Young faced a choice and protected the world because its simple joys were enough for him; twinky Jesus Mark II goes down an elevator and survives just long enough to learn a card trick, distribute pizza, and be disintegrated without addressing any of the events unfolding around him. And where the entire hell is Agnes Nutter, and her tart wisdom?
(....Remember Agnes? Are we to accept that she wrote two books of prophecy, guiding the angel and demon who were fated to thwart Armageddon â and that her descendant burnt the second, in order to start her new life without a roadmap â only for everything to go up a few years later, not in a ball of flaming goo, but in a corny Avengers Endgame series of sfx dust devils? This story seems to be happening in an entirely different universe to the one that was built between book covers or the opening and closing credits of Season One, and it's not because God rebooted it.)
I'll leave you with a bit of shameless self-promo: an imagining of Agnesâ take on the sequels, and a version of what Aziraphale and Crowley themselves might have thought of the narrative malfeasance, as I view it, of season 2 (both written before any of the uglier reports about NG surfaced). I don't know if this was a case of an author deliberately jerking around his fandom, a case of "too many cooks spoil the broth" when the project had to be retooled for a briefer air time, or just lazy reliance on a wealth of incident and fan service as a substitute for a story worth telling. All I'm sure of is that we, as fan creators, should feel completely free to ignore anything that violates the promise, the message, and the perspective of the story we fell in love with. To mend what went wrong, piece by piece.
Or, my two worthless cents on why this grief is not about the kiss.
I am not one for writing posts, usually, but I feel like I need to write down in some way a schematic manner.
(Mandatory "stop reading if you haven't watched GO3" and apologies for any mistakes, English is not my first language and I am kind of all over the place)
First of all, let me say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion - I am extremely happy for those who really enjoyed the finale.
I have read multiple comments saying that if people are not happy with their ultimate sacrifice, then those same people have understood nothing about the story and its message. I see your point of view, and I would like to offer an alternative perspective, as many other people have already brilliantly done.
Shades of grey
We all see some parts of us reflected in Aziraphale and Crowley, this is why so many of us are so attached to this story. We see ourselves in their trauma, in their choices, in their personality. In them being different from humans and from celestial beings alike.
They are outcasts, and they represent all those shades of grey of those people who, for one reason or the other, do not conform to the "normal", to the "typical". What is turning them humans doing, if not erasing all of this? There is no one who is different anymore. No more outcasts, in the ideal "real universe".
But also finding shades of grey - finding a compromise between the situation you are in, what you are expected to do, what you think is the right thing to do. But mostly, Aziraphale and Crowley learning over the course of their existence how to find this equilibrium was one of the key messages for me. Especially in a society where living in a 100% ethical way is not possible, sometimes doing your best is all you can do, and it has to suffice. You will feel lonely a lot of the time, and yet, along the way, you might be able to find who shares your struggles and who understands that loneliness.
What hurt me the most, here, is that in the end, all the struggle of them working to reach a shade of grey that was a common colour did not matter. There was no resolution. No, a kiss was not needed, but there was no real talking, no hug, no real moment between them. It was being lonely once again.
Free will
What is free will against the circumstances you find yourself in? S1's apocalypse arc, Job, Edinburgh, even Bee/Gabriel, everything now feels emptied of the meaning that was built over the entire narrative arc, and over 6000 years.
The message I took away from the finale is that this does not matter. Whatever you try to do, it's all in the hands of those who are more powerful than you. Be it through propaganda (is it free will if our thoughts are influenced without us even realising?), be it by being able to erase your existence without giving it a second thought (how easy it was to erase people through the Book of Life feels very much like what politicians are doing with minorities, or what is happening in war zones), be it by controlling your access to what you need to survive (Crowley not being able to perform miracles), the message is got from the finale is that whatever I might do, it's useless, because it's anyway in the hands of those who control the game, and I will never be able to make my own choice in this universe.
Hope
One of the main things that Good Omens gave me was hope.
Be it by asking questions and rebelling against the system or by trying to change the system by its own rules, each of us is trying to build a better world. What I got from the finale is that this does not matter in the slightest. Doing your best, looking for a solution, trying to fight for a better world, it does not matter.
I do not want humanity to have a "do-over". I do not want a blank slate or anything like that. I want to believe that this humanity, this world that is so many times reflected in the original GO universe, is worth saving. I want to believe that if we all put ourselves into changing it, into going against gods and those who have all the power, we can still make a change. I want to believe that annihilation and sacrificing our love is not a necessary step to have a chance at making things better - a chance, yes, because we have no proof that the second universe was actually better or that humanity got a better chance at it; after all, the biggest examples of kindness and the biggest atrocities were all human, not a result of the intervention of angels and demons.
