Music for the Royal Fireworks
The air to Mozart
Was so gold,
The leaves so dark,
The amber glow
Of summer in the park
As constant as the tempo
Of his adolescent heart:
If all the passions
That he bent to rhyme
With the ordinary sun,
With the endless grime
And oblivion of the land,
Were only shadows, burst
Like sparklers in his hand—
They lit the universe
Around him in due time.
September 11th–13th, 2023
Roscoe
Explanation
Cathy and I would drive up to the mountains, embraced by the apparent reality of a Mozart piano concerto on the radio, as if we were at a concert in Carnegie Hall. Then we’d drive through the Eisenhower Tunnel, and the music would disappear.
This made us realize that music is just a shadow of a brighter, more ideal world. It’s like the sparklers that we hold, that fizzle out in a minute, when we’re children on the Fourth of July.
Music is a clue, a hint, that, like the procession of King George II’s royal barge down the Thames, lit by the royal fireworks and accompanied by another barge of musicians playing music that Handel wrote for the occasion, that, like love, the occasional genius of humanity is always there for us.