Getting A Handel
On A Soggy Day
It's been raining nonstop all day -- a steady, solid rain, the sort of rain that just keeps falling, and falling, and FALLING -- unending, mocking in its steadiness, as if to say, "yep, here I am, and you'd best make the best of it, 'cause you're stuck with me 'till I darn well feel like leaving."
Since the moment I woke up to the dreary spatter of rain on the driveway outside the bedroom window, and the disheartening "tunk-tunk-tunk" downstairs, where the leak in the living-room window drips into the spaghetti pot, I've been moping about in a mood darker that the leaden clouds above.
Chinese water torture, that's what it is, and it's working. I'm just a hair's-breadth from a screaming fit.
Rainy weather -- this kind of rainy weather, that is, soggy monotony without sign of letup -- gets me. Bad.
I can handle thunderstorms, and the more severe, the better. Nature's fury at its rawest is one of the best free shows on Earth, and as long at it doesn't blow my roof off, I actually enjoy a good, rousing storm. (Besides, if the storm's being spurred along by a fast-moving norther, I usually don't have to empty the spaghetti pot more than once.)
And, I can manage drizzly weather, since it's usually not raining hard enough to curtail my activities.
But this -- this cruel rain, so maddening in its constancy -- when it's like this, my depression is bottomless.
Luckily, I have a few friends to get me through it.
They are a properly diverse lot, hailing from several different foreign countries. But George, Johannes, Wolfgang and Antonio all have a couple of things in common -- when they speak, my blues evaporate.
Never mind that they're all dead and have been for a couple of hundred years or so.
But, thanks to the magic of modern compact-disc technology, George Frederic Handel, Johannes Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Antonio Vivaldi speak today with the same passion, the same creative genius, the same lilting harmony, that they did when they walked the Earth themselves, conducting the little chamber orchestras and cathedral choirs of baroque Europe in some of the most magnificent musical prose ever to emerge from the mind of Man.
On a day like this, only one of them will do -- Bach, the master of masters. And it must be this particular disc, recorded by the Empire Brass Quintet at Washington National Cathedral. I have yet to find the day so grey that the Quintet's crisp, brassy sunshine won't part the clouds, or the depression so deep as to be out of reach of the cathedral's booming Great Organ.
Music is a universal tonic. ANY music. The glittering counterpoint of my baroque pals happens to hit my happy button; to someone else, it might be John Philip Sousa, Harry James, Bill Monroe, Peter, Paul and Mary, an off-the-wall John Prine ditty, or a totally-unknown madrigal act whose CD you bought at some outdoor festival on a much sunnier day.
It can be the latest pop tune, or the most hoity-toity opera; "Yesterday" or "Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida"; even the most annoying, "Woop, woop!" mirror-ball disco disaster from a misspent youth. Music, like the old medicine man used to say, "is good fer what ails ye."
It's magic, that's all. Five minutes ago, all the world was sad and gloomy, all grey skies and that endless drip-drip-drip.
But the Empire Brass' particularly rousing version of the "Christmas Oratorio's" opening chorus is suffusing the whole apartment like a potent musical incense, each chord a ray of sunshine pushing aside the mental clouds.
Outside, the skies are still grey and the rain continues, unhurried and unabated. But somehow, the sad and gloomy has become warm and cozy, as I sit here sipping a hot cuppa, listening to my old pal Johannes -- baroquing and rolling while the rain keeps time in the spaghetti pot.
