If a piano could talk

Dum vixi tacui, mortua dulce cano*

I saw this inscribed on the lid of a—modern—harpsichord at a concert in college. It's so sweet. But of course it's not the piano talking, it's the wood from which the piano is made that is doing the talking. One can make use of this quotation in discussions of mereology and suchlike, you know, two objects inhabiting the same substance (and of course having contradictory properties ... you can have a lot of fun with that).

Actually if a piano could talk it wouldn't speak latin; it would play Schumann—probably the Kreisleriana.

...except under compulsion of course. In Berlioz, in the Evenings in the Orchestra—Eighteenth Evening (I was made to read Berlioz when I was a music student—and i still prefer his prose to his music ... nasty bangy stuff ... Wagner and Liszt liked it; Bizet didn't...) is the story of the new piano that gets beaten into shape by a succession of students at a competition finale—lots of performances of the one piano concerto (the Mendelssohn G minor) and when the last student gets up and leaves, the piano starts all over again out of sheer force of habit.

And it plays Mendelssohn, the poor thing.

Actually there's probably a whole genre out there along these lines. One i quite like is ``If a machine-gun could talk it would speak Castilian''.

*In life i was silent. In death i sing sweetly

Click here for next week's poem
Click here for last week's bon mot

Return to Thomas Forster's home page