Prelude
When I was talking about Fukuda's resignation over a cup of cafe-late at a coffee shop with a friend of mine yesterday, a piece of music came flowing. It sounded familiar. What was it? It took me some time to recognize. Prelude #4 by Chopin.
When I first heard this music, it was in a film "Five Easy Pieces" starring Jack Nicholson with abundant hair still on his head. I was young then and I felt stuck with my life full of things to do. I thought how good it would be to live like the central character, whose name I forget, in the movie played by Jack.
Jack played a role of a man who was born in a high class family and once wanted to be a pianist but throws everything away and lives on a physical labor.
There was a scene where Jack played Prelude #4 on the piano to his brother's wife. The camera slowly panned from him, around the room, picking up twice the face of her standing by the piano struck and moved with tears in her eyes. I was somehow crying with her also struck by the music. The music was simple enough to enable Jack to play, yet the cord in minor progressed in a way sad, beautiful, elegant, sometimes comfortably expected and sometimes pleasantly unexpected, in short "beyond description". Jack himself actually played the piano. So I think it was not good performance. Still the music was awesome.
It was several years later that I knew the music was Prelude #4. Of all the 24 pieces of the Prelude I like #4 the best. I wondered why Chopin made only preludes to which no music follows and that as many as 24 pieces. My interpretation now is he made each prelude a prelude to the next prelude. That's why each prelude is so different from the others.
Music is part of my life. It cannot separate from events that happened when I heard it. A piece of music reminds me vividly of one scene of a movie, on my way home in a car with lost heart, with broken heart, running behind others at an athletic meeting, when my daughter was born... All the events are colored by different music. An event in life may be a prelude to the next event that is also a prelude to the next.. that goes on... until a Requiem.
*1:At last I found it here. Listening to him play again I find it rather awful. But still the music is beautiful.
