Two pieces of music bring me to the verge of tears every time I hear them, no matter my mood at that moment. One is the Intermezzo from Cavellaria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni, and the other is Love Theme by Martin Roth. One is orchestral, the other solo piano. Both are intensely challenging emotionally yet come at me from different directions.
I have never seen Mascagni’s opera but understand the Intermezzo is played to an empty stage between two intensely emotional scenes. In film it played while Michael Corleone died in the Sicilian sun, a tragedy of a family corrupted by vengeance.
The YouTube video of Martin Roth playing his composition with a dog stretched out beside the piano is intimate, personal, elegiac. I listen. I watch his fingers caress the keys. I feel the touch of sadness on my heart. It has a retrospective finality. This is the tune I want played as the curtains close at the end of my funeral.
These are not the only two pieces of music that affect me emotionally, that list would be very long. Yet Roth’s tune is called Love Theme - why choose that for a funeral? Intermezzo is played to an empty stage at Eastertide before violent resolution in the final act. Although this is the music that ends Godfather III, Coppola and Puzo were scripting a fourth chapter intended as a conclusion to the Corleone saga. Coppola ended production planning on Godfather IV when Puzo died in 1999. This suggests the choice of Mascagni’s music was as a bridge to that fourth chapter.
I could not choose Intermezzo as the final music for my funeral because I would not want to appear to be suggesting a continuation of my existence. Physical death is simply the final failure of the support systems that will have maintained my physical body from it’s conception. There is no coming back from that. Yet neither am I suggesting that I do not believe in any form of continuance. I do. Excpt I don’t want to speculate on what form that continuance may take.
Why choose Love Theme? Because it is elegiac, defined by Google’s AI as referring:
…to a feeling of sadness, melancholy, or mournfulness, often accompanied by a nostalgic longing for the past or something that has been lost. It is most commonly used in literature, music, or art to describe a tone of mourning.
I mean ‘elegiac’ in the sense of commemorating something that is lost - but the loss of what? Self-evidently a funeral marks the ending of a person’s life - their corporeal existence - yet ‘life’ is more than one’s simple physical presence. People attending a funeral generally display tokens of mourning and grieving to mark the ending of the other’s life. Google AI advises that:
Mourning is the outward expression of grief and sorrow following a loss—most commonly the death of a loved one. While grief is the internal feeling of loss, mourning is how those feelings are actively expressed through behaviour, rituals, and traditions.
Since I am not Sam Clemens I shall not be able to witness my own funeral. We all have to face death alone, but I hope I shall be accompanied at my funeral by people to whom I meant something. I said earlier that I find Roth’s piano piece ‘intimate, personal’. The notes he plays speak directly to my soul. Yes I hear with my ears and my brain interprets those signals, but the effect of them is directly somatic - I feel the music.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
These opening lines of When You Are Old by W B Yeats capture my feelings about the emotional impact of music, and, in particular, Roth’s Love Theme. The tears the music evokes are not of sadness but of healing. Remembering ‘the soft look your eyes once had’ is celebrating (and honouring) the moment of recognition, a moment that stands outside Time. For too long I felt that such moments were lost because time had passed. The healing I have found comes from accepting that the memories are passages and pages in a book I can take down and revisit ‘when nodding by the fire’.
Grief there comes when revisiting a memory and, seeing it in its context, realising what one did was cowardly, cruel or deceitful. The grief is doubled and deepened when leafing through the book and finding too many repetitions. But the same book, on other pages, shows me where I behaved with kindness, decency, honour and, perhaps, courage. The healing is coming from reading and re-reading that book and finding that I have learned, shows I am still learning.
What do I mourn? Missed opportunity. The reading of that book had taught me that a myriad people have shown me kindness: held out a helpful hand, shown me care and even love - and I rejected them.
I have chosen Love Theme to see me out because much of the hurt I have caused in life came from my fearful rejection of the kindness of strangers. There will be very few at my funeral, not because of the hurts I caused by careless actions but because I pushed away the friendly overtures of others. My reading and re-reading of that old book of Yeats’ is slowly bringing me peace. When Love Theme plays, my tears are accepting that I was offered love and regret the rejecting of it…
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