The one-armed man at the concert

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sonata, other chamber works, by a 32-year-old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife, Constanze — it’s heartbreaking to hear the tenderness of the dances in the third movement, the inventiveness of the finale.The audience adored the Shostakovich. They gave it a standing ovation and brought the maestro back for five bows and he gave bows to the brass, the English horn, the violas, the tympani, the cymbals, the strings, the winds, the harps. Shostakovich wrote it in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but during intermission Jenny had shown me videos she’d taken of New Yorkers sliding Cedar Hill in Central Park, sliding on plastic saucers, pieces of cardboard, baking trays, roasting pans, skis, going off a jump and flying in the air and landing in a cloud of snow. Tyranny is brutal and blind to the goodness and delight of life that Mozart found even in his summer of distress. We have a democracy here, my friend. The vintage of the grapes of wrath has been trampled out. The king cannot lie repeatedly and nakedly and demand to be believed.

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