Poland by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction - General, Non-Classifiable, Sale Books
ISBN: 9780517165461
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1984-09-15T23:06:45+00:00

He was convinced that this was true, and he wondered when the seeking woman would find him, so that her life could blossom. Where was she? How did one locate the woman? When applause for the singers ended, Lubonski told Bukowski and the countess: 'The next is rather daring, you know. Mahler, whom you met at the opera, wrote these wayfaring songs for solo voice. Now four are singing them, but you know...'He paused to nod to Herr Pilic, who had moved so as to attract Lubonski's attention. 'You know that Mahler later borrowed the songs to use as the base for his first symphony.' 'And very good it was,'Bukowski offered. 'If you like Jewish music. The songs won't be light and dancing like Brahms, I can tell you that.' After only a brief pause the singers rearranged themselves and the two pianists began a slow and mournful theme, to which the voices soon added a lament, but now the spirit changed, and a broad swelling movement developed, in which Bukowski could visualize himself striding over bleak, empty spaces ... alone. In the rich sadness of late youth he indulged his passion for romanticism, spurred on by the

changing, driving imagery of the Mahler songs. Count Lubonski had been right; this music had little to do with Brahms, or Beethoven either, yet it was passionately Viennese, the almost majestic inheritor of the great tradition. 'It's very Jewish,' Lubonski whispered to his wife, 'but I must say I like it.' Throughout the cycle the two pianos and the four

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voices created an increasing sensation of persons lost in vast expanses, wandering forever toward some goal undefined and never to be realized. It was music for the year 1895, on a snowy night, in central Europe. There is the key! Bukowski thought. I'm on the plains of Poland, Russian Poland that I saw once from the train. It's my land, my Poland, and I've never really seen it or been part of it. Now his music-driven footsteps became longer, for he was striding toward something, toward a homeland which he had never appreciated when living in Bukowo as a child. As the music swirled about him, its marvelous minor harmonies inflamed his imagination, and he became for a moment the romantic Pole lost in a vast horizon. 'Do you like what they've done?' Lubonski asked. 'The four voices, I mean?'When he looked at his young f riend he realized that Bukowski was not in the concert hall but adrif t in some wandering fantasy land, where a young man should sometimes be. It was in this dreamlike state that Bukowski wandered through the salon of the theater during the second intermission, and at some distance from the bar, where servants in red uniform were pouring champagne, he encountered the American ambassador and the two women who could be presumed to be his wife and daughter. Lacking an introduction, Wiktor could not speak to them, but to his delight the young woman said to him

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