Start The Week With Music ...
... and a blatant appeal to our powers of imagination.
Music, to some extent, is always a visual experience; when the sound of music makes us close our eyes, pictures start rising from within. Beyond that, I won't go into details because everyone's life writes its own movies, its own imagery of the soul. But any tune, even the most insipid melody may, at the drop of a few bars, turn into the soundtrack for a personal drama of great depth and power.
Here's a case in point. Antonin Dvořák’s little Romance op. 11 is not the most complex of compositions. Based on the Andante from his 5th string quartet op. 9, it was written in 1877 at the request of the Provisional Theatre Orchestra in Prague, to be played at their annual concert at the Žofín Palace.
The comparison between the original chamber version and this one for violin and orchestra is interesting. Composed four years after the quartet, the Romance is a great deal more streamlined. They both talk about melancholia, dreams, the sweet sadness, perhaps, of love's labor lost; but whereas the former sounds like a somewhat rambling, self-conscious description taken from a novel, the latter is a simple, moving poem.
- EDVARD MUNCH, Dance of Life (1900) -
This is where the imagination comes in. This piece is a waltz; a very slow, lost, sad one, but a waltz all the same. And for me, that's the key to writing my own little movie scene for it. Again, I won't go into the ins and outs; enough to say it's set on an empty, starkly illuminated stage, against the backdrop of the apocalyptic world we have created. This music, for me, has about it a lot of the unfathomable sadness we, the human species, might feel when - to paraphrase Michael Moorcock - we dance our final "Dance At The End Of Time" ...
Dvořák's Romance for violin and Orchestra in f-minor, op. 11, is played in this miraculous recording (1966, CBS 61 332) by:
Isaak Stern, violin The Philadelphia Orchestra Eugene Ormandy