It's been over four months since I first got here and I've made, perhaps, one friend. A fortnightly coffee friend. But tonight I'm out at a concert, a first full orchestra concert in Prague, a first evening out in central Prague since moving here and a first social occasion with one of my "meet-ees".
I'd known ahead of time about the Dvořák and the Mozart (I was looking forward to the former, not so much the latter) and we were sitting in our surprisingly positioned, dead-centre seats. He handed me the programme, to read either in Czech or German. German still being the easier for me to understand, unfortunately. But there's no linguistic skill required to read that the final piece in the programme is Ravel's 'Bolero'.
It is a very ambivalent feeling, the like of which I'm not sure I've ever felt, to know that I am trapped here to listen to a live orchestra play a series of pieces, culminating in Bolero. Why must it be Bolero and why here? Why now? Of all the pieces I've always wanted to hear live, Bolero has to be in my top 5. And yet now is such a searingly painful time to inadvertently run into it. Why must it be forced upon me like this?
I know I'm going to have to go through with it. I also know there is no way I'll be able to get through it without crying. A piece my former partner, the only partner of my whole life, used to collect numerous performances of on CD. (I had helped him to acquire more.) But having left my musician-life behind, having had to come here as my only means of living alone, having had to accept that he'd moved on to someone better suited to him and while the isolation and longing for a true friend is beginning to fully burn away at my insides, I am being expected to survive this?
My poor 'meet-ee'! What is he to think? What will he do if he sees the tears that will inevitably pour down my cheeks?
As the piece begins, I am already on the verge of tears due to my acute sense of entrapment in this. I try to see it for the wonderful, extraordinary experience it is, and watch and listen like a conductor, while I tap my foot along with the tempo and look to see which beats the cellos are doing their pizzicati on. I distract myself with trying to sense when the double basses will join in and I compare the beats they play, when they do, with the violins. Some of these come in and out of playing over a number of permutations of the main motif.
But once the strings are all bowing their notes, I feel my life is being reflected in the unstoppable build-up to a finale I cannot escape. It's like watching all the things I have lost over the last five years and seeing each and every bit in sharp, mocking detail, knowing the outcome of every precise turn of the dagger in my heart. I feel like someone has purposely placed me here for some kind of Orwellian punishment.
However, as the final stage begins with the rupture of the main motif into the high note and following distorted melody, I feel almost delirious to hear it go through its mutations to its inevitable end, but wish I could end along with it. Couldn't it simply make me expire with the last note? It twists and turns to the conclusion I know so well and I count along with the beat how many bars it is until the final discordant notes and ultimate percussive full-stop.
And at that full-stop, the audience applauds and I begin my 'mopping-up and concealment act' with tissues and the back of my hand and hope that the pain of this will never be with me again. Unless it is prepared to do a deal with me to promise that next time it will ensure my ultimate demise as certainly as the proud bow of the conductor and the orchestra's shuffling exit from the stage.
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