Outreach at the High School and Eliana answers my questions
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David YangI call every member of my family until somebody picks up and entertains me, and when they get bored, I call the next person.
Mark your calendar with the Roebling Piano Trio NCMF spring recital on Saturday, March 8th at St Paul’s.
German has great words. OK, it isn’t so great for romantic stuff (“I love you” - Ich liebe dich - is like the sound one makes trying to get a hair out of your mouth), but for angsty terms it is unsurpassed. Let’s take one of my favorite German words: Weltschmerz. Is there a single word in English that says all this?
The feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind resulting in "a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering."
Famously, Beethoven used beklemmt (which I discussed in a previous post). Schumann (and later Webern) carefully used the word innig. In English, innig translates as “intimately” but, oh, it is so much more. In music it denotes something intensely personal, private, inward - something you share only with your best friend late at night.
Which brings us to Piazzolla’s “Oblivion.” While short (four minutes), “Oblivion” will figure prominently on The Roebling Piano Trio’s concert in March.
Piazzolla has a somewhat complicated place in the pantheon of classical composers. Born in a coastal city in Argentina in 1921 to parents of Italian descent, his family moved in 1925 to Greenwich Village, NYC. He grew up listening to his father’s tango and classical recordings, with a particular interest in Bach. In 1929, his father bought him a used bandoneon, a kind of big brother to the accordion. By 1932, at the age of 11, he was writing his own tangos while taking lessons with a Hungarian pianist who taught him Bach.
In 1936, when the family moved back to Argentina, his reputation grew both in tango, as a composer and virtuoso on the bandoneon, and classical composition. None other than legendary 20th Century pianist Artur Rubinstein suggested he pursue studies with the founder of modern Argentinean classical composition, Alberto Ginastera, who, in turn, helped the young man secure a grant to study with the composition teacher of the greats, Nadia Boulanger, in Paris. Boulanger was a giant who enabled many of the greatest composers of the 20th Century to locate their unique voice, among them Copland, Bernstein, Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, Darius Milhaud, and Elliot Carter. Piazzolla wrote of his life-changing encounter with her: When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: “It’s very well written” … After a long while she said: “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this. And she began to investigate my private life: what I did, what I did and did not play, if I was single, married or living with someone, she was like an FBI agent! And I was very ashamed to tell her I was a tango musician. She kept asking: “You say you are not a pianist. What instrument do you play then?” And I didn’t want to tell her that I was a bandoneón player… Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that’s Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.
Piazzolla and Maradona, tango y fútbol
The music for “Oblivion” was written by Piazzolla in 1984 to accompany the Italian film “Henry IV” based on a play by Luigi Pirandello starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale. Since then, this piece, in countless transcriptions, has become a beloved staple of the concert stage. For me, the music is full of heartbreak; or the memory of the loss of a loved one years before; a path not taken. It makes you smile, but it is a sad smile, full of tenderness and loss. (There are entire films that feel like this – Miloš Forman’s “Ragtime” and Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” come to mind.) The closest word in English might be “nostalgia” but – that’s not quite right. “Melancholy” is too strong and doesn’t acknowledge the implied memories of happier times; “Regret” is also one-dimensional. I described the feeling to a German friend who identified it as wehmut, best defined in this 18th Century romantic poem.
David Yang, Artistic Director
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David YangI call every member of my family until somebody picks up and entertains me, and when they get bored, I call the next person.
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David YangPeople have such interesting lives – they’ve lived all over, done this, done that; everyone has a story.
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David YangA degree in music, even from a school like Juilliard, leaves the recent graduate staring into the abyss.
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