They could have shown Jesus and Adam finding each other, and them, as a true expression of humanity, help Aziraphale and Crowley subvert the system. They could have really shown humanity come together and be Aziraphale, Crowley and humanity go against a cruel, careless god to gain their true free will and the right to exist peacefully. They could have shown all the ways we could have found the lady, even when the system is playing against us, making its own rules, and constantly changing them. And we could have still come out as winners.
Good Omens gave me hope of being able to find someone who would make me complete in the way I yearn for. No matter the amount of trauma, of obstacles, of flaws, of fundamental differences. Someone with whom I can make mistakes, and then learn to communicate with and build an even bigger love. Someone with whom I could build my own cottage, someone with whom I could carve a peaceful corner of existence in the painful chaos that is this world. Equally, it does not matter how much you might love someone. If the circumstances are wrong, you might fight and do your best, but what makes you complete will be taken away, even if just for the amusement of someone else.
I believe that them finding each other in each and every universe, "life finding a way", is a wonderful message. But I also want to believe that love wins, for once, even when all seems lost. And I wanted for them to experience that love in their original forms, because we are them, and they are all of us.
What a magnificent love letter to humanity that would have been.
Yes, we were given nightingales. But the cost was erasing the meaning of their song.
A post scriptum
I will take a page from my book, and I will keep "rebelling" against the system, be it the world or, in this case, canon.
I will not let them rob me of the love for these two beings who have saved me and so many other people countless times. They are one of the main reasons why I am where I am, and thanks to them I have found a constellation of magnificent people thanks to this story that I am every day grateful for.
I will grieve, but this is just a version of the story that I am not obliged to believe is true. I will reclaim this story, this love, this hope. And I hope each of us who feels pain will take a page from the true meaning of Good Omens and fight to keep their hope and love intact.
I need Aziraphale angst in season 3. I need him to grapple with his faith, i need him to question everything he thought he knew, i need him to cry, realising he is truly alone and God will not answer his prayers. Im desperate to see his struggles with faith, morality and black and white thinking to come to a head in the finale.
How jolly Aziraphale is about the whole thing. I asked for a rubber duck! I made Michael miracle me a towel!
Whereas Crowley is having trauma flashbacks about Gabriel telling his only friend to Shut His Stupid Mouth And Die. The memory seems to hurt too much to say. It's another thing he hasn't told Aziraphale to protect him.
But also that that it confirmed their existing biases of Heaven and Hell. They both know Hell is wicked, that's the point of it. But only Crowley sees Heaven for what it really is, and Aziraphale wasn't there for the event that might have mad him see it.
I talk about this toward the end of my post here that Aziraphale hasnât personally experienced any explicit abuse from Heaven so heâs pretty blind to how corrupt it is. Even though heâs seen some evidence of it happen to other people, heâs gaslit into believing thereâs a greater reason for it heâs not seeing. Itâs def very sad for the both of them :(Â
i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom
as well as the three laws of fandom:
Don't Like, Don't Read (DL;DR), Your Kink is not My Kink And That's OK (YKINMKATO) and Ship and Let Ship
NO ONE LIVING hasn't been squicked out by something. There's over 7 billion of us, my delights and disgusts aren't universal. So I move on. Don't like the ship? Move on. Don't like____? Move on.
I am not an exception. Neither are you. I don't like it I move on and shut my gob about it because everyone everywhere is squicked out by something and they need to put the thing down and justâŠmotor.
Tosen: *storms in, covered in blood*
Gin: Did you ask questions before killing, or just skip to the monologue?
Tosen: One of us had to carry the narrative tension.
So, I did a little digging and there is a sweet and very funny Crowley connection to this symphony-- one that would make sharing it with him actually a very romantic gesture-- which is likely why Aziraphale was gazing at it fondly and so completely beyond excited to have it...
...and it also has a very Good Omens-esque history that is worth a look. Deep dive on the relevance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 below. Happy anniversary, friends! đ€đ
The first thing to know is that Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 is one of the most analyzed and frequently performed symphonies in the world. Recordings of it are not rare by a long shot. Maggie probably has at least one other recording of this symphony in the classical music section of her shop. Aziraphale definitely already owns other recordings of it. (Especially because he knows exactly how long the first half of it is without that info being located anywhere visible on the record he's holding in the shop.) What Aziraphale is excited about is not just this symphony but *this particular performance* of this symphony because of its relevance to him and Crowley, as you'll see.
