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Rating: Many years have passed, too many.
I have already mentioned my very talented concert pianist relative, Aunt G., who no longer performs in public due to age and health reasons (pianists do a number on their spines, among other things). Over the years, she has always saved me a front-row seat, if possible, at her Roman concerts. A beautiful piano soiree from thirty-four years ago, roughly speaking, organized by the American Embassy for some award presentation I can't quite remember, with many distinguished guests, a couple of ministers, many famous musicians, and myself, sixteen years old, uncomfortable in my father's tuxedo, who would die soon after, and I knew it very well.
Rachmaninov and Liszt, Chopin and Bartok, if I remember correctly, more than an hour of wonderful music, also because Aunt G. played truly divinely, her hair always gathered at the nape, absorbed and absent from the world, with that sad smile I remember so well. Endless applause and two encores, one—Bartok's Allegro Barbaro—with great contrast effect, and the other... the other changed my life.
Eight, nine minutes suspended in time and space, the futile attempt not to cry, but I wasn't the only one moved. A very slow and dreamy performance of the First Movement of Beethoven's Sonata no. 14 ('Moonlight'), poignant and intense, enchantment and pain, the wave of 'piano' and 'forte' extremely difficult for the performer to manage but vibrant in the body and soul of the listener, enraptured, nailed to the seat. The mystery of night and death in a piece for solo instrument, perhaps the most melancholic—most 'dark'—piece in the entire history of music, ecstatically suspended in a transfigured waltz that cannot be humanly danced, the supreme expression of an atrocious and beautiful sadness that belongs to life itself and not just to Ludwig's unspoken love for his student. An absurd beauty, perfectly internalized by listeners of all times and cultures since its first performance.
For the record, a very famous conductor and I found ourselves next to each other at the subsequent buffet, after I managed to recompose a more dignified and less emotion-stricken face in the bathroom (my father's illness was not unrelated, I fear). I noticed this Gentleman next to me, already a bit elderly, only when we both tried to take the same canapé, and I was left breathless and speechless, that mass of white hair, that magnetic and imposing presence, that famous friendly face in front of me with the same canapé between us. He gave me a big smile and, of course, took the canapé, then told me in typical New York twang: ‘Don’t you worry, I was moved myself’. Don't worry, I was moved myself. When I recounted this to Aunt G., I got an old smile in response, I believe they were friends, but she never played that waltz for me again.
The gentleman with the untidy white hair departed a few years later, I suppose without imagining what an impression he had left on a scared sixteen-year-old boy.
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