Speaker 1: I am a very fortunate man of eighty three, deeply
indebted to American medicine, still in possession of the marbles
I need, even though two weeks ago I took a
bad fall in a hotel room in Nevada, wrecking my
left shoulder and becoming a one armed man in need
of assistance to pull on my socks and zip out
my jeans. And the beauty of this is gratitude, profound
gratitude for the lunch at Docs Restaurant in Manhattan nineteen
ninety two with Jenny Lyne Nilsen, who was still with
me thirty four years later. Gratitude is very appropriate at
the age of eighty three. I've been to see orthopedic
surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery, and he plans
to replace this shoulder next week and promises that with
therapy it'll work better than the old one. But mainly
I am grateful for this woman I live with. I'm
very aware of it every day as she hovers over me.
I was aware of it last Wednesday evening as she
guided me up the steps of Carnegie Hall to a
concert of symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich. By the Cleveland Orchestra.
Jenny's parents, Ray and Arle were serious pianists, and they
brought up their four children to love classical music and
to play violin and with cruel tyranny and vulgarity and power.
In Washington, d c. And in Minnesota, it feels like
a moral duty to attend to great art, though I
must admit that I'm no fan of Shostakovitch, and parts
of this symphony his eleventh feel like a composition for
fifty power saws and fourteen pneumatic hammers. But I yield
to my wife's better judgment. A man walks up the
steps with his left arm in a sling and a
cane in his right hand, and he feels the empathy
of strangers. New York is a city of pedestrians, and
we pedestrians look out for each other. If I look confused,
some one would step up and offer to help. But
we walked into the grand lobby of Carnegie Hall, and
up to the hall and down the aisle, musicians warming
up on the stage, our seats about half way down
on the right. And I remember a concert I did
here nineteen eighty nine with Chet Atkins and Butch Thompson
and the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. It was a dark time.
Two years before I had announced that I was ending
my radio show a Prairie Home Companion and moving to
Copenhagen to be a serious novelist, which chedd Atkins knew
was a bad move. The show was at the peak
of popularity, and he tried to tell me I should
change my mind, but I was too proud to back up.
My son, Jason played guitar on the show. He was twenty,
taking lessons from Chat, and he played a beautiful underscore
under a poem that I read by my teacher, James Wright,
about the eyes of those two Indian ponies darkened with kindness.
I sang bass in the quartet. We sang the Lord
will make away somehow, and I did the news from
Lake Wobegon, and I remember thinking I do not want
to give this up, but I did. I walked off
the cliff until two years later I was able to
climb back up. Mozart Symphony Number forty one and C
Major The Jupiter was his last, a symphony that he
himself never heard. Composed in the summer of seventeen eighty eight,
three years before his death, along with two other symphonies,
a piano sonata, other chamber works, A thirty two year
old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of
his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife Constanza. Its
heart breaking to hear the tenderness of the dances in
the third movement and the inventiveness of the finale. The
audience adored the Shostakovitch. They gave it a standing ovation,
and brought the conductor back for five bows, And he
gave bows to the brass, the English horn, the violdas,
the timpany, the symbols, the strings, the winds, the harps.
Shostakovich wrote it in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution of
nineteen seventeen. But during intermission, Jenny had shown me videos
she had taken of New Yorkers sliding Cedar Hill in
Central Park, sliding on plastic saucers and pieces of cardboard,
and baking trays and roasting pans. Also some skis going
off a jump and flying in the air, landing in
a cloud of snow. Tyranny is brutal and blind to
the goodness and delight of life that Mozart found even
in his summer of distress. We have a demod democracy here.
The vintage of the grapes of wrath has been trampled out.
The king cannot lie repeatedly and nakedly and demand to
be believed