Winnie – My Classical Music Partner

Our golden retriever, Winnie, embarked to Eternity on Friday, December 19, 2025, after several months of battling 2 cancers, one incurable and the other metastasized.  She was 11 years old.  We bought her so I would have a running companion, but 2 months after we acquired her as a puppy, I suffered a cracked heel from a bone disease which ended my running days.  She pivoted from being a prospective running partner, to musical collaborator.

I play classical piano and pursued a venture of publishing  out-of-print (& copyright) piano transcriptions in the early 2000s under the name Editions Poole.  I scanned over 20,000 pages of music going to various libraries around the country with my portable scanner — that is how I spent my vacations.  When I was at Oracle, I found 3 other pianists who could sight read and we’d convene at my apartment every Wednesday after work where I had 2 grand pianos crammed in and we’d read through the various transcriptions of famous symphonies I published for 2 piano 8 hands.  I got into a real swing of cranking out new editions every week so we’d have something new to read.  When I was in Napa, I had a sight reading partner and we’d cover my 2 piano 4 hand editions weekly.  I also like to read through and tackle Franz Lizt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies.  (For Napa’s first Porchfest, I convened 3 pianists and we performed Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, arranged for 2 piano 8 hands, and as a more popular piece: John Phillip Sousa’s Start & Stripes Forever.)  All this is background to point out that as Winnie was raised in our Napa household, she had an extreme exposure to classical piano.  What we found happening is that Winnie liked to sing to certain works I played and/or practiced.  Her favorite was the 5th and last movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, “The Pastorale”, and the theme of the last movement is called the Shepherd’s Song.  (I performed Beethoven’s 6th with three other pianists at Filoli in Woodside, for the musical summer strolls — we were in the ballroom and performed various symphonic transcriptions, in their entirety.)  Beethoven’s 6th has very high sentimental value to me as my four sons were taken away from me by a vindictive spouse who erased me from their lives having probably spent over $1 million in attorney fees to accomplish her goal.  I always dreamed that some day my sons would realize what happened to them and reunite with me and the Shepard’s Song (which comes after the famous Storm movement) would be playing in background.  It was my fantasy that helped me through this dark period of my life.  So when Winnie started showing interest in this movement, it seemed as if she were an angel from heaven come to comfort me and reassure me there is still a greater Good.  I may not have the love of all my sons, but I had Winnie’s love.

Our routine was Winnie would come to me in the kitchen and I’d ask her if she’d like to go outside to visit the back lawn and if she didn’t respond, I’d then ask “do you want to sing?” and she get all excited, trot over to her toy basket in the dining room and then position herself under my grand piano placing her and her chosen toy at the piano’s foot pedal.  She knew several pieces and would sing on cue at familiar measures.

There is one section in the last movement of Beethoven’s Pastorale where there are three voices and for some reason she would go bananas during those measures.  I think she was attuned to particular keys, for example I read through Brahm’s 1st piano concerto one evening, having not read through it for years, and off she went.  And she loved Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto, and once I read through Anton Rubinstein concerto having never seen or heard it, a friend gave me the score, and for some reason she liked that.  But then there were other pieces she could care less about.  Oh, and she loved Mendelssohn’s Ouvertüre zum Märchen von der schönen Melusine, Op. 32; I have a book of solo transcriptions of Mendelssohn Overture’s.  I never did get a good recording of that one.  Winnie’s taste even embraced Franck’s piano trio — the last movement.

As she became weaker and was not anxious to get up and go to the piano, she would remain in the kitchen and I would play and sometimes my wife could hear her hum when I reached her favorite passages.

To preserve what joy she brought to me as her father and musical partner, I share these: