Wednesday, November 27, 2013
THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERS MAHLER
Traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Here's a great story.
A wonderful article on a remarkable woman:
"Today, in a one-room flat in Belsize Park, in London, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer is celebrating her hundred-and-tenth birthday. Her life is extraordinary not only for the years she has counted but for the people she has known and the scenes she has witnessed. She is noted, among other things, for being the oldest living Holocaust survivor. For two years, from 1943 until the end of the war, she was interned at the Theresienstadt camp; her husband, Leopold Sommer, was deported to Auschwitz and later to Dachau, where he died of typhus. She was born in Prague, to a German-Jewish family that consorted with the giants of fin-de-siècle culture. When she was a child, she met Gustav Mahler, and Franz Kafka was a frequent guest of the household."
Gustave Mahler's Adagietto from his 5th Symphony
On an entirely different subject, here's a great article by our beloved TRUTH 101 on Pope Francis's recent criticism of phony "trickle down"economics.
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1 comment:
I love this woman! A living miracle, really. She embodies the tremendous wisdom and strength great character, a true appreciation of Beauty -- and GRATITUDE -- may give to those blest with talent, courage, tenacity and true humility.
There is another video made the same year, when she was a mere 106 years of age, where she is wearing a most becoming red dress, and does a good deal more playing of the Schubert Impromptu, Opus 142 in Ab-Major, one of the most poignantly beautiful pieces ever written, and something else I didn't quite recognize that sounded as though it might have been written by a young Richard Strauss. She must have known HIM too, I should think.
Her voice with its beautiful, charmingly accented English sounded so much like my teacher at the conservatory it almost startled me.
In the "red dress" video I was struck by her gentle-but-firm assertion that "EVERYTHING is a PRESENT" -- something for which we should be grateful and from which we may derive benefit. EVERYTHING!
Coming from a dear lady of great intelligence, talent, abundant knowledge and refinement who endured the horrors of Thersienstadt and the loss of husband and mother in the Holocaust, that is an astonishing testament to the healing, nurturing power of all significant expressions of Beauty and Order and Empathy.
Her total lack of apparent bitterness, anger, accusatory rhetoric or demands for retribution may very well be the secret not only to her longevity but to her still-productive, eager, obviously joyful approach to life.
What a treat! Thank you so much for this inspiring post. how perfect it is for this Thanksgiving Eve.
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