Piano Concerto No. 23, Adagio

10:24 AM Unknown 0 Comments

I was listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, when I came to the Adagio and started feeling increasingly nostalgic. Then I remembered something Milan Kundera, Czech writer best known for his work The Unbearable Lightness of Being, said about nostalgia. Paraphrasing Kundera, he said: "The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."

I have been trying to understand what Kundera meant with these words. He might have been trying to say nostalgia is the pain inflicted by wanting to return to a certain place. He might also have been trying to say nostalgia is the pain caused by the reminiscing of the past. After all, the past is the only place, no matter how hard we try, to which we can never go back.

For those of you who may not know, the word "adagio" comes from the Italian "at ease". It implies one should play in a slow tempo. The movement is quite sentimental, sharing more similarities to an opera or a symphonic poem than to a piano concerto. The piano begins alone, solitude being a central theme to the overall mood of the piece, and is followed by unusually large symphonic gaps. Dynamics are soft, never greater than a mezzoforte. The theme seems to get more joyous near the middle only to fall back to its melancholic état d'esprit. Isn't this what happens when one reminisces of the past? It is a curious thing the human mind, letting you remember so fondly something you have forever lost.