monocle

Dear friends of piano music,

my husband had a fellow student who always looked as if he lived in the imperial era. He never went out of the house without a monocle and walking stick, on festive occasions he wore a uniform richly decorated with medals, otherwise dark suits, unless the sun came out unexpectedly. Then he rushed home to change his clothes for a light summer suit. He had like-minded people who, as loyal to the emperor as he, dreamed of a restoration of the monarchy as the only and ideal form of government. I found this radical form of glorification of the past as fascinating as it was eerie.

Of course, our memories, even when it comes to what we have experienced ourselves, never correspond to the facts, because memories are "made" and they even change in the course of our lives. How subjective they are becomes clear in emotionally shocking events such as criminal offenses or divorces - "audiatur et altera pars", one should also hear the other side, because one will experience a significantly different version of the same incidents, possibly a completely different story, the nevertheless is based on the same facts.

The transfiguration of the past is probably as old as humanity itself, the interesting thing about it for me is: Why does it bother me in some cases, but not in others? The Romantics were particularly thorough glorifiers of the past; they idealized the ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages, and they dealt with fairy tales and horror stories with the same enthusiasm. I can live with that - it's the essence of romanticism to do so. Nostalgia is also a very understandable feeling for me - the somewhat wistful celebration of past beauty. To a certain extent, this also belongs to the profession of the classical musician, provided that he does not only play avant-garde music. I think you can be old-fashioned and nostalgic to a certain extent without glossing over the past so one-sidedly that it becomes unbearable. But there is a point where nostalgia turns into sentimentality, and at that point I regularly get toothache. In music it is an interesting self-experiment to find out exactly where this subjectively perceived limit lies. Sometimes it is a tightrope walk ...

Otherwise, I'm just wondering whether I also tend to glorify the past. For example, the time before the children. No, it wasn't better, but it was a lot quieter. Yesterday the little rascals found my recorder collection, and that sounded neither nostalgic nor sentimental, but very, very terrible.

Kerstin