Christmas Concerts and a Postscript

We had our first snow in Chisinau this past week.  It did not accumulate in a smooth cover over the ground, but laid down a light sprinkling of soft fluff which, with a warming thaw, and then another freeze, quickly turned to frozen mush.   For much of the week the temperatures stayed below freezing, so our Lake Valea Morilor had a thin layer of ice over most of its surface for the past few days.  Winter has arrived.

I am still hoping that winter here will not be too severe, and have found new reason for this hope, in all the Mistletoe that I see in the trees.   In the US, I have only seen  the Mistletoe tree parasite growing in plant zones 6 or warmer, and here I read that the European Mistletoe inhabits mostly zone 7.

The cold weather has brought on a new slate of concerts here in Chisinau, and we’ve been attending quite a few, along with crowds of Chisinau residents, all enthusiastic for Christmas music.   Last week we arrived at the Filarmonic Hall just before the announced starting time for a concert sponsored by the German Embassy, and found a crowd of people still trying to get in.   The concert had been publicized ahead of time as free, but in actuality the German Embassy had handed out invitations ahead of time to nearly enough people to fill the hall.  After the staff let in those people holding invitations, there were not many seats left, and a crowd practically stampeded the front door trying to get in.   Standing on the steps I got pushed into the middle of the mob crowding into the entry way, and as I was pressed from behind and all sides, I was thinking, if only we had this problem at our Haywood Arts Council Swannanoa Chamber music concerts!   (Perhaps the Balsam Ridge Band gets that kind of response in Haywood County, I don’t know.)   At any rate we were admitted for standing room only, and happily stood for two hours for what turned out to be a terrific concert by the Concertino Accordion Band, five Moldovan accordion players with a tuba player, a violinist, a keyboardist and a drummer.  They  were spectacular in their renditions of all genres of Christmas music, including arrangements for accordion ensemble of classical pieces, such as Winter from Vivaldi’s Seasons, with all its dramatic flair.  And they were joined on stage by Helena Goldt, a German soprano, and the National Symphony Choral Group, the “Corul National de Camera.”

This soprano by the way, Helena Goldt, was introduced to the audience as having been born in Kazakhstan and having immigrated to Germany at the age of six. I later learned from Elena, my Romanian tutor, who was eager to tell me this history, that Ms. Goldt was a descendant of that large population of Prussian/Germans who emigrated to Russia in the late 1700s at the invitation of Catharine the Great ( a German herself,) and in large numbers again in the 1800s during the Napoleonic wars. The story was a bit familiar to me because among those Germans in Russia were many Mennonites.   At the outset, Catharine excused Germans in Russia from military service and from many taxes, and by the late 1800s many had became prosperous, and thus also resented. With Russian nationalism growing, the invitation to European immigrants was revoked and Germans lost their privileged status.    During WWI German Russians were suspected of having sympathies with the German enemy, and some were exiled to Siberia. Later, during the revolution, many tried to leave but this emigration was stopped by Stalin in 1929.   In the late 1930s there were ethnically motivated attacks on German language speakers and in 1941 Stalin ordered German inhabitants to be exiled to Siberia or Kazakhstan.   After Stalin’s death in 1953, emigration out of Russia was again allowed, and of course after Perestroika many Germans emigrated back to Germany as well.   But according to Elena, these descendants, the generation of Ms. Goldt’s parents, came back to Germany speaking a two hundred year old version of Low German, along with fluent Russian, and therefore appeared more Slavic than German to many modern western Germans.   For this reason they had difficulty with assimilation and were sometimes treated with prejudice.

Hearing this history retold by Elena was of interest to me as one more reminder that all of world history is about constant immigration and emigration, -but Elena told me her take on this history in order to give me an example of how another language, like Moldovan Romanian, had evolved along its own stream, apart from the mother country.   She tells me that the Romanian which Moldovans speak sounds to Romanians like an older version of Romanian and includes vocabulary of Slavic origin. It is not as divergent from its mother language as would be Yiddish, or the Pennsylvania Dutch that my mother grew up speaking, but evidently it is recognizably Moldovan.

But back to concerts. This week we attended two more concerts. One was actually a recital at Organ Hall by three very talented young men, a pianist, a cellist, and a violinist playing piano trios by Rachmaninoff and Mozart.  And Friday night we went to the Christmas concert sponsored by the Italian Embassy. This time we had invitations so we actually had seats.   The National Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony Choir performed Italian opera arias with several vocal soloists, who were all spectacular. The Moldovan audience was rapt; they love their opera singers!

Yesterday morning Bob and I provided the music for the US Ambassador’s Christmas party held for the Embassy community. I played piano background music, mostly traditional Christmas music and Hanukah music, and Bob joined in on a couple of pieces with his violin. We also got the crowd to join in singing Christmas carols, including a couple of them in Romanian.  The Moldovan staff were quite familiar with the Romanian versions of Oh Christmas Tree and Jingle Bells.

Also last week, Chisinau held a Traditional Rug Exhibition at the National Palace. Finally, I got to see an impressive display of traditional Moldovan woven rugs.  Regional Museums from all around the country displayed their rugs, mostly antiques, and traditional musicians and dancers performed.

“Arta Rustica” was also there, a group of women who are reviving the weaving of woolen rugs in the traditional style. We made appointment to visit their studio up in Orhei in two weeks.   I hope to write about that visit in my next blog!

The snow was all gone for our walk in the park this morning.

A Post Script: Re: “Post-Truth”

According to an article I read a few days ago in the Washington Post online, the Oxford Dictionary announced this week that its new Word of the Year for the Year 2016 is “post-truth.” They define “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than are appeals to emotion and personal belief.”   According to the Post, “…the “post-” prefix in this new word doesn’t mean after, so much as it implies irrelevant.”

“The word was selected after Oxford’s dictionary editors noted a roughly 2,000 percent increase in its usage in 2016 over 2015, in news articles and on social media in both the United Kingdom and the United States.  ‘Fueled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time, ’ one of the Oxford editors commented.  The word was evidently used frequently in reference to the US presidential campaign in which accusations of lies and alternate realities flowed freely, in every direction, and hundreds of fact checks were published about statements from both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Dozens of media outlets found that Trump was a champion among liars, in a class all by himself, and none of this seemed to matter significantly to those who supported him.”

It seems to me that, although the news media and social media may have just discovered the concept this year, “post-truth” thinking is nothing new. While I agree, it does feel right now as though we are living in an Orwellian “post-truth,” world, the “truth” of the matter, or my opinion rather, is that personal belief has always been the predominant way that most of us interpret the world, the predominant factor in how most of us construct our “reality.”   It’s not so much that the lessons of humanity’s “Age of Reason,” have been thrown out with the advent of a New Age of “Intuitive Knowledge,” like the unfortunate baby with the bath water, but that those lessons never really penetrated very deeply, never fully took hold. Most people, alas, never have been very rational, or informed, or even awake for that matter.  What most people need, in order to know what they believe, is simply to figure out what is assumed by the group to which they feel they belong or want to belong.  Maybe instead of “post-truth,” thinking we should be speaking of “truth-proof” thinking, as in “child-proof” bottle caps.

I am glad if this recognition for the word “post-truth” raises awareness of our perennial talent for slanting reality however we like. But it doesn’t stop me from feeling the need to reiterate my own understanding of reality in order to maintain my own sanity. I think this impulse is likely what drives a lot of us writers to write, this need to get our “truth,” our view of reality, down on paper, to have it read, heard, so that it at least stands a chance of survival. And so that maybe ten years from now we might be able to remember what used to be our “reality.”