Last evening my wife and I attended a salon at the home of some friends from church. An acquaintance of theirs was passing through town and he agreed to put on a living-room piano concert for a group of about thirty, including several soon-to-be transfixed young people. Our friends have a home with a large living room, in which a beautiful baby grand piano sits. The dress request was semi-formal, so I put a suit and tie on, my wife a nice outfit. I have not worn a suit and tie for two years, our son Daniels wedding being the last time. So informal has our world become. The program was in two parts: classical and movie themes in the first part, gospel in the second. Each part was approximately a half-hour long. It was a bravura performance. The pianist, Hiram, is a Cuban-born missionary who works for a denominational mission agency. He oversees the Latin American work of the mission. During his youth, while he still lived in Cuba, he was sent to Moscow to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he studied for six years. During a pause, he told his story. At the age of 24, he had a dramatic conversion; he asked God to reveal Himself. If you are real, I am opening my mouth right now and I ask You to come into me and make all things new, from the inside out. And, as he relates it, God took him up on it, and came into him in the person of Jesus. Somehow he escaped the gulag called Cuba and made it to the US. He reminded us to be grateful of our precious liberties. Our visiting virtuoso then sat down at the piano and played a series of gospel hymns and modern praise choruses, but not as any of us had ever heard them played! In earlier times, composers such as Mozart, Schubert and Liszt performed for appreciative guests in living rooms and parlors across Europe. I am glad our friends opened their home for this event. It was the first and perhaps the only time Ive been, or ever will be, to such an event. Its gotten me thinking about genius. Two thoughts occur to me. Every masterpiece, whether a book, a poem, a composition, a painting, a sculpture, begins as it were as a blank piece of paper. We take so much for granted. We are surrounded by monuments of inspiration and genius and seldom give them a thought. Oh, of course, thats the Bach Chaconne, we think as though it has always existed. The second thought is this: no so-called genius (and we can differ on our definitions here) had to do what he did. Augustine could have been a lawyer, rather than a theologian and autobiographer. Shakespeare could have been a cobbler. Jean Sibelius could have been a bar tender. Tom Clancy could have stayed with insurance. In art, writes Andre Malraux, we are first to be heirs of all the earth... Accidents impair and time transforms, but it is we who choose. Hiram started out in astronomy, but gave himself to music and to the work of God. Perhaps some of the young people who watched him last night will end up loving and passing on the great music of the past, or composing some of their own for the world to come.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 03:04:59 +0000
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