Mozart and My Father A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Its Father's Day weekend, and this is dedicated to my father. My father died in the fall. As I made preparations to travel to his funeral, I began a process of dislodging memory, remembrances that--though minute in themselves--in their accumulation would define him in ways which perhaps I had overlooked while he was alive; but now that he was dead, anxiously sought to identify and save.

Thinking of these things, I felt the need for music, and my thoughts turned to Mozart, his Requiem. I had listened to it many times, but on that evening, I was especially drawn to it--drawn perhaps, to the idea of a requiem: a mass for the repose of the dead. More to the point, a vehicle that would provide for my own repose; for confronted with the reality of death there was a void into which I welcomed the power of music.

Mozart transforms the requiem into a drama. Each section, Eke an act of an opera, dramatizes an exquisite struggle to master the terms death imposes on us. He launches us into a voyage of spiritual discovery, music expressing feelings--some we cannot name--but to which we listen in a trance of recognition, surprised at what he knows, following him trustingly into the unknown.

A musical drama which, I believe, seeks to transform our experience of death from one grounded in grief, to one more like the German poet Herder's vision of it as "the lovely youth who puts out the torch and imposes calm on the billowing sea."

We traditionally think of Mozart as a man who failed at life but succeeded in art. Whether or not the cliche is apt, in his greatest music, we are clearly in the hands of someone fully engaged in the conditions of our humanity, in a voice that engages us compellingly in the experience of our frailty

The humanity of Mozart's music, this experience that transcends knowledge and interpretation became clear to me in light of my father's death.

Dad was blessed with a pure, unadorned tenor voice, a voice that carried him into the lives of people, giving him sources of fellowship and affection which otherwise may have been denied him. Ashy man, music was one of a few vehicles he had to express his feelings, and mediate their intensity into a creative, affirmation of life.

Through music, he became transformed: became a master communicator, a translator of the full scope of the human experience. In music he was at home in the grandest spiritual territory, in realms beyond language, beyond simple conversation. But it was a conversation he and I could have, indeed, still have, through mutual feelings we shared through the language of music. Music liberated our friendship, provided us with a plane where our unspoken understandings converged. It is through this music, this Requiem, that I can embrace him again, a place where I can return to him, where I can refresh myself in his grace.

Where, in the words of the Psalms, in a metaphor that might be the prayer of every son to his father--I can "flee as a bird to our mountain. Keep me as the apple of thine eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings." Where I can take those final words of Mozart's "Rex Tremendae," movement of the Requiem-- "fountain of my love and gratitude" and offer them as my own hymn of thanks to Dad.