I bear in mind Saturdays in Don Bosco being considerably festive, as a result of at 11 o’clock the varsity intercom would play music from the Radio Ceylon station. I’m undecided if this was for the entire faculty, however this was definitely true for the first part which I used to be in, through the early Seventies.
It was looking back a turbulent time for my brother and me linguistically, as we needed to discard the German we had discovered to talk from beginning, and decide up English and Konkani. (Any Portuguese we picked up by osmosis was a bonus, probably not essential to get by).
There have been some comedian mix-ups consequently. For fairly a number of years I believed ‘Obladi-Oblada’ was an English nursery tune, and ‘Guantanamera’ was a Hindi tune for youngsters, as they had been sung to us by our kindergarten lecturers in Cristo Rei, wherein we had been enrolled earlier than switching to Don Bosco once I was in second grade.
The primary time I heard Neil Diamond’s 1972 hit ‘Music Sung Blue’ was on Radio Ceylon, because of the Don Bosco Saturday intercom.
You’ll be able to think about the confusion the tune title alone sowed in a seven-year-old first-time English learner. The conjugation tense appeared fallacious, and the way might you sing a tune in a color? After which it went one to say “everyone is aware of one” (I didn’t), and that each backyard grew one! Gardens grew songs?! By the point Diamond obtained to the following verse in regards to the tune “weeping like a willow” and “sleeping on my pillow” I simply gave up making an attempt to make additional sense of it.
At the moment, in fact, it makes excellent sense, the universality of disappointment,” the blues” (“Me and you’re topic to the blues from time to time”, which is why “everyone is aware of one” and “each backyard grows one”). However despite the fact that you might sing it with “a cry in your voice”, as a result of cathartic therapeutic high quality of music, “earlier than you already know it, it will get to feeling good; you merely obtained no alternative,” It’s a “humorous factor” certainly.
Eloquent lyrics, to make certain. However what sticks within the reminiscence even when we are able to’t bear in mind all of the strains, is the tune.
The melody was ‘impressed’ by the second motion of Piano Concerto 21 in C main (Ok. 467) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 -1791).
My very own introduction to this Mozart work got here solely someplace within the Nineties, through the cassette growth. At first it was simply this motion, courtesy French pianist Richard Clayderman with a really schmaltzy syrupy backing ensemble that put a glaze over all the pieces, obliterating any subtlety or nuance. It was titled ‘Elvira Madigan’ with no clarification.
A little bit later, one other cassette (I feel it was Svjatoslav Richter with the Philharmonia Orchestra underneath Riccardo Muti) let me hear the entire concerto. In these days a sure whiskey model partnered with the HMV (His Mater’s Voice) label to current ‘Classic Virtuosos’, tastefully packaged in units of six cassettes, and a illustration of Peter Paul Rubens’ 1620s portray ‘The beginning of Louis XIII’ on the entrance. I don’t understand how a lot they boosted whiskey gross sales, however the cassettes definitely expanded my listening repertoire.
Mozart was on the peak of his fame as pianist and composer on the premiere of this work at Vienna’s Burg Theater on 9 March 1785. He had written it only a month after his D minor Piano concerto no. 20, and would write 4 extra within the subsequent 21 months. His father Leopold Mozart was visiting his son (the final time father and son would see one another) and known as it “astonishingly tough.” (By the way, 10-year-old Ayaan Deshpande just lately carried out it with the SOI Chamber Orchestra).
Its second motion, Andante, is typically known as the Andante-rêve (‘Dream’ andante) for its other-worldly high quality, the principle theme rising from muted strings, triplets pacing duple time. Some harmonies had been so experimental for his or her time that Leopold known as them “fallacious sounds”, fairly certain they should be a copyist’s error. However it was met with enthusiastic applause, and “many [in the audience] had been in tears.”
That was Mozart. The bitter-sweet wistfulness of this motion might or might not have had any autobiographical reference. However it has been persistently poached for its tear-jerking potential.
Which brings us to its different moniker, ‘Elvira Madigan.’ I’ve solely just lately watched the eponymous 1967 Swedish romantic drama movie for which this Andante-rêve is a type of idée fixe, numerous segments of it giving emotional depth and context all through its length.
Elvira Madigan was the stage-name of circus acrobat Hedvig Antoinette Isabella Eleonore Jensen (1867 -J889) remembered for her ill-fated romantic relationship with the Swedish nobleman and cavalry officer Sixten Sparre that resulted in each their deaths in a suicide pact.
The affair started in 1888 after Hedvig/Elvira appeared together with her circus act at Kristianstad, Sweden. Sparre, married and father of two, was passionate about her extraordinary magnificence and lengthy blonde hair. The movie romanticises the connection, however the reality might be a tad darker. Sparre appears to have manipulated a younger woman with emotional points, threatening to shoot himself if she didn’t comply. He was closely in debt, having frittered method the household inheritance.
Their elopement solely impoverished them additional. The top got here on the morning of 19 July, 1889 when Sparre shot Elvira together with his service revolver after which killed himself.
A poem was present in Elvira’s pocket in a combination of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German: “A drop fell into the water, light out slowly/ And the place the place it fell/ surrounded from wave to wave/ What was it that fell? /And the place did it come from? /It was however a life, / and however a dying that got here/ to win itself a monitor. /Now the water rests as soon as once more.”
Is that this a love story? Or a tragic one, a homicide of a younger girl who some purpose got here underneath the thrall (Stockholm Syndrome involves thoughts) of this man if uniform (simply as he was captivated by her magnificence) and obtained in deeper and deeper till she couldn’t see a method out besides by permitting him to kill her? The movie left me fairly troubled by this query. In all of the evaluations, constructive and damaging, of the movie, I’ve not seen this angle even talked about, not to mention addressed.
Nonetheless, I feel what does unite Mozart’s Andante-rêve, Neil Diamond’s ‘Music Sung Blue’ and the ‘Elvira Madigan’ movie is the universality of disappointment, and the position music performs in giving it expression, if not at all times providing a balm or a method out.
This text first appeared in The Navhind Times, Goa, India.
