If we replace Franz with Sam, the resulting utterance is the most famous in the history of cinema but usually reproduced wrongly as “Play it again, Sam.” That would be a great way to start an article on how easily tricked our brains are, or on how we collectively pass down information of events that never were; myths as one example. But this one, Sam, is going to be about what you were there for—for music.
It seems I'm one of those who came equipped to this world lacking the starstruck gene, or whatever it is that makes us want to have children with a person we know almost no thing about except that his or her performance is messing with our entire beings. So you can easily imagine my dropping jaw when watching footage of a The Beatles' gig, and all that mass hysterical screaming, and all that fainting.
But...
The thing is that it would be implausible that all of a sudden in the early 1960's a part of humanity had suffered a mutation that made it swoon in the presence of music composers and performers. And that thought leads me back to Franz, Ferenc, Franciscus, all of them Liszt, out of a list of alternative names for the very same composer.
Liszt is reputed to have been one of the rare both composers and virtuoso performers of the 19th century, while his pieces were famous for being dubbed as unplayable, or for requiring four hands to be performed. This is easily perceived in his only piano sonata known as Piano Sonata in B. Minor. That's quite a stolid name for a piece that could have been known as I Am the Yellow Submarine and I Will Dive in You. The shift of emotions throughout the piece, and the intensity that playing it requires, surely drew many a sigh from the lady concert goers of that time. “Oh, Franz...”
And why? Because, most likely, Liszt's music would have sounded as a break from what the ears of that time were used to, in a pleasant way. He was the shit of his own time. And music and our very existence seem to the fatally tied to one another, from the heartbeat of our mother, from the resonance of her voice in our first concert hall: the womb, to the sound of our hands and feet first stamping the floor. No surprise then that music turned out to be therapeutic in some instances.
Musical score sheets, with their allegro energetico or con strepito entries, might be seen today as elitist or snob. I'm inclined to believe though that, if those kind of entries were renamed mentally to fuck all or bring the house down, the gold wash that they seem to wear would wear off. And thus we could see the bare nature of the geniuses behind them, regardless of the epoch each was born in.
My niece C and her colleagues and teachers did exactly that last night to an even older rock star, Claudio Monteverdi. By erecting a performance with humour and amour, and in spite of the gold wash the 17th concert hall in need of repairs exhibited, they were able to transport the sex-appeal that Monteverdi brought to the world in that same century and the one before to the 21st.
“Play it, Franz. For first times' sake.”
