When did you last cry? From pain, relief, elation? Was it a book, a movie? Were you bidding some farewell for a year, for ever?
For me, it is often music. There are pieces that move me to tears, such as the slow movement of Chopin’s Sonata in B minor, perhaps the greatest modulations ever written; absolute beauty in sound, reaching the elusive “blue note” that the composer’s contemporaries vividly remembered. But more often than not, it is the extramusical reference, the stuff music is “about,” that touches me most strongly. Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw is guaranteed to make my face completely wet, and I experienced a similar moment a few months ago at Vienna’s Musikverein. The Polish–Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki played Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto. Throughout his life, Beethoven struggled with his demons, and the slow Andante of this Concerto juxtaposes a stark, sombre, demonic questioning with a luminous, melancholic cantilena: angelic for some, orphic for others. Unlike Beethoven, Lisiecki is more angel than demon — he was a Wunderkind until recently, hammering out Mozart’s light-hearted figurations with ingenuous enthusiasm — and it’s perhaps why his playing proved so moving in this movement.
Yes, art has the power to unravel our deep, unconscious emotions, hence the tears. I shall never forget my first trip to Madrid, entering the room at the Museo Reina Sofía with Picasso’s Guernica. You could have read all the books about the Spanish Civil War, the bombed villages, analyses of the painting itself and even
