Vibrato

I’m hunting for psalms.

The CPO and ESO1 banded together to play, via multiple webcams, “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations. It’s music for solemn moments: funerals and the British handover of Hong Kong. But there’s a startling joy threaded through the solemnity: after all, each of the variations is a portrait of a friend.

All of the musicians who played Nimrod yesterday were laid off by their orchestral employers. With public health orders for the audience to stay home there are no more concerts, operas, plays, or ballets this season. Yet the music itself endures all calamity, so long as it has willing players. Elgar composed the Enigma Variations in the 1890s. Cellists are playing Bach cantatas in the rain. The scores won’t disappear any time soon.

I listened to the music and I thought of Shostakovich. His 7th Symphony was written during the Siege of Leningrad as the German army starved the city to death. The musicians assembled for the première were blockade survivors performing with mouldering instruments stripped of edible parts. The music was played on the radio and speakers were set up to blast the music at enemy lines.

I’ve been thinking about that episode from Shostakovich’s life a lot recently. Art grows in response to stimulus: the desire to defy, to romanticize, to enshrine. The making of something shapes anxiety into a workable item, or gives context to loss. Even when people are preoccupied with the basic business of survival, art flickers, persists.

Shostakovich became a folk hero in the United States and the Soviet Union after writing the 7th Symphony. He graced the cover of Life magazine in his Leningrad fire brigade uniform. He was a fingers-crossed patriot and an unlikely figurehead for national pride. A slender, smoking man, his nerves shattered by Stalin and fear of the NKVD, and tortured by the love of two women. The unlikeliest of war captains. The desire to do something led to a symphony, and no war requiem.

I wonder now what art will come out of all this fear and uncertainty. The jokes and the memes are already here, the gag clips of isolated citizens crafting snooker tables with paper cups and cherry tomatoes. Spaniards yelling Battleship coordinates between their balconies. Italians playing ping pong across window sills. Defiant singing. The guileless urge to carry on in the face of enormous anxiety. But who will write the novels, the symphonies about this. How will we remember these times?

Now I think of collective memory and the markers we lay down in history. Shostakovich 7. Spanish Battleship. I hope someone writes a comedic opera about the panicked toilet paper hoarders, even though there is some disagreement about the question of comedy and if it’s appropriate at the given time. Our excuses and our inadequacies will be weighed in the future.

I turn now to Stravinsky for comfort, the finale of the Firebird. Hope and defiance and a soaring brass section. I save it for when I need the most potent dose of uplift. Some people have their anxiety medication, I have music. But isn’t that also, in a strange way, a drug?

It’s not enough to make mourning art. There’s the art of the present, next to the live wire of uncertainty and trouble. It animates our days.