Music and Mayhem

On Valentine’s evening my sweetheart took me to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform in the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. Conductor Riccardo Muti came on stage to lead Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique, Opus 3. But first he made an impromptu speech. Here is the gist of it in my own words:

 

This afternoon, just an hour away from here in Parkland, seventeen people were murdered in another school shooting. This has affected me deeply, much as I felt on September 11, 2001, when I was preparing to lead a concert in Torino. I thought perhaps no one would come, but they all did, needing music to make sense of the world. That night I asked the orchestra to play Schubert’s Rosamunde (Entr’acte No. 3) . I would like to end the program with that piece tonight. I ask you to think of the parents who sent their children off to school this morning, not knowing that they would never see them again. When this piece concludes, please do not applaud, but leave the hall in silence. Now please stand for a moment of reflection.

You could have heard a pin drop. As only a great leader can, Muti united the entire concert hall in somber reflection. After the Stravinsky, we enjoyed hearing Jennifer Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto and Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major. The musicians were in top form and playing from their hearts. Then the Schubert, so simple and so lovely. We kept silence until we reached the car. When I googled Rosamunde, I found that Michael Tilson Thomas had performed the same piece in 2011 in Sydney, Australia, to honor victims of natural disasters in the Pacific. He and Muti are obviously on the same wave length.

The Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland FL is named for one of my favorite authors, who wrote The Everglades: River of Grass. There is a statue of Douglas at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables that my granddaughter Nina especially likes. Last night her father, our son David, who works not far from Parkland, sent me this text: Thought of this statue and you today in light of the local horror show. Difficult to process such awfulness on a day of love. So I say through tears, Happy Valentines Day.

Back in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald took a strong stand on gun violence in America. Here is their editorial posted on Facebook this morning by my former student Meg Rebull:

It is incomprehensible to us, as Australians, that a country so proud and great can allow itself to be savaged again and again by its own citizens. We cannot understand how the long years of senseless murder, the Sandy Hooks and Orlandos and Columbines, have not proved to Americans that the gun is not a precious symbol of freedom, but a deadly cancer on their society.
We point over and over to our own success with gun control in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, that Australia has not seen a mass shooting since and that we are still a free and open society. We have not bought our security at the price of liberty; we have instead consented to a social contract that states lives are precious, and not to be casually ended by lone madmen. But it is a message that means nothing to those whose ideology is impervious to evidence.”
• Demand background checks
• Demand a ban on assault weapons
• Demand a ban on all modifications to convert weapons to semi or fully automatic
• Demand accountability by the Senators and Representatives on the NRA payroll.