The Universality of Music
Four musical themes are swirling around in my head. They are events, more than musical performances, and are rich in metaphysical significance. These events involve the integration of musical compositions, its performers and the audience. Music cannot exist by itself. In order to be complete, it requires the addition of an interpreter and a listener. Nor could heaven exist without Love, loving, and loved ones.
The first involves eighty-eight-year-old Arthur Rubinstein performing the second movement of Chopin’s second piano concerto which the composer wrote when he was nineteen. An octogenarian playing the music of a teenager! And yet, there was a perfect symbiosis that received rave reviews. Rubinstein, by his own admission, came to a fuller understanding of Chopin’s music in his later years. It is most extraordinary, then, for a teenager to compose music of lasting and universal significance that requires one of the most insightful concert pianists in the world a virtual lifetime to comprehend it to his satisfaction.
The second involves concert pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy entertaining fellow pianist Nobuyuki Tsjii at his former home in Iceland and asking his protégé to play a few chords on the piano. Tsjii more than obliged by playing the opening movement of Chopin’s first piano concerto. Ashkenazy was born in Russia and Tsjii in Japan. Ashkenazy (age 81) married an Icelandic pianist whose father was a symphony conductor. Tsjii (age 30) was born blind and yet shared the gold prize in the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano competition. In this scenario, music had obliterated the- distances between Russia, Japan, Iceland, and Poland. Good music has nothing to do with geography, though throughout history, geography has been a constant occasion for war.
The third involves Jehudi Menuhin who, at twelve years of age, and on the night of April 4, 1929 in Berlin, Germany, performed the Bach, Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos. To have played all three of these demanding works at such a tender age and in a single night is more than remarkable; it borders on the supernatural. Menuhin is Jewish. The three composers are Christian, although belonging to different denominations. As duly reported in The New York Times, none other than Albert Einstein, a Jew whose religious faith resembles that of Spinoza, rushed from his seat in the audience to the dressing room where he lifted the young lad and said: “Today, Yehudi, you have once again proved to me that there is a God in heaven”.
The fourth is borrowed from the Stephen King classic, The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Tim Robbins’ character uses his privileged position with the prison governor to broadcast over the tannoy system a recording of Duettino sull’aria (a little duet on the breeze) from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Prisoners stopped what they were doing. They were transfixed, in awe of this completely unexpected and beautiful gift. Two female vocalists were expressing in music something from another realm. In the motion picture version, the honey-toned voice-over of Morgan Freeman says to the audience: “I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it”.
These four musical themes tell us in a most striking way that music transcends age, geography, time, religion, and occupation. Music is universal in the sense that it has the power to unite all members of the human race. As a form of beauty, it is the seamless integration of truth and goodness. It is not truth in the abstract nor goodness as mere pleasure. It compels the whole person and makes him aware of a higher world where the brotherhood of mankind is not divided by the arrogance of the individual.
