Coughing in Warsaw

Part I: All about me.

Polish audiences seem to have a wonderful capacity for holding in a cough.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's 2025 and I am once again in thrall to the performances of some of the world's best pianists at the 2025 Warsaw Chopin Competition.  It's also October and there's lots of flu and colds in the air, apparently.

The contestants come up the stairs, down onto the stage, bow, sit at the keyboard, adjust their chair, get out their handkerchief, wipe their hands and sometimes the keyboard, and stare nervously at it, lift their arms, and begin.

Out comes some of the most beautiful music ever written and the world is effectively shut outside my door.

They play a number of pieces, sometimes, as with preludes, moving from one to the next without delay.  When they do delay, as if to gather strength to move on in another direction, we are suddenly presented with a barrage of coughing. It's clear people need to cough, but have been holding it in until it is socially acceptable to let it out.  After a number of these displays of respectful silences followed by loud hacking, the whole thing becomes quite funny.  And distracting.  I'd almost prefer it if the audience would just let loose when they need to.

Maybe I'm overly focused on coughing.  I have a lung disease and that means I also have a chronic cough and I'm more than a bit pissed that I can't go to public performances anymore for that reason.  Except that actually I can as long as I get seated early enough to calm my breathing.  I don't cough if I don't exert myself.

Part II: All about Western Civilization and racism - and me again

When asked about my race, I check the Caucasian box. Both my parents go all the way back to fade-out as Europeans in origin. And I am profoundly disgusted when I encounter MAGA folk who are white supremacists. I have loyalty to my LGBT brothers and sisters, to my fellow German-Americans, to both Germany and Japan, countries whose cultures I have had the luxury of playing around in and who have offered me great benefits: Germany gave me a year of university education and an introduction to the joys of urban living.  Japan gave me a good living for 24 years and enough money to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area.  It also gave me a husband I'm terribly fond of.  But I have no loyalty whatsoever - zero - to the Caucasian race.  If two men could make a baby, I'd be more than happy to have a mixed-race Asian-Caucasian baby to love and to raise as much as I love my dogs and cheerfully pick up their poop off the sidewalk when we go on walks. I don't understand why one would give credit to accidents of birth.

At the same time, maybe because I lived those 24 years in Japan and because my first lover was a black American, and my last one, my husband, and the one before were Asians, I am race-conscious and totally committed politically to the notion that racism needs to be eradicated all over the world.

When I first went to Japan, back in the 1970s, I remember watching a TV program where they were teaching Japanese how to applaud. How much was too much, how much was not enough. It was hilarious.  So very Japanese, I thought, in focusing on doing the right thing rather than allowing for spontaneity.  All they succeeded in doing, I thought at the time, was stressing that western music was alien.

That's the thing.  "Western" music - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - do not belong to Germany, or to Europe, or to "Western civilization." They are world composers and belong to us all.  When I still had legs that could go all night long, I used to dance in a kolo folk dance group. I'm not a Yugoslav.

And that takes me to make the observation that now, when the contestants at the Chopinowski competition (to give this a Polish slant) have more Asian names and faces than you can shake a stick at (if you're a white supremacist and into shaking sticks) I feel obliged to mention that not only does the list of contestants contain several Lees from Korea and four Lis from China, but there is also Kevin Chen and Ryan Wang from Canada, Eric Lu and another Wang, William, from the United States. And if that doesn't make my point, you've got to include the Polish speaking Viêt Trung Nguyên from Poland and Yuanfan Yang from Edinburgh.

Part III: Sweet mysteries of life...

How the judges make their decisions continues to baffle me.  I know I'm just showing my limitations here, but when I began listening to the first round all I could hear was perfection. Then I listened to the second round and had to admit I thought the performances as a whole were actually somehow better than they were in the first round.  Obviously the judges were onto something.  But what?  How could I be so out of it?  I had good musical training as a youth, was a church organist for a while and accompanied choruses and ballet lessons.  I wasn't good enough to go on to a career in piano or in music, but I thought I had a well-trained ear. But the judges are miles ahead of me.  This is one serious bunch of musicians, and that probably explains why I'm inclined to use words like "thrill" and "joy" when reacting to the competition.

Part IV: Favorite composers

Following up on my musical limitations, I often say, when asked to identify my favorite composer that I don't like ranking world-class quality talent.  If forced to, I'd put Mozart and Chopin out beyond all the others, but I'd still list Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach and Tchaikovsky as gifts from the gods.  As with the Olympics, much of this probably stems from the tendency of countries to claim their heroes as national heroes.  Austria gets Mozart, Germany gets Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn and a whole bunch more, Russia gets Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and many others, and Poland says it will be damned before it lets France take Chopin away from them.  Hence this every-five-year spectacular thing in Warsaw.

Part V: Chopin, in particular    

Sitting for hours in front of the tube (or the computer) listening to 28 contestants display ways to do things with their fingers that are not humanly possible (like watching divers or pole-vaulters in the Olympics), I realize how much, even after all these years, I still have to learn about just what Chopin managed to do in writing over 250 known and numbered pieces of music, in addition to many which got lost or never got numbered. He wrote more than twenty waltzes, more than fifty mazurkas.  Of all his music, it's the nocturnes (all 22 of them) that go most directly to the soul, the etudes that blow my mind, the polonaises that make me want to get up off my chair and pretend to be the King of France, the rondos and scherzos that make me happy to be alive.  And where does that leave the four ballades - utterly beautiful pieces of music - and the impromptus and the two concertos.  And the bolero and the berceuse and the barcarole (music for boats??? - yes, I understand he got the inspiration from Venetian gondoliers).

The excitement isn't over.  They are, as I write, just beginning the third round and the winner won't be announced till the end of the month.  I've chattered on about spin-off thoughts rather than pretend I'm in the running to judge the performances.  You can find those easily; they're on YouTube.

Again, words that I reserve for things like the Warsaw Chopin Competition, if you haven't watched fingers fly in a while, go to YouTube for the thrill of it all.  Joy.  Pure joy.