Music and Memories
Going to the Dallas Symphony’s first concert of the season under the baton of it music director designate, Fabio Luisi, I did not expect to be transported through my seven decades, but I was.
I have heard Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto more than a hundred times, going back to my college days, when in my freshman year, I used to lean back into the sofa of our floor’s common living room, and put it on as loud as I could, so as to savor the exaltation and the crashing disappointment that Beethoven felt as I had learned he had wanted to dedicate it to Napoleon and, then, seeing what this ‘hero’ was turning into, dedicated it to one of his own rulers.
Yet, this time, as I heard it played, more romantically, with great soft nuances, I was transported back to Bonn, the city of the seven hills, the place where Beethoven was born. I saw the corner house in which he lived. I walked the square, went to the open air market with the mother of my first love. That love crashed, but listening to this rendition of the concerto, I saw its bloom, the beauty that it brought into my life. I waltzed again in my love’s arms, I walked with him in glorious woods, I sat with his father for breakfast and listened in as he, responsible for Germany’s reparation payments to Israel, talked on the phone with none other than Weizmann, the grandfather of the Jewish state.
How incredible that I the daughter of Soviet refugees, of a man forced by circumstances to work in a coal mine in Belgium, a girl, who as a child could only bathe once a week when my mother warmed the water on a coal stove and poured it into the big basin, would, at barely twenty one, be attractive to and attracted by someone whose life had been at the opposite end of that political and social scale. And, yet, it was lived in the sweetness of Bonn, in a Germany made more human by its very sins, not a grandiose state with a capital in Berlin.
And, then, there was a piece I had consciously never heard or listened to, Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony. As I closed my eyes, I was looking out from the top of the Corvatsch looking out onto the Alps on the other side of the valley, to St. Moritz on my right and to the less well known places on the left. I was walking up a path on that left side, going up to a ghost village, built decades before for the Shirley Temple movie, Heidi. With my best friend, we were walking across, getting wind, having her scared and coming down in the sunset to Sils Maria, to the place where Nietzsche wrote, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Fifty years of Alps, east, west, north, south starting with Mont Blanc, with that first love. For years I had only lived the hurt. The music made me live the beauty and the depth, and the pain I had always felt dissolved in compassion and forgiveness.