Unlike other pieces of recorded classical music that Aziraphale has in his collection, this is a record of a very historically significant live performance and it is, I'm willing to bet, one that is personally significant to Crowley and Aziraphale. It took place in a completely different era when it came to sound recording technology, as the record is a performance that was recorded live on October 20, 1959. The record that Aziraphale is so excited to receive is a digitally remastered recording of this performance. What Maggie has gotten for Aziraphale and Crowley here is, through advanced technology, some human magic. For Crowley and Aziraphale, this will be the auditory equivalent of a time travel experience.
This live performance took place at what was and still is, acoustically, one of the top places in the world for live music to be heard and recorded-- Boston's Symphony Hall-- and the equipment used to record it was state-of-the-art for its time. Obviously, though, the ability to record sound has changed dramatically since 1959. Records of this performance that were released soon after it were good by the standards of the day but were never stellar and they are really difficult to listen to by our modern standards. The recordings made then could not really fully capture the sound in a way that makes someone listening feel like they're there the way that a recording of a performance held today could.
You and I can pull up the digitally remastered sound files from this performance in under 3 seconds on our phones or computers and listen without issue to a performance with sound quality so good we will feel like we're sitting there in the music hall but for Crowley and Aziraphale? That feeling was only had on the night they were there in 1959. Records of that performance were unable to do it justice until very recently in history, when humans invented technology that could bring back the sound of that night as it truly sounded to them.
Adding to this is that humans, as a whole, despite all this advanced technology, have still not given up on a sense of the romantic so they've taken these advanced recordings and pressed them onto what is, technologically-speaking, an "outdated" form of technology-- vinyl records-- so that people who enjoy listening to music in this more old-fashioned but imminently more soulful way can have an experience that blends modern technological magic with something more intimate and personal. The result is the ability to have the romantic vinyl experience but one with the transportative quality of modern technology.
That is what is Aziraphale has had Maggie get for him and Crowley.
In 2.01, Aziraphale is so excited because he has in his hands the ability for him and Crowley to listen to a live performance of a concert from 1959-- a concert I am sure that he and Crowley were at-- and hear it sound, for the first time since, as they heard it then. Gabriel and Beez's "Everyday" records and Maggie's failed attempt at giving Nina a Nina Simone record do have a Crowley and Aziraphale parallel. We might have been distracted by the idea that, because "Everyday" is Gabriel and Beez's song, that the Crowley and Aziraphale parallel is "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" but, as you'll see, it's subtly not-- it's the other record in S2. It's Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5.
Ok, so why is Aziraphale so obsessed with this particular performance of this particular symphony and what does this have to do with Crowley?
For that, we have to look at the symphony itself.
Music is language and, within the language of classical music, composers-- particularly the sort like Shostakovich, who was limited in expression by confines of his society-- would slip bits of hidden language into their music. In his case, it was a form of rebellion against the repression of dissention by the Russian government, much in the way that Crowley and Aziraphale's hidden language-- which they speak right under the nose of Heaven & Hell-- is for them. The first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 contains the single most Crowley & Aziraphale-ish bit of hidden language in music imaginable.
The piece of music being referenced has ties to a very famous religious parable that is Ineffable Husbands-y in the extreme.
You all have heard of Saint Anthony, yeah?
No, no that Anthony-- Saint Anthony. đ
Patron Saint of Lost Things? The dude your grandma tells you to pray to if you misplace your car keys? The patron saint of sailors and all things nautical? And also the patron saint of pregnant people, as if Saint Anthony weren't already amusingly professional midwife Crowley-esque enough? đ If you know this guy, then you probably then know the most famous Saint Anthony-centric religious story, which is the one at the heart of the musical interlude that is the hidden message in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5:
Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes.
Oysters. Bouillabaisse. Gravlax in Dill Sauce. Sushi... we could go on and, indeed, I have, about Crowley and Aziraphale's ability to elevate the-sea-as-sexual-metaphor to its own art form and we all know how much they revel in blasphemy. As a result, a musical hidden message referring to Saint Anthony and his Sermon to the Fishes is possibly the funniest little romantic in-joke in a piece of music possible for Crowley and Aziraphale.
For those of you unfamiliar with this story, it goes a bit like this: the future Saint Anthony was getting a bit miffed about these heretics who weren't listening to him while he was trying to spread the word of God. He goes to his church one day and finds it empty because everyone's out doing non-God stuff. So, to make a point, he went down to the river and began to preach to the fish. (Yes, the actual fish in the river.) The story goes that the fish were all really interested in this and came up to the surface to listen to the sermon, all rapt with attention. They absorbed Saint Anthony's words and found God, leading them to then bow their little fish heads and pray hard in response.
