Pages

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Miserable Artists, Great Fans

Kartikey Sehgal

The coolest people are all miserable. This is a secret.

Misery strikes the best, for it has something to feed on. From boring people, misery gets nothing.
To get by in life, the finest of men appear well. Hence the way to love them is to know and accept their private life.

Lets say there are two types of lovers: the first type that accept the happy face and assumed awesomeness of any artist’s life.
The other type look within and love the artist knowing that he faces hard times. And often, more so than others because of his mind.

  • Classical composer Beethoven married - nobody - and fought violently for his nephew’s custody.
  • Russian composer Mikhail Glinka went bitter after his Opera ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’ failed. It became popular after his death.
  • Indian singer K L Saigal died from alcoholism. Though we love the ‘alcohol induced voice’.
  • Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi never married his true love and took to alcohol.

If you go to private mehfils, they all discuss of how ‘cool’ they all were. And how unfortunate and ‘that’s how life is’. But would they have married Beethoven, or appreciated Glinka’s Opera - in his lifetime. Or gotten Batalvi to marry the girl of his choice despite the caste problems?

I say many wouldn’t. Here’s another secret - ‘that which is not part of consensus, is to be shunned. Until that is dead’.

So when you listen to music, particularly music created with the intention to not just please but to be a testament to man’s genius, immerse yourself with the thought that the artist faced life’s miseries, yet came out with - this. What we hail as triumphant may not be just the music but also the artist behind it.

.......
I leave you with music from Richard Wagner’s Opera, Tristan and Isolde; the Opera was panned and ridiculed when released, a critic called it, “the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life.” These days, it is one of the best things ever.

No comments: