FEBRUARY 2, 2021 – When I saw images of the goons invading the Capitol on January 6, I couldn’t imagine having anything in common with them. Ditto the man on whose account and upon whose instigation they’d staged their rage. (I don’t even golf.) My disdain for them is cut and dried. Hold them fully accountable, I say; then move on.
It could be worse . . . and has been. Or so?
Recently, I enjoyed a long phone conversation with my oldest sister, Kristina, who lives near Boston. She’s a professional violinist, and though the pandemic upended her career, she continues to perform at church, where parishioners are mostly “virtual,” participating via some form of Zoom.
On the side, my sister plays piano, and a short while back the church organist introduced Kristina to some Bach written for four hands, two pianos. The church musician said the actual sheet music in her possession was old and brittle and would have to be photocopied. She did so and mailed the reproduced music to Kristina.
After practicing a bit on her own, Kristina appeared at her counterpart’s home for an afternoon of Bach—four hands, two pianos. (Since the woman owned two pianos, Kristina didn’t have to lug her own parlor grand.) After exchanging pleasantries, the two musicians got down to business.
First off, the host wanted to show Kristina the original sheet music. The shocker: the cover page, which had eluded the copier, bore a stamp. It read in German, “From the Library of Adolf Hitler.”
Kristina gasped. The owner then told the story of how American forces liberating one of the death camps had stumbled upon a warehouse bursting with grand pianos and piles of sheet music featuring the works of great composers. Soldiers began helping themselves. Among them was a relative of Kristina’s host, who managed to grab Bach’s work for four hands, two pianos. He stuffed the music into his pack and hauled it home. Now, a lifetime later, Bach’s once imprisoned beauty would fill the room with . . . joy.
Doubtless the Bach (and pianos) had been treasures confiscated from victims of the Nazi regime. But when Kristina told me the story, the mark of “Adolf Hitler” upon such beauty turned into a screeching runaway train jumping the rails and crashing into humanity crowded upon a platform—with grating steel and blood-curdling screams reverberating inside a cavernous Bahnhof.
My mind leapt to all the movies I’d seen depicting Nazis and Beethoven; to all the books I’d read about Nazis and stolen art of the ages—all of it so obscenely incongruous. How could such evil associate itself with such beauty?
Call it the rape of civilization. Evil human beings violating the very highest forms of human achievement.
At least Bach, Beethoven, and Botticelli are off-limits to people like Trump and the Capitol rioters—not because such folk aren’t evil but because they’re oblivious. Evil can’t desecrate what escapes its notice.
Except . . . wait. What of Democracy?
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