The human people walking by? Well, their attention was naturally had as the fish were acting like people and listening to this dude preach and that was, ya know, a bit weird. The story goes then that people thought that if fish were listening to the words of Jesus as preached by Saint Anthony then maybe they should, too. The point of the parable is that Saint Anthony found a more receptive audience in the fish and, in preaching to these beings who wished to hear what he had to say, his message wound up amplified by being both received by those open to it and by drawing in others who then saw all of these engaged people listening. It suggests that the best way to speak to people and be heard is by starting with those who are already predisposed to listen and focusing on them, instead of ignoring them in favor of those whose minds are not yet open to new ideas.
(There are actual humans, though, who believed this dude really talked to actual fish, in case you needed another reminder to vote.)
As a little sidebar: there is also another story in a similarly Crowley & Aziraphale vein about Saint Anthony that is not part of the symphony in question but does relate a little bit to S2. In that story, Saint Anthony was dining with some non-believers who poisoned his food as a way of testing the fact that apostles of Christ were supposed to be immune to poison. Saint Anthony realized the food was poisoned and confronted them, found out why they did it, blessed the food, and then ate it without harm as a way of trying to prove to the non-believers that God was real.
So, yeah, the Sermon to the Fishes parable here boils down to a comparison between people and fish. It's using fish as a metaphor for humanity, which Crowley and Aziraphale do in an, erm, slightly different way lol by using fish as a metaphor for their human-styled sexual relationship. To the blasphemous and fish-obsessed Aziraphale and his partner, Mr. Anthony J. Crowley, there might not be a funnier bit of Biblical humor to be had than the story of Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes. So, how does this story fit into this symphony?
In the 17th century, a priest named Father Abraham a Sancta Clara wrote a poem describing Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes but this priest really kinda got how insane the whole thing is because the end of it is a bit tongue-in-cheek. It is also more insightful than the actual religious story itself is because it basically says that the fish listened to Saint Anthony-- but then they went back to being their usual fish selves as soon as he was done speaking.
The humor in the poem comes from the priest using the fish as a metaphor for humans listening to the sermons of Saint Anthony and others. The priest is saying in the poem that people listening to sermons do not fundamentally change as a result because they don't take the words to heart and really apply them to how they are living. He conveys this in the poem by saying things like "the carps still stuff themselves" and-- amusingly considering the references in Demon's Guide to Angelic Beings and elsewhere to Crowley as an eel-- "the pikes remained thieves/the eels, great lovers."
If you wanted to, you could make a case that Crowley or Aziraphale influenced the poem a bit (or, even, the whole Saint Anthony story in the first place.)
Anyway, the point of the poem is... ironically... that these fish people?
They heard the words but they didn't truly listen to what was being said.
*laughs in Good Omens S2*
In tone, it's also very similar to how while Crowley and Aziraphale are overall optimistic they also are, through their experience of human history, a little jaded when it comes to the ability of someone to really enact massive amounts of change in people. The poem is in the same tone of their responses to the reasons for why Jesus was being executed for preaching kindness:
Right, so, anyway... the symphony ties...
This poem was then later set to music by the composer Gustav Mahler, with both the poem and the score included in a book called Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which was the go-to compendium of German folk songs and stories. In its inclusion here, Mahler's song-- called Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (which is just German for Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes)-- made the jump to what is, technically, a secular book of folk songs. In those days, there was not as much of a separation between religious music and secular music but this book is kind of a blend of both them. The song is then played all over the place and becomes an extremely popular, well-known song. Everyone then knows Mahler's tune about Saint Anthony and his fishes.
Like Crowley and Aziraphale forced to hide a bit from the regimes to which they belong and using hidden language to communicate, Shostakovich, feeling the pain of government suppression that kept him from full, open expression in his art, was forced to make sure that his compositions sounded appropriately Yay! Russia! enough to not, ya know, be killed... but he slipped in little things along the way to troll his oppressors and inform his art for those who knew to listen for hidden messages in it.
In the first movement of his Symphony No. 5, he slipped in a musical reference to Mahler's Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt to express his distaste for Stalin and his government.
The exact bit of Mahler's Saint Anthony's song that is musically referenced in the first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, off of the second movement of his Symphony No. 4, is the musical accompaniment to the lyric: "He goes to the rivers and preaches to the fishes." So, in addition to the rebellious nature of this and the blasphemy, Aziraphale has bought his Anthony a symphony that begins with a musical interlude that basically says "let's get it on" in Ineffable Husbands Speak. đ
It was only decades later, though, when people realized just how much of a fuck you this musical reference to Mahler's Saint Anthony song really was-- and that is because of the fact that Shostakovich had actually first put that very same musical reference into the companion piece to Symphony No. 5-- his suppressed Symphony No. 4.
