Childhood memories

It’s an amazing thing, the history of music. It’s extremely interesting to observe the changes in mankind and its attitude towards the world reflected in music. But there’s something potentially even more interesting. Bach is just as poignantly modern as Shostakovich, while Shostakovich, like Bach, is imbued with eternity. All music exists in a kind of continuous space, and composers well removed from each other can turn out to be next-door neighbors. On top of that, life consists of simple things, and we can eavesdrop on bearers of divine music talking about those things to each other.
So what do the composers in this programme talk about? Childhood. The essence of human soul, something that’s kept in its secret places when we start exploring the larger world and leave the ‘native things’ behind; that flares up when we are confronted with loss, that accompanies us even where there is no way for one who wasted his childhood. There’s a wonderful poem that says “When I close my eyes forever, as trustfully as I had opened them in childhood.” It’s by Anastasia Tsvetaeva, the sister of the famous Marina Tsvetaeva. Trust in ‘nativeness’ is trust in eternity. A native eternity is a derivate of preserved childhood.