Tonight We Love

I don’t think I had heard Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto for nearly seventy years before listening on Sunday when the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra offered it.  For me it is a virtue of the Orchestra’s programming that they play a lot of old chestnuts throughout the season, simply because in my obsession with being trendy once I left Iowa City at 22, I devoted myself to music I did not know.  So now it is a shock to hear Beethoven, Brahms, and in this case Tchaikovsky almost as though it were new music.  I remember that this piece was some of the emotional porn to which I turned as my teens began, to throb and sob at the dance hall version "Tonight We Love," with intimations of longing and ecstasy, or as I imagined them to be. Watching Casablanca did the same for me, or hearing Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again,” which itself brought forth freshets of tears in my mother’s eyes, as she compressed the events of the war in which we were then engaged with the one twenty five years earlier when she had lost her first husband.  At eighteen I watched mesmerized by grief and erotics as the gorgeous young Gerard Philipe played the teenaged lover of a married woman (Micheline Presle) with a soldier husband at the front in Le Diable au Corps, a desperate and doomed love affair, emotions that I reprised years and years later watching Vittorio De Sica and Danielle Darrieux in the waltz sequence of Max Ophuls’ The Earings of Madame de . . ., seduced by my love of Edwardian repression and hypocrisy in the minuet of manners with which these beautiful people act out their passion.(I agree with Andrew Sarris that this is the most beautiful film ever made.)  But Sunday as we came away from the concert, I realized first of all, that listening to this piece in a concert hall, the acoustics of which elicited the subtlest textures and tones in the pianist’s solo parts, made it something quite other than the source of swelling emotion in a teenager’s heart.  And let’s face it, at eighty three I am not a teenager. I suddenly stopped to realize that nowadays when I need to dip into the maudlin, I go in quite another direction. For instance, as the great mass of tired males at the end of the day light up their computers and hopefully their lives with scenes of naked women in orgy, I turn on yet again the YouTube presentation of Susan Boyle winning the singing contest with “I Dreamed A Dream.” It always makes me cry, as that dowdy middle aged woman, slightly daft enough or courageous enough to offer herself up to the condescension that poured out into her face, opens her mouth and produces such solid, authoritative singing, and she wins! she wins! she wins! And the song is by turns so sad and so hopeful, and such a statement of her own predicament.  Oh, the lump in my throat every time.  As the tears start up, I am so happy!  But wait, that’s not all.  I often also turn to, you won’t believe this, the Antwerp Train Station Flash Mob.  Why?  Because as I watch those crowds forming into rhythmic patterning, all of them looking like they are having so much fun, I suddenly can believe that there are no snipers, rapists, pick-pockets, mortgage brokers, investment firms, militias, and all the other desperadoes and betrayals that The New York Times,for instance, offers up each morning for our spiritual breakfast.  Ditto "Puttin’ On The Ritz," the Moscow Flash Mob, scenes again of precision dancing, some of it with real wit,  everyone smiling and laughing, beautiful young people, nobody frowning, nobody drunk.  Just to hear a Russian crowd singing “. . .rich as Rockefeller . . .” well, that’s another form of tearing down the Wall, when you come to think of it.  And if you want to play at being an academic and do heavy duty analysis, you can start with teasing out the meaning in the iteration of the Russian leader’s name in "Puttin’ On The Ritz."