I just listened to the Andante of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto, played by Maria Joao Pires. I enjoy watching her beautiful face up close, emotions expressing themselves almost imperceptively.
The concerto has three parts, the Andante being the second. It starts at 13.27. Andante means walking and thus, the piano is played at a leisurely tempo. When I heard the simple opening notes of the melody, tears of joy and sadness welled up in my eyes, trickled down, and wetted my cheeks.
It was not only the glorious music that gave me such emotion.
The music reminded me of a story my father once told me. He had parked the car a few kilometers from our house, next to a country road. It was winter, and the wide polders of Holland were covered in snow. The car stood next to a small windmill, red and green against the snow. My mother sat next to him. They looked out over the white world in front of them while the radio played this concerto. They were sitting hand in hand, listening to this joyous and sad music.
While I myself am listening, probably fifty years later, to the same music, in my mind I can see my father and mother sitting in their car in the white land, the shrouded winter skies of Holland above them, reaching as high as heaven.
I am sure my father cried. He often cried when he listened to classical music. He tried to hide it from us, his sons. My mother then took his hand in hers and told him he didn’t have to be ashamed, that these tears were actually a beautiful thing, and he could let them flow. Probably his love of music was one of the reasons why she had fallen in love with him in the first place.
It is funny how the mind conjures up images. Looking at the scene in the snow, sometimes I am in the car, sometimes I am outside looking in, and sometimes looking down from on high, like a hawk sailing in the freezing wind.
When my father died, the Andante was played at his funeral.