Weekend Interlude...

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Memory tags: An unstructured Sunday in March in Shillong and notes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

A lazy spectator watching spring touch pines swaying in the March breeze, on this unstructured Sunday with a tea laden tray. The weekly Saturday replenishing includes the first edition of Harper’s Bazaar, a magazine with Kareena Kapoor on its cover. Fresh flowers come in with Sunday goodies and grocery stocks for the week. Crossing the sands of dead habit? Communication can make the routine and mundane full of wonder! That is how the word wonderful sometimes asks to interpreted. Words exchanged with friends over a grocery counter, goods I came back with were not just from the shelves.

Spring notes take over the rest of this weekend interlude. The air is unsettled. Now gusty, now calm, now cold, now warm. It is fey with spring fever! The shackles, of winter are loosening; the sun stays longer each day. In the deep indigo late evening sky, a crescent moon smiles above a brilliant Venus. A friend calls bewitched by its beauty! Roadside florists are ablaze with azaleas, primrose, cineraria, and pansies. A burst of freshness and colour, amid a sea of scurrying humanity! The dry drooping willow puts out new leaves everyday, to catch the ascending sun and ready for another cycle of life. Birds like the grey tit, perfectly coordinated in their grey blazers and black tie hop among the pines of this city. Bees collect honey, distribute pollen among the yellow mimosa blossoms on trees. The rhododendrons are just beginning to make their appearance. The white of the pear blossoms against its dark wood, with a few new red and green leaves complete this natural ikebana. Wild daisies and tiny blue gentian dot the greening grass.

Back home I decide to round off this interlude with some of my favorite music. I cut out all other distractions, dim the lights and settle in. I choose to listen to Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons). In essence, its notes capture the moods of all four seasons, beginning with evocative spring. Written in 1725 by Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, it is one of his most famous pieces and certainly my all time favorite. Attacks of asthma brought this ordained ‘red priest ‘(thanks to his red hair) back to his violin. Such are blessings in disguise!  For this virtuoso had written his first composition at 13! He went on to compose about 500 concerti, 48 operas,73 sonatas and sacred music . This Baroque music composer and Venetian priest, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist, was born and raised in the Republic of Venice. About 1717, Vivaldi was offered a new prestigious position in the court of the prince Phillip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua as Maestro di Cappella.  In his three years there he produced several operas. It is also in this period that he wrote the Four Seasons, four violin concertos depicting natural scenes in music. A tone poem inspired by the countryside around Mantua!

The Four Seasons are  revelation , I close my eyes and the music  takes me through flowing creeks, singing birds , crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties frozen landscapes, children ice-skating, and burning fires. Each concerto comes from a sonnet written by Vivaldi, describing the scenes depicted in them. In their time they were a revolution in musical conception. Does not every revolution around the sun renew the revelation that life is?  I cannot imagine the tragedy of a time without spring or a silent spring on our home, planet earth.