MARCH 22, 2024 – Today I watched and listened to the recording of a live performance by the Borodin Quartet, one of the oldest string quartets in the world. The 90-minute concert I listened to featured Borodin—surprise, surprise—along with Tchaikovsky (Andante cantabile from quartet no. 1, opus 11), and Schubert’s The Death and the Maiden. Over its decades-long existence, the quartet has been best known for its renditions of the 15 quartets of Dimitri Shostakovich, who worked very closely with the group and gave it his stamp of approval.
Founded in 1946, the ensemble achieved special favor with the Communists and performed at the funerals of both Joseph Stalin and Sergei Prokofiev, who died on the same day—March 5, 1953. In a testament to the staying power of great music—and the hard-core training traditions of the Moscow Conservatory—the Borodin Quartet has survived and thrived amidst three-quarters of a century of . . . both Russian upheaval and inertia.
As the musical gifts of the Borodin musicians brought the genius of Borodin (one of the “Mighty Handful”), Tchaikovsky, and Schubert to life and gave me a boost of inspiration, news came in of the horrific attack at the concert facility just outside of Moscow—60 dead; 145 wounded. The contrast between Beauty and the Beast couldn’t be greater. Brilliance of heart and mind vs. holes of the soul deeper than the darkest reaches of the universe.
We all despair, of course, when we hear of crushing violence perpetrated by us against us; not by aliens sent to destroy us, but our own kind attacking our own kind. And yet even when the scale goes “biblical” as it did in the 20th Century—or as it did in the stories of the Bible—the staggering evil that we unleash on ourselves is never enough to shame or scare us into burying it once and for all. The war to end all wars, at it turned out, didn’t. Nor did the war that followed, even when it ended with shocks in the form of thermonuclear mushroom clouds.
Yet by the same token, none of the bullets or bombs can ever extinguish or even long suppress our strivings to do better, to be kinder, more charitable, and to produce works of wonder and beauty.
The irony of the Moscow attack, of course, is that Russia has inflicted its own evil on Ukraine. The one evil doesn’t lessen or justify the other, but both serve to underscore how much humanity needs the hope and promise to be found in good works. Russia has produced its share of treasures, not the least of which is great music. At the end of this tragic day, that is what all the world must seize upon.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
