Category: Music

War, values and pianos

David Dubal:

During the Civil War, a Union general and his troops marched into Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the intention of destroying the little Confederate town. Looking at a beautiful mansion, the general walked in, saw a fine grand in the parlor, and began playing. Upon hearing the music, a beautiful young woman descended the long staircase. After a few minutes of conversation, the pair discovered that they had both studied in New York with the same teacher. The very next day, he again came to her home and they played duets. On taking his leave he said, “You and your piano take the credit for saving Holly Springs.”

I am amused by present-day politicians who mourn the death of what they call “family values.” I would tell them to call for the return of the piano in the home. Before the endless proliferation of canned music, mothers played for family and friends a variety of music, from hymns to sentimental popular songs, while feet moved to the current dance craze, and many a romance began near a piano. There may even have been flashes of radiant beauty when mother played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. D. H. Lawrence describes almost unbearable nostalgia for a mother playing to her child in his magnificent poem “Piano”:

Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.