Sadness

Piano Concerto No. 1; Three Intermezzi; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Sir Simon Rattle, conducting; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano

I wish I better understood the “true” correlation between the concept of major and minor keys and the personification of emotion that we, as humans, connect with them. Mind you, I’m not complaining that this interrelationship exists. After all, what would music mean to us if we couldn’t associate it with the portion and parcel of our lives?

Listen to this E Minor Prelude by Frederic Chopin. It’s nothing if not … sad, isn’t it? Yes, it’s sad. I’m not telling you anything new. If you heard the song on your own, you would probably say, “Boy, that’s really sad.”

What makes it sad? Some would argue that the melody makes it sad. Well, there isn’t really a melody, but what could pass for one certainly contributes to a measure of melancholy. Maybe the tempo; yeah, a little bit. Let me cut to the chase. It’s basically sad because it’s in a minor key.

Minor keys evoke - well, - sadness, anger, despair, disappointment, anguish, disheartenment, misery, worry, gloom, fear … even a little dejection. Excitement can happen in a minor key, absolutely. Many a Rossini overture has pepped right along in a minor key. But it’s an unsettled excitement. If you were promised a happy ending in a composition and it finished in a minor key, you’d think that you got hosed.

Point being: In this day and age where we don’t like to apply labels to anything or anybody, virtually everyone, , on God’s blue and green Earth, including me when they hear a song or composition in a minor key, immediately associates the music with some type of turmoil, whether it’s quiet and beautiful, or agitated and angst-ridden. It’s automatic. We can’t help it. We all do it.

During my cruise ship days, the ship often visited ports of call in the Soviet Union and Russia. When I disembarked the ship to hit the streets of Leningrad, later St. Petersburg, Odessa and Yalta … and peered into the visages of the people of this land, I saw sadness. Not all of the time. But, mostly. Even when their beautiful faces glowed with heart-warming smiles, I still saw sadness. And I, to this day, rightly or wrongly, identify these wonderful people with a little sorrow and a little woe.

Contestant Tatjana Baronov, played by actress Vicki Kriegler in the movie “The Competition”, is from the Soviet Union and constantly stands in the shadow of her formidable teacher, Madame Gorshev, played by Bea Silvern. Madame Gorshev announces to all of the contestants that Miss Baronov will play the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor. Yup. You heard me. D MINOR. The saddest of all keys, according to the folks on “Spinal Tap”.

And to add to the sadness, Madame Gorshev, about two-thirds of the way into the movie, seeks political asylum in the United States. Imagine a young shy contestant in a major piano competition, in the land of the cold war enemy where she doesn’t know the language, watching her teacher and mentor seek to escape all that this girl knows to be right and strong and true. What can I say? Sad.

I saw and heard my friend MC play this piece with the Philharmonia Orchestra during my first quarter at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. For a while, I held a grudge against him for being so much better than me. And so much younger than me. In the words of the great American H. Ross Perot, “Now that’s just sad.”

Credits: To the Russian people, for your beauty. And your sadness.