Here's where this whole thing becomes a really Good Omens-y meta joke as well...
Shostakovich composed and completed his Symphony No. 4 during 1935 and 1936 with the intent of its first public performance being in Leningrad in December 1936. However, he and the opera he had composed that was being performed at the time-- Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk-- were targeted by Stalin. All art criticism in Russia was monitored and influenced by the state and Stalin had been growing concerned about Shostakovich getting a bit political with his art in a way that didn't benefit Stalin and his government so he fired a bit of a warning shot at Shostakovich by targeting his opera. He didn't outrightly imprison or kill him because Russia only had so many really amazing composers who could make patriotic music for Stalin lol but, at the same time, he was warning Shostakovich to toe the party line and reminding him that was always being watched.
As a result of this targeting, the public performance of Symphony No. 4 in 1936 was canceled. The symphony was not actually publicly performed at all for the next twenty-five years. It did not see the light of day until it was first played publicly by an orchestra in Moscow in December of 1961. Back in 1936, though, Shostakovich kept composing and fought against being targeted a bit by hyping his next work-- Symphony No. 5-- as being this super-patriotic ode to Russia. He somehow actually managed to get Symphony No. 5 publicly performed for the first time the very next year after Stalin was threatening him-- in 1937.
Why this matters is that the two symphonies are thematically connected and they both contain the musical motif of this reference that's relevant to Crowley & Aziraphale but musical audiences-- including Crowley & Aziraphale lol-- actually learned all of this both backwards and decades apart...
...just like how we viewers are learning the story of Good Omens.
Shostakovich composed a story between the symphonies but that story wound up presented to his audience beginning in the middle (with the start of Symphony No. 5) and with a long wait of decades before the crucial beginnings of that story (Symphony No. 4) was ever shown to the audience-- even though Symphony No. 4 had existed for a quarter of a century. It's a bit of a meta wink at how Good Omens is presenting its story out of sequence and to the fact that more of its story with Season 2 took decades to make its way into being publicly viewed.
Maybe more to the point? Audiences who heard both symphonies then took awhile to realize how interconnected they are and their understanding of Symphony No. 5-- which they've been analyzing for decades-- was changed dramatically by the revelation of Symphony No. 4 and their understanding of how the two works connect.
Since Crowley and Aziraphale lived in the eras of Shostakovich's music being revealed and first performed, these two symphonies are a classical music version of understanding a full story that took decades to be fully understood. It's kind of like their version of what Good Omens is to us.
To understand it from their point of view? Symphony No. 5 was, as we said above, first performed publicly in 1937 and the performance that Aziraphale and Crowley saw-- the significance of which we're going to talk about in a second-- took place in 1959. Symphony No. 4 was still not publicly known when they were at the performance on the record Aziraphale got from Maggie. It would be another two years after that until Symphony No. 4 debuted in 1961, even though it was written in 1936, and it would take time after that for people to begin to understand how the two pieces went together... and to really fully appreciate the fact that this canceled 4th symphony that Stalin oppressed did contain a hidden reference to Mahler's music that made it as secretly radical as Stalin had feared-- which Shostakovich then turned around and stuck right smack dab at the beginning of the first movement of his Symphony No. 5-- less than a minute into the start of it-- as a middle finger to Stalin.
Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes, as we can see, has taken this longer, cultural trip to wind up being used in this symphony as a pretty delicious act of rebellion and it's pretty easy to see how Crowley and Aziraphale would be very into that. By putting the Mahler interlude again into Symphony No. 5, Shostakovich was just growling fuck all of you idiots-- you'll never stop me! beneath a socially-acceptable exterior of this symphony that managed to pass as not subversive enough and quite literally saved Shostakovich from being killed by Stalin and allowed him to keep having his work performed publicly... and he was doing so by referencing this hilariously Crowley-esque Biblical story and adding some rebellion to its social history.
That, alone, would be more than enough for why Crowley and Aziraphale love this symphony but there's actually more...
The second bit relates to why Aziraphale is so excited to have a good recording on vinyl of this particular performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. That relates to the performance's role in international relations and history, how Crowley and Aziraphale use (and the story uses) the political relationships between countries as a metaphor for Heaven & Hell, and just the really, really beautiful symbolism involved in this historic performance of this symphony.
