My friend Bill and I got into a nice exchange the other day over the word “exquisite.”
I had posted a link to a couple of YouTube videos of particularly moving violin pieces, one of Fritz Kreisler playing “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and one of a Hungarian violinist playing the theme from Schindler’s List in a synagogue in Budapest. I had described both performances as “exquisite.”
Bill wrote back, “If this rendering of the theme from Schindler’s List doesn’t generate tears, one had better check for humanness.”
I agreed, of course, but that begged the question of whether “exquisite” meant “something that can bring you to tears.” I’d like to think the word functions as an extender of the word “beautiful” and should be used sparingly. Not for kitsch and sentimentality, but for things that touch the soul. Tears often come, but they are not required to give the word its meaning.
I wrote Bill back:
I keep thinking of the time when Taku was fishing for compliments about a meal he had prepared.
The conversation went something like this.
T: You don't like it!
A: Yes, I like it. You just didn't give me time to say so!
T: But you don't think it's very good.
A: Yes, I do! It's delicious!
T: But it's not exquisite!
I was still learning that there were going to be times when I was not going to win an argument.
I then went back to listen to that Schindler’s List piece once more, for the nth time, and concluded that it fit the bill. The music and the performance both are exquisite.
This time, when the YouTube video came to an end, I let it roll over to the next video. YouTube has people with marvelous sensibilities who know how to provide their viewers with suggestions, based on what they have just watched. In this case, it was another performance of the theme Schindler’s List, this one by the Netherlands Orchestra, and I noticed for the first time that it was written by John Williams. “I’ll be damned,” I thought. Hollywood. He’s a great composer, but he wrote it for Hollywood. Not a place you associate with exquisite, at all, but with popular culture and the world of the mundane.
Turns out this second Schindler’s List performance is loaded with emotional heavy stuff. First, there’s the music itself. Then there’s the fact that the violinist was dressed in red and the rest of the orchestra was in black and white. If you remember the movie, this will ring a bell.
And mostly, as if the memory of the Holocaust, which is inevitably called up by this music, were not enough to tug the heart strings, the woman playing the cor anglais, the oboe-like instrument, has a moving story of overcoming a neurological disease and the fear she would never be able to live her dream of playing in an orchestra. You can get the story if you read the commentary.
But YouTube doesn’t stop there. It then links to a piece by another composer for Hollywood, the Italian Ennio Morricone, who died recently, by the way, who could turn out the schmalz/exquisite music (depending on the hardness of your heart) with the best of them. Maybe he was the best of them, actually. He composed (and conducted as well) this next piece, the theme from The Mission, a third piece which, despite its association with Hollywood, I would also apply the label exquisite to. And that begs the question, “Why am I assuming if it’s Hollywood, it’s schlock?”
I’ll leave it there. It’s not for me to tell anybody how to draw the line between “emotional” and “exquisite,” or between things that are kitschy, trite and obvious and things that are soulful. That, I think, is something only life experience can draw out in you. Some will claim it’s a class issue, the leisure classes having the financial means to acquire “acquired tastes,” and the rest of the population having to make do with bread and circus entertainment, to which the word “exquisite” rarely gets applied.
Like many a working class kid who grew up in America when people could still be what we used to call “upwardly mobile,” I outgrew the working class tastes of my parents. “Outgrew,” of course, being the word you use if you’re in the snob class, not if you are in the class of folk my mother belonged to, with her fondness for movie magazines and soap operas. Or my father, who once built a house with his own hands, down to the plumbing and wiring, and could take a motor apart and put it back together, and who despaired at having a son who despised him for hunting deer and got bored as hell having to sit with him in a dumb rowboat on a dumb lake when he went fishing. I’m pretty sure my father never once in his life uttered the word “exquisite.”
My father’s gone now, and as I approach with alarming speed the age at which he died, I’m beginning to miss him more and more. He did live long enough, fortunately, for us to find some sort of reconciliation after years of having no points of contact. And I know that if he had lived longer, that process would have continued.
But it was not to be. As I become increasingly aware of just how limited our time with loved ones is, and as my inclination to eschew religious faith and throw all my weight into making this life as meaningful as I possibly can only increases, I find one way to do that is to focus more intently on things that are true and beautiful. Beauty is elusive and temporary, and what gives life its meaning is partly finding something outside yourself to dedicate yourself to, like the health and welfare of children and other vulnerable creatures, human and non-human. And by caring for friends and strangers alike. And by learning to embrace death, that mysterious faceless figure we picture as Father Time, carrying a scythe, who will one day come and take it all away, but in the meantime frames the here and now.
There is beauty in a sunset or a Grecian urn. But exquisite beauty, whether it comes to you through the eyes or the ears, as in music, is likely to be tied to sadness and loss. One can cry for negative reasons, because one has failed at something, or because one is feeling spiritual or physical pain. And one can cry for the best of reasons, because one is touched by what is rare, hard to achieve, temporary. And exquisitely beautiful.
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