My not feeling well drove me to see a doctor and I've been set up for some tests and put on an anti-biotic. Cipro. A 10 day regime, 5 days before my birthday. This growing old shit is growing old. But I didn't realize how much it was messing with me or how wound up I'd become over the last weeks in trying to help at least a little in Ukraine's situation...not till this came on the radio as I drove home.
Mussorgsky was a Russian composer responsible for some magnificent music. Night on Bald Mountain. Boris Gudunov. From an aristocratic family outside St. Petersburg, he ranks with Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev. All of them did music I love, but because of Russia's terrorism in Ukraine, I feel wrong about loving them, because all of them were supporters of Russian exceptionalism...that Russia is supreme and all other countries her lesser.
I still haven't reconciled my love for Anna Karenina, War & Peace, Brothers Karamazov, The Lower Depths, Crime & Punishment, and The Cherry Orchard with Russia's animalistic brutality in Ukraine. Then there are aspects of my own writing that include Russian connections...like naming Daniels fictional detective Ace Shostakovich in The Lyons' Den. I'd like to think one can separate an artist's creations from his life, but you can't really. They inform his choices, and all of these men were very Russian in their work.
Maybe that's why I was weeping -- the beauty of that music echoing the place where it's set and knowing the artist was a strong supporter of Russia's egotism that's led, so many times over the years, to genocide of entire culture, and death. It hurts in so many ways. But one positive thing about this piece is, its meaning has taken on being in support of a free Ukraine, and that makes it wonderful in ways never expected by Mussorgsky.
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