Friday, February 09, 2007
8:16 PM
Today I stayed at home and forced myself to work on this "Lost and Found" poem series I promised my supervisor tomorrow. I'm stumped, after four semi-complete pieces and two fragments and still no coherent direction or vision. I reread a couple of poems written 3-4 years ago that would've fit thematically into this sequence but that make me cringe now -- such closed all-knowingness and privilege! such appropriation of other people's pain to pound a metaphysical insight onto the reader! I wish I had a piano to pound on right now while I think. I wish Papa were around in one of his lugubrious (HIS word!) moods, playing one of his "putangina" pieces. So thanks to Limewire I'm now listening to mp3s of: Lizst's "Hungarian Rhapsody," Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique," Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini," and Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "Funeral March," and "Heroic Polonaise" -- music I used to hear as a child on wet Sunday nights, when I'd hear him over the curtain of rain, and I'd go down the stairs of our old house for a glass of water and see him at the piano, beads of sweat on his brow, torso leaning forward, harmonic thunderstorms bursting from his wrists. That was the picture of the artist I grew up with, that dedication, that erratic fumbling and practicing for a perfection that was elusive, for a phrasing that was his own, and was unapplauded, except in the mind of an admiring daughter.
(The painting is Salvador Dali's "Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano," 1933.)* * *
Here's an inspiring (if pompous-looking) 84-year old Vladimir Horowitz playing the Polonaise in A-flat major, also called the "Heroic Polonaise." My father's favorite section, I could tell, was that marchy movement beginning at 3:15 with that gong-like chord repeated six times, and later with the left hand moving in a downward four-key wheel. My favorite is that lyrical respite right after, starting at 4:35 and lasting more than a minute -- such a contrast and complement to the majestic torrents of tones earlier. Let the purists disagree, but I prefer Horowitz's imperfect pathos to Arthur Rubinstein's technical elegance in this 1968 recording (the same lyrical passage happens at 4:25 with Rubinstein).
I've also just learned that this was the last piece of music broadcast over Warsaw radio before the city surrendered to the Nazis, almost a hundred years after Chopin composed it in 1842. Wow. Can you listen to it now and put yourself in the shoes of those about to be herded off to face that unspeakable silencing? It's unfathomable.
Labels: creativity, family, music
