It is not unusual in the streets of Florence to see a mass of people lining up by the entrance to a historic building, especially as Italy moves into high tourist season.
Standing in line to see Michelangelo’s “David” or Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” is actually part of the touristic experience; if you could simply stroll in whenever fancy struck, well, you’d have been born in the 18th century and you’d be dead now.
This line was different, though. It was not composed of obvious out-of-towners fanning themselves with street maps. Immaculate dress and a certain elegance, not to mention a certain language, revealed the majority of those in line to be Italians; they were standing outside a granary that had, in 1337, been turned into the church of Orsanmichaele.
Tonight, it was both church and concert hall: A fabulously frescoed place where dazzling American students would perform one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, Bach’s “Passion of St. Matthew.” It was to see these young people from Yale and Julliard that such a throng of locals had assembled.
As the sun went down, the queue got thicker and a sense of eagerness grew. Occasionally someone would rush from the surrounding streets and you’d see their face fall, on account of how long the line was getting.
Suddenly, an alarm rang out from a nearby building. It was a terrible shrieking thing that alternated between two notes: dah-duh, dah-duh, dah-duh! A ripple of consternation ran through the crowd. The alarm kept blaring. Policemen arrived, consulted one another, and peered into the windows of the closed shop that was radiating the noise. The alarm kept blaring.
It was almost 8 o’clock, the fateful hour when the concert was meant to begin. At a signal the doors opened, and the waiting people poured in to get seats on hard pews. Still the alarm blared: dah-duh, dah-duh, dah-duh! The pews were full, and still people poured in. Here a regal white-haired couple, there a scruffy fellow carrying his motorcycle helmet, and over there, by the wall, a striking figure of indeterminate sex clad entirely in black leather.
Inside, the racket was muted but still fatally audible. You couldn’t sing an aria with that going on and you certainly couldn’t listen to one.
And so the people waited, gazing at the young faces of the Yale Baroque Ensemble and an ensemble from Julliard. The musicians waited, gazing at the audience. For nearly an hour, each side studied the faces of the other and yearned for the appalling noise to stop. Nearly an hour sitting on hard pews or standing on hard stone for a three-hour concert that hadn’t even begun — yet no one left.
Suddenly, just like that, the alarm stopped and the church erupted in cheers and applause. A moment later conductor Masaaki Suzuki raised his arms, and what followed was not just a glorious and deeply moving concert, but a kind of hymn to Western Civilization itself: American students playing German music to an audience of Italians in a church painted in the early days of the Renaissance. It really does not get much better than that.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
