MARCH 28, 2024 – Trust me. I’m only half as crazy as I appear to be. But I must confess, I thoroughly enjoy the level of insanity that I’ve been able to maintain throughout most of my life—thus far. Despite my strivings to go all the way over the edge, I’ve long accepted that life isn’t perfect: a part of me will always be (perfectly) sane.
Today, though, I gave full-on insanity the college try. Sorry, I should share some of the credit with the workmen in the house. Starting much too early, they got the idea that remodeling our upstairs bathroom should involve lots of NOISE—with sawz-alls, hammers and chisels. Make that SAWZ-ALLS, HAMMERS and CHISELS. At times things got so out of hand the entire house shook, and our house is rock solid. I was afraid to peer up the stairwell for fear I’d see clear sky. In the midst of this, this . . . insanity . . . Beth appeared in the living room where I was sitting—like a crazy man, eyes as big as saucers as I stared at my laptop screen and tried to make sense of the file I’d opened. “I think I have some errands to run,” she said, laughing. I realized her humor was pointed at me. She knew I had no ability to go anywhere. I was stuck fast to my chair.
The pounding got so crazy I pulled out my phone to check the photo I’d taken of the construction zone yesterday evening. From this I estimated the number of tiles that had to be removed. I went all-the-way-crazy and came up with the number 750. I then ran the math: 10 hammer blows per tile, with the sawz-all thrown in for good measure in a dozen hard-to-reach corners of the project.
After counting to 100, I decided going 100% insane probably wasn’t such a happy place after all. As is the case with so many other things in life, the turf of my mental state was much greener when viewed from a distance. I realized that I’d never counted anything to 1,000—except for the bud caps I stapled to the white pine in my tree garden a year ago last fall. Now I’d taken on a number seven and a half times that, and I was sucking wind at just 100. Total insanity, I decided, was not what it was cracked up to be. It was . . . well . . . insane to strive for it.
But how now to backtrack from the edge of the precipice of total craziness?
Try Chopin, I thought. Why Chopin, you might ask. Ah hah! A collection of his Preludes edited by Ignace Paderewski sat on the music rack of the piano. I’d purchased the book at a music shop in Warsaw Poland in 1981; a gift for my mother. Unfortunately, the binding of the Instytut Fryderyka Chopina – Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne edition isn’t of the best quality (the Communist paper mills produced musical scores and toilet paper from the same paper stock), and 43 years have left it compromised. I’d uncovered it a month ago and had taken a crack at Prelude No. 4, marked Largo, which I’d taught myself years before wandering off to Poland. Unfortunately, my muscle memory lapsed some decades ago. I’d have to relearn the piece.
In any event, with Beth absent from the house and the workmen at still under 1,000 hammer blows (it seemed), I figured I’d fight noise with noise. I sat down at the piano bench and hammered away (so to speak) at Chopin—despite the marking espressivo next to the P at the outset of the very first phrase. I felt like a beginner downhill skier with zero athletic skills. “Keep your weight on the downhill ski!” my inner instructor called out, just as my knees buckled and I made a nice sitzmark on the slope. I got myself back up, dusted the snow off my butt, formed again what looked like a snowplow and edged down the hill—about 10 feet before . . . kerplunk!
A hundred hammer blows more, and I’d finally cleared the first line of the Prelude. My big problem was the bass clef: a “G” is really a “B,” and a “D #” is actually an “F #.” As I drilled this into my sorry brain, I marveled at all the pianists I knew who could whip down a double-black diamond slope, all eight fingers on the left hand flying with as much ease over the base clef as eleven fingers of the right hand scurried over the treble.
I wondered if my version of Chopin had driven the workmen crazy yet. This question arose about a minute before I realized I was driving myself insane. Time to give Chopin a rest.
Between blowing my nose, trying to cough up phlegm, and sipping water I’d warmed up in the microwave, I wondered what I could do for an encore—not to drive myself insane but to prevent myself from doing so.
The answer: Mozart. Why of course!
Miraculously, I can actually play Mozart and rather fluidly. One of my sisters once reminded me that the only people who really know how to play Mozart are young children and old men. As a young kid at heart and an old man in reality, I should therefore “know how to play Mozart.” And I do. I truly do—and the most famous music in all the world. No, not the Jupiter or Symphony No. 40, Exsultate Jubilate, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the violin concerti, or any of the piano sonatas or concerti, but what Mozart wrote specifically for young children and old men . . . that which twinkles with celestial light: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I’ve devised my own harmony, my own voicing, and I each time I play it, I do so with my own naive “interpretation,” and it gives me great delight, especially when Illiana is on hand to hear it, so there.
But today I held off. I found Mozart on YouTube, and went for piano concerti—not the ones I know best, No. 17, 21, or 23, which are the three that I heard most when I was growing up. Instead I randomly chose No. 14 and 15. These miraculously restored my equilibrium. I didn’t notice when the hammering stopped upstairs, but Mozart had conquered it. I’d survived it.
Now fast forward to a phone call I received late in the day from my sister Jenny. She was on her way to Carnegie Hall to hear Mitsuko Uchida perform Mozart No. 17 and 22 as she conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. A short while later Jenny texted me a photo of the Carnegie stage. I immediately hiked across my laptop keyboard to YouTube and searched “Uchida Mozart 17.” I found it just in time: the two performances—one live, one recorded—were playing now almost exactly in sync with each other.
Where I now sit, I see the sun appear to dip toward the horizon. From 100,000 miles out in space, the sun isn’t dipping at all. It merely shines relentlessly, just as the good ol’ earth spins inexorably, turning day to night, night to day. This was going for eons before humans came along . . . with cold viruses, sawz-alls, hammers and chisels, insanity . . . and Mozart.
How insane is all that? Pretty damn miraculous, if you ask me.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