The record that Aziraphale gets from Maggie in 2.01 is a recording of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 as performed-- live-- on October 20, 1959 by the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, at Boston's Symphony Hall. This single performance of this particular symphony happening in this way, at this time, is maybe nothing short of a miracle and is a really great example of art transcending borders and how it can bring out the common humanity in us all.
Leonard Bernstein, a first-generation American whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from what was then part of the Soviet Empire, became the first American-born composer to lead an American orchestra when he took over the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein is the composer of West Side Story and the scores for films like On the Waterfront and is known for leading the Philharmonic as a conductor to international fame as one of the world's best orchestras. Under Bernstein's direction, the New York Philharmonic made recordings of American orchestral music-- like their completely stunning version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue-- that really exemplified a kind of wild, passionate, expressive feeling in the music that combined elements of jazz into classical music and has come to be globally synonymous with America.
In 1959, during the Cold War and with the Space Race in full swing, Leonard Bernstein made headlines for taking an American-government-backed, art-as-diplomacy type of trip with his orchestra to Moscow to meet his fellow composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. In a 20-day trip that is monitored by everyone under the sun lol, Bernstein and members of his orchestra are shown artistic and historically-relevant places in Moscow and get to dine and spend some time with Shostakovich and other musicians. They're all admirers of one another's work and are excited to be able to talk about music and make some together. Their countries are enemies but they are not-- they're just people aware of the politics involved of their visit but just excited to have that visit so they can talk about art with other artists they admire. While they are there, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic perform Symphony No. 5 in Moscow for Shostakovich.
Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic play the piece a bit differently than Shostakovich and other conductors in Europe do. The main difference is playing the piece a bit faster in parts, particularly in the last movement, Movement 4 (which is the piece of the symphony that is playing in Good Omens when Gabriel arrives.)
If you listen to recordings of how Movement 4, in particular, is played by orchestras under Russian and other conductors in the decades after its first performance in 1937 in comparison to Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic's take on it, it has a very different feel to it. The change in tempo in parts changes the feeling of the piece in such a way as to basically make it emote more. It is wilder, more openly passionate and less restrained. I've seen it described as the piece shouting its own joy at being set free and that's really it.
So, the Americans played it this way in Moscow for the composer himself and in front of half the Russian government, who seem to just see it as a coup that this younger composer is coming to their country to see their composer. Bernstein is most concerned with just not offending his new friend with his take on the work-- and he is thrilled to learn that Shostakovich loves it.
Bernstein and the American government had been hoping to somehow get an exchange trip out of this but Moscow is hesitant. Rumors exist that they were worried that Shostakovich would defect so while they're fine with the Americans playing music of Russian composers, they subtly (and, probably, not so subtly) threaten Shostakovich into staying in Moscow.
Bernstein, as thanks to Shostakovich for his friendship, expresses his intent to go ahead with what they had been planning on doing if Shostakovich could come to America and that is to conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in Shostakovich's honor in the very musically and politically-significant place they had wanted to bring him to to hear his work played-- Boston's Symphony Hall.
Symphony Hall in Boston is considered the finest concert hall in America from an acoustic perspective and one of the top two or three in the world. If you enjoy music performed by an orchestra, there is almost no better place in the world to music played than Symphony Hall and there is not a place of its caliber anywhere in Russia. For a composer like Shostakovich, secretly long-suffering at the hands of the Russian government, it would have been one of the highlights of his life to hear his own music performed in this wild and free way by his American friends in what is basically the classical music equivalent of paradise and that, as a bonus, just so happens to be located dead center in the birthplace of the American Revolution.
Bernstein had hopes that they could convince Moscow to let Shostakovich come to Boston to hear his music performed at Symphony Hall but Moscow won't budge so Bernstein gets an idea that both governments also like because it winds up good press for both for them-- the New York Philharmonic is going to perform Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in Boston's Symphony Hall in honor of their time in Moscow with Shostakovich and they will make a record out of it, which the record labels love because the attention paid to the trip means the record will sell tons of copies. The musicians are all really also doing it, though, to make a record of the performance out of love for Shostakovich himself, so he can have the closest thing possible to hearing his symphony performed in Symphony Hall.
So, naturally, when this concert took place? The musicians were all really emotional and played the living fuck out of this symphony as a love letter to their friend trapped behind the Iron Curtain. There are many people who consider it to be the best performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in existence.
It's October 1959-- there is no internet. No one can get Shostakovich a VPN and link to a livestream. He had to wait months for the record to be pressed and to get a physical copy on record through international mail before he could hear it. When he did, the sound quality was the best 1959 had to offer but it still was nothing like what the digitally remastered version of this live performance that Aziraphale has on this record is like.
