Moved to Tears

Hot tears welled up behind my glasses when I heard Helene Grimaud play Mozart's 23rd piano concerto with the Israel Philharmonic on Friday morning at the Jerusalem theater.  We had read an article about Grimaud in the New Yorker last month, and then we saw ads for a series of concerts here in Israel.  We had never heard of her before reading the article, because we don't follow current performers of classical music so closely, but, because of the article about a fascinating and astonishingly gifted person, we decided to treat ourselves to the concert.

Friday morning at 11 is not a time we usually go to concerts.  Judith cooks meals for Shabbat on Fridays, and I try to squeeze in a few more hours of work.  Last Friday it was raining very hard.  I am always put off balance by the rain here.  Even after nearly 40 years in Israel, the country means sun, not rain to me. Friday's rain was cold and torrential, and streams ran in the streets that sloped downhill.

It was a relief to reach the lobby, and, to our astonishment, we found that it was full of round tables with yellow cloths, and middle-aged people who certainly could have lived without another piece of cake were avidly gobbling down pastries.  We saw where they were giving out the food and went over to find out what was what.  After all, we're also adequately fed Ashkenazis.  It turned out there was a deal: 35 sheqels for coffee, cake, and the weekend newspaper.  We hadn't signed up.  Just as well.

We had unknowlingly entered an unfamiliar world of devotees who have been going to Friday morning concerts of the Philharmonic for years: Intermezzo.  When we entered the hall, we misread the row of our seats and trespassed on the territory of a couple of regulars.  Of course we moved after acknowledging out mistake.  We were outsiders in a secret society.

All that background has little to do with the point.  We had seats in the 2nd row, to the right of the piano, so we could see Grimaud's face but not her hands.  She's a good-looking woman with an expressive face, and it was a pleasure to see the pleasure she found in the music.  The tears came to my eyes because of the beauty of the sound of the orchestra and because at one moment in the first movement the soloist swept the orchestra along with her.  I felt that the music had gripped them all.  They were more than a group of highly trained, skilled, professional musicians.  They were lovers of Mozart's music.

Recently I have been listening to more classical music after years of listening mainly to jazz.  There's no point in comparing.  Great music is great music, whether it's Ellington or Brahms, and I still have no patience for a lot of bombastic classical symphonies.  However, I do believe that no other kind of music has yet attained the sublime heights of the greatest Western classical works.

I suspect that many people in Friday's audience, comfortable, middle-aged, affluent professionals and business people, attend concerts so that can feel good about themselves, not because they know and care a lot about the music.   But who am I to judge or pretend to know who those people are?  I should be glad they're willing to shell out money to keep the orchestra going.  There was barely an empty seat in the hall.  Collectively we had paid a great deal to hear two relatively familiar pieces.

Sometimes I wonder what Mozart would think if he could attend a concert today.  He wrote the pieces we heard about 230 years ago.   Could he have imagined that in Jerusalem, an Ottoman backwater in his day, a symphony orchestra based in Tel Aviv, a city that didn't exist, conducted by a visiting conductor from an Austria bereft of its empire, would perform music for complacent Jewish bourgeois?  It makes me think of the Midrash about Moses who is brought forward in history to see Rabbi Akiva teach his Torah, and he can't understand a thing.

Perhaps there's a glimmer of hope here.  Maybe mankind will survive for another 230 years, and people will still be playing Mozart, perhaps on instruments we cannot imagine, but there will still be an audience that attends concerts as much as an act of self-affirmation as to hear and understand the music.  Even for those listeners, a moment might come when they are moved to tears by the playing of a Helene Grimaud in the year 2252, because she is playing Mozart's 23rd piano concerto as if her own fingers were writing the work, and her own years were hearing it for the first time, and a whole orchestra will be borne aloft  by her playing.