June is time for most of the churches in
Pittsburgh to move their worship into smaller,
air-conditioned facilities like the chapel or
social hall. Before we leave our large,
Tiffany-window-bedecked sanctuary, I like to
give the grand organ a go for one last grand
postlude. This year that isn't going to happen
as our church continues to be closed because of
the pandemic, but there was a time when the rafters
rang with the mighty sound of Louis Vierne, and
will be again. This recording is from 2018.
This week I set a new record for length
of time being unable to play the organ,
because our church has been closed for
quarantine since the middle of March. The
last time I had a ten week hiatus was while
the organ was being repaired in the summer
of 2014, which led to a blog series. This is
a part of it:
The very first sounds we hear in the movie are the
opening, crashing chords from Mozart's opera Don
Giovanni. They are the very opening chords from the
beginning of the overture, and they are there to
foreshadow the chords that will sound in the opera's
final scene when the dead commandatore, whom the Don has
killed, comes back from the beyond to drag him to his
punishment in hell. In the movie, these chords are also
there from the beginning, and then don't come back until
near the end of the movie. In this case, they have been
repurposed to represent Salieri, in costume, trying to
kill off Mozart by commissioning a Mass for the Dead,
and then scaring him into thinking it is for his own
funeral. These chords also represent Mozart's father in
judgment over his son (at least in Mozart's
imagination) and their second use is during the scene in
which Mozart sees his father, who is visiting Vienna.
The father's first appearance is at the top of a flight
of stairs with Mozart at the bottom. After the
accompanying dramatic chords have ceased, Mozart bounds
up the stairs joyfully to see this glowering individual
clad in black, crying "Papa!" In this case, the somber
music seems not to make any sense, but it paves the way
for the later sepulchral symbolism, not to mention
hinting that Mozart's relationship with his father may
be a bit complicated!
