Marta’s piece this morning about her father sparked something about my father who also liked to listen to classical music, no, not classical music, but Italian opera, and I, a 13-year-old girl who thought she didn’t like that kind of music, secretly loved Verdi’s Requiem, particularly the “Dies Irae” – the day of wrath, an appropriate piece for an angry teenager. My father would put it on the record player every night before I fell asleep that year I lived with him in Carmel, sent there by my mother against my will, crying and begging to stay with her. Yes, those were days of wrath. I learned years after I lay on my bed listening to the chorus sing that wonderful, swooping down music that Verdi didn’t go to church, hated organized religion, that he wrote the Requiem in honor of the death of a poet he loved, to be performed a year after the poet’s death. I had stopped going to church when I was ten, found it boring and charmless, but this music, the music of the last judgement, the music of a funeral mass, excited me so. And still does.
Wow! There is SO much is this very short very emotional piece, not a word wasted. The connection with Verdi, the father, the separation from the mother, and the prevailing excitement of the music through it all.
ReplyDeleteI, too, like the parts about teenage angst and the day of wrath. And the part at the end about the musician not wanting to go to church.
ReplyDeleteThe music echoes and expresses the passion and power within the narrator --
ReplyDeleteAmazing how such an economy of words can have such an impact...emotions and images of teenage angst so perfectly summed up,
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