As it lives to be alive

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
~ Johann Sebastian Bach

Chaconne

For Jascha Heifetz

Watching Jascha play the Chaconne brings me to weep.
The majesty of his bow work, the certitude he swallows
himself with in the Master’s opus is a rare coupling of
living and dead and dead again as it lives to be alive.

He is old now, in this clip, his eyes ringed with age-circles,
his gaze seasoned and balanced as the black over gray he
stands so effortlessly in, the notes pealing pure and sweet,
beading like the glassing sweat of angels under stage light.



Tears and introspection, loss and the love of loss, the dear
lessons they teach us in this life that all is returned, all is
given up in the end. To give it up while the choice is ours
sing Kahlil’s words from his deep perch of sand and foam.

But for now, it is Jascha who thunders through the sullen
trees, their bibled barks broken and fertile from a ruination
of rain and restraint, the notes breaking limbs as they fall,
the tonnage of tears unstoppable, beautifully unstoppable.

Joseph Gallo
April 5, 2013