Even though he was not able to hear this performance in person, Shostakovich did receive the record in 1959 and was able to hear with the best sound of that time what his music sounded like in Symphony Hall when performed by a bunch of Americans going wild out love for him and his work and giving what some consider one of the best orchestral performances ever in the process, in a place that is, acoustically, musical Heaven. Shostakovich died in 1975. Sound had barely improved by then by comparison to today. He never actually got to hear this Symphony Hall performance the way that Crowley and Aziraphale did in 1959 and can now again by listening to the record Aziraphale has just bought from Maggie.
Aziraphale's love of classical music, plus his financial and magical resources and having plenty of time to travel mean to me that he has undoubtedly heard music live in Boston's Symphony Hall before. Because of how much of an international and cultural event this particular performance was in 1959, it was hyped for weeks before it happened. It was almost impossible to get seats but Aziraphale is very wealthy and very magical. Given how much he loves classical music and the really moving story of this performance, Aziraphale, if he didn't already have an in from knowing different composers (probably Bernstein heh), he would have gone so far as to give away a book to get to this thing. He and Crowley were at this concert.
Given how much the story of this concert parallels he and Crowley and their love across enemy lines, this would be worth the risk. They definitely would have had no trouble being inconspicuous and blending in amongst the crowds here as this concert was very sold out. They snuck off to America together for a date to watch its best musicians play a passionate ode to the subtly subversive music of their fellow artist with whom they couldn't always physically be because of who he was forced to work for but whom they love madly anyway.
The hidden language, the hilarious blasphemy of St. Anthony and his fish, the way they use Russia and America as a parallel, the absolutely beautiful music itself and all the parallels to their relationship in this particular, live performance and how it came to be, and the fact that he and Crowley were there together... It all makes this record different from other ones Aziraphale is shown to have or has listened to in the past.
He loves those, too, and they probably have significant meaning to him but the Schubert he was listening to in 1.01, for example, is not a live performance. A lot of classical music recordings are edited. It's music played by others that is like music Aziraphale once heard live. This is a literal record for Aziraphale, in the sense that it's a live concert and he and Crowley were there.
Think, for a moment, about how special that really is to Aziraphale and how much it will be to Crowley when he finally finds out Aziraphale has this record...
They have souvenirs but nothing that is overt and nothing that is any sort of audio/visual record of any time they've ever spent together. They either destroyed or have deeply hidden the one picture of the two of them together that they had. Everyone else in the modern world is walking around snapping photos and making videos left and right of the people they love but Crowley and Aziraphale are not. They don't have pictures of each other or videos or a recording of each other's voices. It's too dangerous. They've been sneaking out for dates for literal ages and they don't have a single record of what any of those countless nights sounded like.
Aziraphale is vibrating with excitement over this record in 2.01 because he is thinking that, when Crowley comes back later in the day, he'll be able to give him this record of the music from this very memorable night they once had together in 1959. Aziraphale knows this is romantic as all holy hell and that Crowley is going to love this so he can't wait for later that night when he and Crowley can listen to this album together. Aziraphale knows he has a very amorous evening in store as that demon is going to be mush over this record.
I think that's actually the joke as to why he's listening to the album backwards.
As others have pointed out, it's the first half of the symphony-- its first two movements-- that are just over 21 minutes long and one might assume that someone would begin listening to the record of the symphony with Side A of the record. This is what Aziraphale seems to tell Maggie that he's going to do when he makes the hilariously lewd little "21 minutes" comment. However, when we actually see him in the bookshop after just a few minutes have passed, it's clear that he actually put Side B on the record first and began in the middle of the symphony with Movement 3, as the record is playing the very beginning of its ending-- Movement 4-- when Gabriel arrives. There's an etymology joke that explains this a bit.
Aziraphale is obviously thinking about Crowley while being excited to get this record and about the hidden language within it and his and Crowley's own hidden language. Both of them actually frequently phrase sentences to other people around them that sound normal to those people but actually mean something slightly different if the words they say are viewed through a filter of the rules of their vocabulary. Crowley will say things to Maggie in their speak in 2.06 when he's irritated over the fact that she says they don't talk and Aziraphale is doing so with the "21 minutes" comment. The key word in the sentence that actually changes the meaning of it is the word next.
Next, from the Proto-Germanic nekh, meaning near, and nigh, meaning near and soon.
In other words, Aziraphale's comment sounds like he's, ah, really excited about his music and is about to go, ah, really enjoy the first side of this album but, while he is rather excited to have the record, the 21 minutes of the first side of it are not something he's going to be listening to in the next 21 minutes-- meaning, the exact following 21 minutes-- but that he will be listening to in the next 21 minutes with next in its etymological root meaning of soon.
