Note: You can listen to the piece of music here. Thanks to Jason Holloway for test reading this first entry.
Beneath the war-cry there is an undercurrent – menacing, and
almost imperceptible. We lose it in the busy preparations between the bugle
calls. The pace quickens. In less than thirty seconds, we have reached a
crescendo. The strings have become a battle charge; a variation of La Marseilles plays defiantly over the
clamour. There are blasts of percussion , rising and falling action, burning debris
hurtling through a dark sky. Slowing. Transforming into embers, caught in an
updraft of bass. The first glorious foray is over, and a victor is emerging,
magisterial against the wreckage of war.
But the chaos, the burning has not truly been vanquished.
There is a struggle between the giddy rush of the violins and the measured
triumph of the horns. In the background, there is an instrument I don’t
recognise. The ringing echoes of artillery fire, or the prophetic phantom of an
A-bomb, whistling towards its inevitable conclusion. It vanishes amidst the
last weary throes of victory.
Then somebody throws a cream-pie, and hits General Kutuzov
square in the face. Sullied by the trailers of a thousand tacky slapstick
movies, the celebration of the returning heroes becomes a hymn to an altogether
different form of chaos. People trip on errant roller-skates and bounce down
staircases; a man hits his friend in the head with a large-plank of wood; atop
the stairs, a pair of mismatched workmen smash a grand piano through the
railing. It teeters on the brink and they fight to pull it back but it slips
off the balcony. It is nanoseconds from smashing on the ground below when Tchaikovsky
arrives to rip up the score and destroy this bedlam he has unwillingly created.
With a safe hand back on the conductor’s baton, the piece builds to a more
dignified conclusion, but the phantasmal atom bomb has returned. The orchestra
plays louder, faster.
We don’t hear the bomb go off.
