Mozart Was His Co-Pilot

I’m talking to a room full of seniors at the biggest retirement community in town. We are gathered in a big ballroom type space, all the chairs are filled. There’s a mix of sprightly youngish seniors and those who have been toppled by physical or cognitive infirmity and everyone in between. No matter what their bodily state, they have all gathered to hear me talk about an upcoming Mozart concert. Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, and Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”). You’d recognize the very famous Andante movement of the concerto, nicknamed “Elvira Madigan” because it’s been co-opted so often for commercials and movies.

I want to connect and engage with them so I wander around instead of standing at the very proper lectern they’ve provided for me. I use the microphone so that everyone can hear, even though it’s just a big room and not an auditorium. They all smile at me, their crinkly old eyes kind and interested.

“I have lived two and a half times as long as Mozart,” one gentleman says. “I can’t carry a tune in a paper bag, but I love music and I love Mozart most of all.”

I brilliantly calculate that he’s over 87 and wonder if I should say wow. Instead, I ask him what his favorite works are, but what I really want to know is what he’s done with his life and aren’t there more interesting subjects than Mozart for him?

“I always wanted to play the viola,” he says. Another I-always-wanted-to-play story for my ever expanding collection. “The viola, not the violin. I think the viola has the most beautiful, most human voice of all the strings.” Heads around him nod in agreement. “But I became a pilot instead. I flew in the Vietnam war. That was a terrible thing, the war. Terrible. After it was over, I flew commercial jets. All over the world. And most flights, I listened to Mozart. I thought I died and went to heaven when I got one of those Walkman gadgets and I could listen whenever and wherever I wanted. Even on the plane. Went through about five of those. Then got an iPod thingamajig. Had everything Wolfgang ever wrote on that thing.”

“That’s amazing,” I tell him. I find out later that it would take around 240 hours to listen to Mozart’s entire body of work.

“That’s love,” he tells me. “When I would get home after a long trip, I’d go in my den and put on my headphones and listen to real vinyl. The best technology, ask anyone. I tell you, that’s why I’m this old, young lady. Nothing feeds the human heart better than music.”

I am overcome with a feeling I can’t describe. I feel like sitting down and letting him take over my “lecture.” I know nothing in comparison to him. But he pats me on the shoulder and tells me to keep talking because there’s got to be one or two things he doesn’t know about Amadeus. I doubt it, but I resume my presentation, making eye contact with these lovely people and feeling so very moved by their collective lives. I finally just abandon my talk, sit down near the front of the room and ask them to share their musical stories with me.

“I had a piano lesson with Leonard Bernstein,” one woman says. “In, oh, around 1940. Just before he became very famous. He fired me because I wasn’t any good. But he was very handsome! And he smelled of cigarette smoke and very good cologne.”

“So, you weren’t there for the piano, were you Carol?” We all laugh, Carol admits it.

“My mother made me take lessons from the mean lady down the street,” a woman in a wheelchair tells us. “She had a ruler and she would spank our hands if we played a wrong note. But I tell you, it never stopped me from loving music. We didn’t have a phonograph, couldn’t afford one. Couldn’t afford tickets to the orchestra. I don’t know how I heard it, but I loved music then and I still do now.” She started humming Edelweiss, and two or three other people joined in and then the whole room started singing along with them.  When they finished, there was one of those silences like after the final chord of a Brahms symphony that hangs over the crowd and holds everyone hostage with its power and beauty for several long seconds before the applause begins. That’s what it felt like in this room full of my elders and I was moved to tears and awe.

“I can’t really sing like I used to,” said the woman who had started it all, finally breaking the loaded silence.

“Why Francine, I’d say that was pretty darn good,” said a fellow in a tweed hat. Francine blushed, looked down.

What on earth could I possibly say or do to follow that, to complete my Mozart talk to eighty people who were gracious enough to give a whippersnapper like me the time of day?

“Music is everything,” says a voice from somewhere in the middle of the sea of white heads.

“Music is worth living for.”

“Music is life and that’s all there is to it.”

A staff member comes into the back of the room and signals to me that my time is up. What, already? Aides follow her and start to roll out the wheelchair folks. A few people hang around to thank me, but really, I’m trying to figure out how to thank them for what they’ve just given me. My pilot guy gives me a hug and tells me he’s going back to his room to listen to The Magic Flute. “That Queen of the Night aria is really something,” he says, and winks.

A year or so later, I see his obit in the newspaper. I put Magic Flute on my iPod thingamajig and wish him godspeed on his way to meet Wolfgang in person.