Atget, "Organ Grinder"My last night in Rome I was able to attend a performance of Archangelo Corelli in a church on the Via Del Corso. You cannot imagine with what pleasure I anticipated the event. Corelli has always been my favorite composer since childhood. He was a Roman, his body has the strange honor of being buried in the Pantheon. This then, to me was to be the quintessential experience of my trip to Rome.
I can hardly listen to certain passages of Corelli, when played correctly, and in the proper tempo, without weeping. My friends know this and are willing to forgive me my tears, if his music catches me unawares in a store or an elevator it can be very embarrassing. It was even worse when Pachabel’s Cannon was so popular, but fortunately, you do not hear that so much anymore.
I began to save up my tears for the occasion, and I debated with myself if I would indulge in muffled sobs, with an occasional gasp, or if I was going to go all out, and wail out loud. Obviously I would never do that, but I must admit, there have been times when I have been sorely tempted.
When we arrived at the church however I became suspicious. I felt something was amiss. It was an English Anglican Church, and Corelli was decidedly not an Anglican. He was a priest in the church of Rome. I ignored this however, as best I could. The English build great churches, and certainly Handel, and Purcell make me cry also, so all was not lost.
But the chairs were terrible and uncomfortable, in the worst way. They had an enormous overstuffed cushions on them, so that it was impossible to sit comfortably. My wife noticed this also, and commented on it.
The music began, the performance was perfect in every way. They were playing the Opus Six, Number Eight, the “Christmas Concerto.” I glanced at the program and saw that it was being performed on period instruments. My excitement began to build, and I looked forward to sobbing any instant. But my wife interrupted me to mention again that the chairs were impossible to sit on. I looked around and noticed that in sections of the church the cushions were on the floor rather than the chairs. They were not cushions for sitting on, they were for kneeling on. This broke my concentration, and I began to think about the prayer cushion. I must admit that often in a concert I start to daydream, and lose my concentration. I began to imagine that I would drop down on my knees and begin praying, instead of listening to the music. I began to debate with myself whether I would pray silently, or if I would cry out in despair to God as a voice echoing in a wilderness.
But the Corelli performance was a failure in every way. I sat on the edge of my seat, I rocked slightly back and forth, but the tears, they just wouldn’t come.
After that we rode home on the subway, and I sat next to my wife in a rather depressed state of mind. We sat across from the doors, and at a stop two people got on the train and they captured my interest at once. The two of them reminded me of some characters in “Crime and Punishment” which I just happened to be reading at the time. They were beggars, a very old man, and what must have been his daughter, an intensely beautiful black eyed, thin girl of about fourteen, with a face of sad abstraction. He had a violin, which he began to play, and a moment later she began to sing in a soft, slightly tremulous untrained voice. From the very first instant, when that bow began to scratch across a string I began to feel my heart ache, and when the child’s voice emerged, as if it had been hidden in the sound of the violin string, I suddenly felt as if I was going to pass out, so intensely did I feel the sound of her voice in the center of my heart, unexpectedly. She sang that sad American song about the leaves being brown, and the sky being gray, with those words, “It I didn’t tell him, I could leave today.”
It seemed to me that it was not a song at all, and that I could see in her sad distracted eyes, that this girl was singing about her decision to leave her old father, and cease their begging. As if she knew that he was soon to simply die of grief, and that there was not a thing that she could do about it. And in his face I though I could also see his certain knowledge of his coming abandonment and certain death. And his even more certain awareness that he could play the violin, but that she could not sing. And in that perfect balance, was the charm and substance their existence.
But that was all perhaps just a story telling daydream, and of no consequence, but the upshot of it was that, right there on the train I began to cry, and not muffled sobs, no, not by any means, but hysterics, and cries of anguish, right there in public, in front of a lot of strangers.
Imagine my embarrassment. I was convulsed with sobs. It was hysterics. Everyone in the car eyed us with mounting alarm, as if something very untoward and frightening was about to happen. I took a firm grip on my wife's arm, and indicated that we had to get off at the next stop. And what was it all about. I don’t even care for that song, and she wasn’t even singing it very well.
She was just singing those lines, “And I began to Pray”, as I rushed by her and put a bill in her cup . She broke off her singing at the very instant she saw the note, and went off to another car, without even bothering to finish the line of the song they were on.
Several people came up to me on the station platform to see if I was all right. I calmed down. I said, “My mother has recently died, that is why I am crying like this, but never mind". People seemed to accept my explanation with sympathy, and a few minutes later we boarded another train.
Later, in the hotel, I looked up the passage in "Crime and Punishment," that this incident had reminded me of. Here is what I found, on the first page of Part 2, chapter 6:
From old habit he took his usual walk in the direction of the Hay Market. A dark-haired young man with a barrel organ was standing in the road in front of a little general shop and was grinding out a very sentimental song. He was accompanying a girl of fifteen, who stood on the pavement in front of him. she was dressed up in a crinoline, a mantle and a straw hat with a flame-coloured feather in it, all very old and shabby. In a strong and rather agreeable voice, cracked and coarsened by street singing, she sang in hope of getting a copper from the shop. Raskolnikov jointed two or three listeners, took out a five copeck piece and put it in the girl’s hand. She broke off abruptly on a sentimental high note, shouted sharply to the organ grinder “Come on,” and both moved on to the next shop.
I felt strangely elated that I had seen something, for a moment, through Fyodor Mikhailovich's eye.
Richard Britell, Rome, late November 1996
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