The Griever's Concerto
The orchestra played the solemn first bar of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 20 and, according to the conductor Riccardo Chailly, the soloist “jumped and panicked, like an electric shock”. Maria João Pires was standing in for another pianist at a public rehearsal and only realised she had learnt the wrong Mozart concerto when she heard the opening bar of the D minor concerto - a gloomy syncopated rhythm of violins that surely mirrored her inner turmoil.
I watched a video of Maria’s horrific realisation and felt a visceral terror that’s best described by one YouTube commenter’s words: “I would die. I would crawl under the piano and die, right there and then.” In the footage of that fateful concert in 2009, we see Maria, back slightly hunched and turned away from the audience while the orchestra is heard intensifying in the background. Maria’s gaze was cast downwards but she probably saw nothing. There was a smile on her face, the sort of smile one might make when the foolishness of one’s error is just coming to light.
I’ve made that smile before, probably more than a few times in my life. Once, when it started pouring while I was waiting for my older daughter’s gymnastics class to end; my mind revisited the moment I stood in front of my kitchen windows and, gazing at the blue skies, consciously chose to leave the laundry out and the windows wide open. At the time, it seemed a rational decision. But when thunder roared and the now darkened skies released torrential rain upon the land, my foremost reaction, though incongruent, was to smile in resignation at my own folly. We came home to a flooded kitchen - drenched laundry was the least of my worries - and by then, my smile had long disappeared.
But I’d take a flooded kitchen over Maria’s predicament anytime. Cleaning a flooded kitchen while heavily pregnant, though hard, is not quite on the same scale as an unprepared soloist on stage, watched on by a full concert hall of expectant spectators. Somehow still smiling, Maria brought her right hand to her eyes, and then her forehead as she rested her elbow against the grand piano that she would soon have to play on. Around this time, her lips started turning down at the corners as the weight of mishearing the name of the concerto over the phone sank in. She told a sprightly Riccardo of her grave predicament who responded by saying, “You can do it, you played it (11 months ago), you can do it no problem, just do it,” all the while continuing to conduct the orchestra. It is this detail that grips me, that I relate to most as a griever - the fact that despite Maria’s nightmarish reality, the music played on. Wrong concerto or not, the orchestra forged ahead and Maria’s entrance inched ever closer.
A grieving person knows the loneliness of learning the wrong concerto. In the final months of my husband’s life and after his death, my life unfolded to the tune of Elgar’s Cello Concerto but it seemed everyone around me was playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major. I was somehow the only person who had received the wrong sheet music, but play along I must. So I learnt to play Beethoven’s Concerto, while pretending I don’t hear Elgar’s concerto in the background. The griever’s concerto is sometimes distracting but bearable, at times loud and debilitating, other times just a hushed murmur, but always, only audible to the griever.
After Larry’s condition deteriorated in the middle of 2022, I reduced my workload but still fulfilled a small number of workshop requests that I had already committed to. Shortly before one of those online workshops was scheduled to begin, Larry, who had been sleeping, started trying to get up to use the toilet. He was somnolent and frail at the time and needed my help to move. I helped him up to sit by the side of the bed, but before he could stand and take a few steps to the toilet, he had accidentally wet himself. My heart broke for my husband who was losing his strength and control of his body, but there was no time for that. All the while, the orchestra forged ahead and my entrance was imminent. I helped him into the bathroom, got him out of his wet clothes, washed him, changed him, helped him onto a different bed to rest, removed the soiled sheets from his bed, rinsed the clothes and sheets and threw them in the washing machine. When I finally sat in front of the laptop ready to facilitate a workshop, thankfully just in time, I was out of breath and covered in perspiration. Nonetheless, my audience heard me play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 perfectly, not knowing it was Elgar’s Cello Concerto that screamed in my head.
It isn’t that the griever’s concerto is the wrong concerto. It’s that the griever’s concerto is out of step with the “more, better, bigger, brighter, faster” symphonies that society moves to. In Geoffrey Gorer’s Death, Grief, and Mourning, written in 1965, he observed that the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.” These days, a grieving person quickly learns that grief is inconvenient, so she silences her concerto and plays along to the societally acceptable one even if every cell in her being is vibrating to a different tune. Grievers go back to work or school, shop at the supermarket, ride buses and trains, meet friends over meals, look interested during conversations, keep up with festive celebrations, cook, clean, exercise…“you can do it, you played it (before), you can do it no problem, just do it.”
I cannot help but wonder what grieving looked like before it became a trend to hide it. What did it look like when people weren’t expected only to grieve within 3 to 5 days of bereavement leave subject to their company’s or school’s approval? In The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, I read about grief that was communal and revered in ancient Scandinavian cultures. For a year or more, the griever’s duty was “to mourn, to live in the ashes of their loss, and to regard this time as holy”. But what caught my attention most was this sentence: “This sacred season in the ashes was the ancient Scandinavian community’s way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered a world parallel to but separate from the daily life of gathering food, feeding children, and tending fields.” In this world that is parallel to but separate, there existed a sacred space where the grieving person did not have to silence her concerto, yet was in harmony with her community.
Almost 2 minutes after that opening bar, Maria covered her mouth with her left hand for a brief but pregnant moment. She brought her right hand to the keys in front of her and as soon as the orchestra came to a silent pause, her piano sang a quiet and affecting melody. Against all odds, her entrance was seamless and she played without making one mistake. The 2000 people in attendance had no inkling of the despair that surged through her moments ago. “The moment when I lose the…I don’t lose the fear, but I lose the tension,” Maria said in an interview with ClassicFM earlier this year, “is when I accept.” She added matter of factly, “People accept everything in the end.”
People accept everything in the end, even great loss. Where Maria had to find acceptance in 2 and a half minutes, ancient Scandinavian cultures intentionally carved out a year or more for those grieving a loss. What of the modern griever?
A day before the first anniversary of Larry’s death, grief caught me completely off guard. I had been feeling a growing calm and hope in the weeks prior and arrogantly thought that I was on top of my grief. I didn’t think much when I agreed to arrangements to meet some friends for lunch one day before Larry’s death anniversary. That morning however, Elgar’s Cello Concerto demanded to be heard and the volume knob I had become adept at using, didn’t work. Once again, I had misread the weather and confidently left the windows wide open. This time, it was grief that rolled in like dark clouds and it was grief that rained down relentlessly. I considered going to lunch anyway - “you can do it, you played it (before), you can do it no problem, just do it.” But that day, grief both inundated me and poured out of me. For much of the day, I cried as if a swollen dam had burst. There was little else I could do but to accept…but unlike Maria, I had no triumphant comeback. I couldn’t play the concerto that the orchestra and the audience were expecting. I surrendered to sorrow and for that one holy day, chose the wrong concerto - my concerto.
The Healing Time - Pesha Gertler Finally on my way to yes I bump into all the places where I said no to my life all the untended wounds the red and purple scars those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin and bones, those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again where I find them, the old wounds the old misdirections and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy holy.
hi Li Ling, how do I reach out to you? Have been reading your posts since Larry passed on. We still bring his work out of our family cupboard often to view, because it is one of the more memorable ones we have. Not sure how substack works but PM me if there is a function like that?