Nostalgia

Dear friends of piano music,

sometimes even I have to clean up. While I'm not particularly fond of doing this, my kids love messing around. A tidy room immediately puts them in the busiest hustle and bustle, as it opens up completely new opportunities for anarchist chaos. What they don't like, however, is to part with old things. Giving away baby toys is almost impossible, they are clinging to their belongings and they even want to go back to the time when they had nothing to do but play, crawl around the apartment or be driven around in the buggy. So children are already nostalgic.

When my grandparents got so old that they had to spend more of their lives on the sofa, they lived almost entirely in the past. This is perfectly normal and understandable when friends and acquaintances have already passed away and you can no longer pursue your hobbies. With my grandparents, however, there was also the fact that they had fled the GDR, the communist-ruled East of Germany, when they were in their early thirties and left their parents, their siblings, their farm, their real home there. It must have been incredibly beautiful there, at least until before World War II. A large village community that sang and celebrated together, that helped each other with the harvest. I always think of it as “Bullerbü” (children's books by Astrid Lindgren), and I remember very funny things like a party where a seriously drunk man put a piece of plum cake in his wallet to bring to his wife, or of a runaway cow that strolled through the always open door into the living room, where it slipped on the freshly polished wooden floorboards and accidentally sat down on the sofa. My grandmother was extremely delighted when she discovered the animal there.

There are numerous human weaknesses that I repeatedly discover in myself, such as superstition, dogmatism, repression or inconsistency. You really can't be proud of that ... but the glorification of the past, the nostalgia, is among the few sympathetic ones of all the human weaknesses.

Best regards

Kerstin

Edvard Grieg: Lyric Pieces, Book I, Op.12 - 1. Arietta: https://youtu.be/rQlO4XdzHSc