Ashes, witches and waltzes

At a time of year like this, as the clocks turn back and the nights draw in, and the owls and bats and witches come out to hoot and flutter and haunt on Halloween night, my mind is full of the concept of mortality.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

I mean, yes, my mind is full of the concept of mortality, but it’s not Halloween that’s behind my present ponderings. It just happens to be convenient that it’s precisely at this time of year that the musings have struck me.

So, full disclosure: this post is not about Halloween. It’s about … well, wait for it …

… It’s about my one and only true love; I mean really true love – as in, having never been disappointed, deceived or cheated on by him. I’m referring to the amazing, prodigal, hyper-sensitive, handsome (at least I think so, as well as sexy) all-time genius of the piano – Mr Frederic Chopin! Dead, but not forgotten, therefore, still very much alive. Dead but alive. Is that spooky and ghostly enough for you?

On second thoughts, my post is related to this time of year. Perhaps not Halloween specifically, but certainly All Souls’ Day: Day of the Dead. Dia de los Muertos. Because the thing is, now, 175 years after my beloved Frederic’s death, a manuscript has been unearthed in the vault of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. It’s of a previously unknown waltz, and almost certainly attributed to the hand of Chopin. I’ve downloaded the sheet music so that I can play this new discovery on my Berdux grand piano, thereby resurrecting my musical soulmate and if-only lover. As my fingers caress the black and white keys and draw out newly-heard melodies, phrases and lyrical passages, I can drag them out of oblivion and transport them to the real world, planet Earth, albeit composed by a soul dwelling in the Afterlife.

Thanks to the bewitching magic of music, and thanks to the recent discovery in that New York library, this frail, sickly, enormously gifted composer will never truly be dead. Okay, so his heart might be locked in a metal casket in the Holy Church in Warsaw, and his bones might be crumbling in a wooden coffin in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, but his scherzos and polonaises and ballades and mazurkas and waltzes are still swinging and singing and dancing away, and therefore, so is he.

And so, I’d like to raise a toast (wine glasses ready? – mine sure is) to the eternal life of this incredible human being who lived in the land of the living for thirty-nine short years, and now lives in the land of the dead for ever and ever. My darling, romantic, sexy Frederic. (Okay, so you can probably tell I had a MAJOR crush on him when I was younger. Ah, the fantasies …)

In fact, I’m sure the man himself is saying ‘Cheers’ to me right now, as he soars in the night sky, glass in hand, smiling down on my house by the river, peeking through my candle-lit window as I sit by my piano and play his haunting music. Or maybe he’s dancing with the witches, in rhythm to his newly discovered waltz, with the bats and owls and ghouls applauding the free midnight show.

Here’s to Chopin, music and immortality!