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Rating: Music.
Harmony, lightness of spirit, organic freshness, paradise of the limbs, eternal breath of peace, human spiritual spring.
Can a piano solo avert the dominance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Are Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms able to avoid the evil symphonies of the grenadier and the ruling machine gun?
Wladyslaw Szpilman managed it. The Jew who, for six long years, traded art for hunger, creativity for death, flair for exile. From the piano bar of a luxurious restaurant in Warsaw, the Polish capital, he migrated to the decay of the ghetto, a degrading mass of little men reduced to primordial beasts. Hidden behind a wall and a deafening tram, forced to improvise as dancers for the circus shows of the self-proclaimed arbiters of peace, brought to disgustingly licking trickles of canned soup spilled on black asphalt.
That Poland, designed in minute detail by (semi) expert architects made in Versailles twenty years earlier, no longer exists: the Third Reich and the Soviet Union have divided it, like beasts on a defenseless antelope. The stench of blood, gunpowder, the decaying mire trampled by the boots of the SS, invade picturesque Warsaw, the elegant Gothic-Baroque buildings begin to crumble.
Wladyslaw and his family do not give up, Thanatos seems to ignore them, but neither does Life extend them a sincere smile; from the window, the grim, nocturnal Nibelung show of an old infirm man thrown forcefully from a balcony, his relatives, in flight, shot without requiem. This, after all, represents the only show offered by the conflict, completely free for the only survivors. Who, little by little, find themselves on a freight car towards unconditional extermination.
The train does not take The Pianist, he remains alone, in an almost deserted station. The ghetto, an authentic cemetery, has emptied, Warsaw has frighteningly shrunk, an eerie European Far West; Wladyslaw wanders in tears without a destination: a nomad, for years, in his own city, like the stray cat, the sewer rat, seeking refuge, exiled from his affections, immersed in the catastrophe of hate. He digs in the mud, is tormented by those who promise peace and wealth with the whip. In the middle of a construction site, he watches the eagles silhouetted against the leaden sky, a roaring swarm of allied bombers. Hope fights with reality, the match is extended further. On the ground, corpses, pitiful sacks of potatoes, barracks, cockroaches, and parasites.
New apartments open and close: cordial, merciful, humane people who welcome the destitute, who save the defenseless, now catapulted into the Warsaw, counterpoint to the deadly Nazi-Soviet clash. If anything was left standing, now it burns diabolically: a mummy decomposes, already pierced in the heart of its people by atrocious anti-heroes from the "democratic" West.
Wladyslaw remains, however, The Pianist: his face is terribly bristly, his clothes torn, his hair long and dirty, but his fingers mime Chopin, playing, in the shadow of a demolished wall, an imaginary piano. Delirium, yes, but a residual light, still shining, of memory: it is the rightful inefficiency of the rifle and the dynamite, the current Domini.
Ich war ein Pianist.
A few minutes, the harmony of a piano that moves the German Officer and saves the Jew with golden hands. Shots that halt their deadly fury. Only they, however, manage to be silent now. Perhaps too late.
Resurrected melody that returns to cheer spirit and flesh, but does not forget to have been replaced by the deafening cannon of the disharmonious red and black Armies.
Unfortunately for the history of Man, these last ones represent the dominant sound source. His playlist preferred in the ages of ages. And it seems that not even in the era of so-called democracy and international balances has the multimedia player of Homo Sapiens undergone any slight modification in its normal reproduction.
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