My friend Amy Burton, who I’ve written about often on this blog, and her husband pianist John Musto were kind enough to agree to play a song by Schubert at my father’s funeral. Amy wrote this the day before:

John and I played through a bunch of Schubert and Schumann, and
Schubert’s Du bist der Ruh (the one playing in my head this morning)
was the best for length, feeling (moving without being morose) and
non-religiosity. 

If you’re interested, here’s a link to the translation:

http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=18177

Also, I called the funeral home to ask about the piano, and it sounds like a nice grand – very elegant.

Amy spoke briefly before she sang about all the time she’d spent with me in the Riverside Drive apartment during high school and after and her memories of my dad and "that record collection" which she said was a part of her musical education.

Then she and John played and the music made me feel emotions I haven’t been able to access during the last, most difficult weeks of my father’s illness. A combination of joy and loss, the song was a powerful evocation of, as Amy said, the illumination of love. I  actually sobbed during the piece and partly it was out of  satisfaction that my father was being honored in this way. I know my father hadn’t heard Amy perform in more than 30 years but he followed her operatic career with great interest, always asked how she was doing, and somehow knew if she was performing in New York City.

At the end of the service, pianist Alvin Novack, a noted concert pianist and teacher on the South Fork of Long Island, played a Chopin Mazurka, which he said was something that reminded him of my father. He told those assembled that he and my father "were friends as boys in Los Angeles,"  where my father spent his high school, college and post-college years. I found this article about Novack, who like my father, moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, in the East Hampton Star:

As a teenager in Hollywood in the 1940s he was in the midst of a European community. His friends were the children of Thomas Mann, of Bertolt Brecht, "and I got the picture early on. It rubbed off on me."

When his father died ("It was probably the shock of the warm weather"), the teenaged boy stayed on alone and put himself through college.

"Then I was 25 and I suddenly realized I was old for California. So I came to New York City, where 25 was young."

Listening to Novack play I again experienced a crushing and formidable combination of joy and grief. I also felt strongly that we were honoring my father with the power, the beauty and the lyrical melodics of the music. The piece ended on a non-resolving note of such hopefulness and mystery that it made me gasp inwardly.

Afterwards the rabbi spoke briefly and beautifully and we played a piece of music chosen by a friend of my  fahters; she was sure it was one of my father’s favorites. It played as people filed out of the chapel. Pastor Daniel Meeter of Old First Church sent me a translation of The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from the opera Nabucco, by Verdi and his own feelings about my father’s funeral:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold,
go settle upon the slopes and the hills
where the sweet airs of our
native soil smell soft and mild!
Greet the banks of the river Jordan
and Zion’s tumbled towers.
Oh, my country, so lovely and lost!
Oh remembrance so dear yet unhappy!

Golden harp of the prophetic wise men,
why hang so silently from the willows?
Rekindle the memories in our hearts,
tell us about the times gone by!
Remembering the fate of Jerusalem
play us a sad lament
or else be inspired by the Lord
to fortify us to endure our suffering!

This chorus is sung by the Hebrews who were carted off to captivity in Babylon by Nebudchadnezzar. This chorus earned Verdi his greatest early fame. Every patriot in Italy learned to sing it. At that time, northern Italy was under Austrian rule, and the Austrian censors were very strict on stifling any Italian patriotic songs. So this chorus became an Italian patriotic song, a song of liberation, freedom, and aspiration. I love this chorus. I was thrilled as soon as I heard the opening chords. It was as perfect a choice as the others: Schumann Kinderszenen, Rabbi Bachman, The House at Pooh Corner, and the Chopin Mazurka.