He's saving the first half of the symphony and its Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes for Anthony.
This actually though winds up making the lewdness of Aziraphale's "21 minutes" comment even funnier when you take into account the musical natures of the different movements of this symphony. While everyone's taste is different, I feel like it's a safe bet that if all of you go listen to this symphony in full right now, you will agree with me that the only truly fuckable-music part of it is Movement 3-- which is very much so.
The joke winds up being more like Aziraphale is listening to the second half of the symphony on the B side of the record alone when we first see him because he really loves the damn symphony itself and wants to hear all of it right away to appreciate the performance of the music in its own right but he knows that he and Crowley are going to be getting busy from the hot Movement 3 on and he will not be able to pay attention to the music so he's sneaking a listen to Side B of the record first just to have the musically orgasmic experience as well. đ
It also adds a funny element to Gabriel's arrival. Movement 4 of the piece is wild and soaring and then winds up in this weird kind of funeral march-- these two and their sex and death-- and Aziraphale's just trying to appreciate the piece when a naked, American-presenting bit of celestial harmonies shows up on his doorstep, bear hugs this Shostakovich, and defects to his and Crowley's embassy.
Gabriel's arrival causes a chain of events that culminate in Aziraphale still not having shown Crowley this record and, as Gabriel is in the street, arriving in 2.01, he is being recorded with ease by hundreds of people on cell phones-- all of them easily making high-quality records of an event with technology that is nothing shy of magic that now exists in everyone's pockets-- Aziraphale is inside listening to a record on vinyl that was made during this same modern era, using its advanced technology to act as an accurate recording of a concert from the past that would have been lost to it without the magic of the humans and their technology.
It continues the theme of different kinds of records-- Muriel the Scrivener, books and diaries, Maggie's record shop, "Everyday", the Gabriel file in Heaven, the Satanic nuns and their lots of records that were lost in the fire, etc.-- and underscores the themes of memories and existence.
Ok, a couple of more things about this record here that tie to the story. We should probably note that the Movement 4 that Aziraphale is listening to when Gabriel arrives is labeled allegro non troppo, which means fast, but not overly so. Not only does it describe both the original intent of the music and still works with Bernstein's interpretation of it but when you consider the pacing aspect of Crowley & Aziraphale's story with the car and around that particular word of fast (which also means to withdraw from eating for a period of time), it adds in the music motif to some of that as well.
Also about the final movement: not within the part we hear in the show but within Movement 4 as a whole, Shostakovich references a song he wrote separately from this symphony that was musical accompaniment for a poem by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin called Rebirth. It is worth a read as there might be some threads to pull on there when it comes to where Aziraphale ends up over the course of the season and in general.
Another thing is that the first movements of the symphony have been described as a kind of mix of lamentation and grief with a sense of pining and longing to them, which I got when I listened as well. There is a lot of angst in it and musical motifs that kind of go nowhere at times, representing a lot of anxiety and unfinished threads. Some attribute this to the fact that Shostakovich had a tragic romantic life and, around this time, a woman with whom he was madly in love refused his marriage proposal, fled to Spain and married a film director there.
Shostakovich also included something else of Crowley and Aziraphale relevance in the first movement, possibly off of that failed romance of his-- so, alongside the reference to Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes. It is a musical reference to the Habanera, the famous aria from Bizet's Carmen.
While lusty and playful, lyrically, the Habanera is also a bit of a pine fest about not knowing when or if you'll ever get to be with the one you love but about how that love is wild and untameable and cannot be stopped.
Its formal name is its first lyric, which is:
L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, which is French for...
I wrote a thing and liked the words, but it looked rather bare without an illustration, so I drew something to go with it. Hereâs the text if itâs too hard to read on the image:
Even humans dream of falling, and Crowley dreamed, too, of bombs over London, of guillotine blades, of fallen Empires, Rome burning, the first drops of the Deluge piercing the dust. Falling. Ruin. Falling. Catastrophe. He dreamed of his fall, and his fall, tooâ shattering like a cup on the floor when Pompeii shook.Â
âI donât want you to fall,â he said.
âMy dear, it is not your choice to make. My darling, it is too late. I fell for you long ago. I fell like a leaf in autumn. I fell like the first snow in winter. I fell like rain in springtime. It happened so softly I never felt it. I fell like Hamletâs sparrow. I fell like Newtonâs apple. Nothing in Heaven or Earth could have prevented it. I fell like a law of nature. I fell for you and Iâm still falling, like the moon caught in orbit. Let me keep falling forever.â
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