Ukrainians are earning such sympathy around the world these days that even classical music fans in Mobile, Alabama, will interrupt Beethoven to pay respects to those beleaguered people.
Meanwhile, a documentary available on Netflix will do even more to earn support for the Ukrainian cause.
First, Beethoven. The remarkably good Mobile Symphony Orchestra, led by nationally respected conductor Scott Speck, traditionally uses one of its eight full concerts each year for a more casual “Beethoven in blue jeans” performance. The March 12 show, though, began with a twist.
The infectiously enthusiastic Speck usually gives a short explanatory introduction for each performance. Here — from my memory, so the words may not be 100% exact — is the surprising segue with which Speck ended his opening monologue about the soon-to-be-played Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony:
“Before we start, please allow a few thoughts: Music aficionados long have wondered whether music can truly change the world. I’ve always wrestled with that question myself. I am still unsure if it can. But I know this: Wonderful music can help us engage with the world and can express ourselves to the world. With that in mind, we will begin tonight with something different, and I welcome the audience to stand in respect or not, entirely as you feel appropriate, as we play the Ukrainian national anthem.”
With that, the now-familiar colors of light blue and yellow (not a flag, just the colors) appeared on the backdrop behind the musicians, who began what truly is a lovely piece of music. Everyone in the audience stood as one.
This was not one of those occasions in which a few people tentatively stood, looking around to wonder if they would be alone, only to be joined by others afterward. Rather, this was a spontaneous, universal, simultaneous act of rising — an unreserved act of admiring solidarity without hesitation for a people 5,691 miles away.
And this wasn’t in cosmopolitan New York, nor was it in one of those Pennsylvania or Ohio counties with large Ukrainian American populations. This was in supposedly insular Alabama. Courage and well-motivated patriotism can stir human hearts across oceans and cultures.
The night before the symphony, my wife and I had watched a documentary on Netflix called Winter on Fire, which chronicled the 2013-2014 “Maidan” protest movement in Kyiv, and eventually throughout Ukraine. It is one of the most astonishing pieces of filmmaking, and almost certainly the best documentary, I have ever seen.
As Ukraine’s then-president, the Russian puppet and would-be autocrat Viktor Yanukovych, reneged on promises to have Ukraine join the European Union, peaceful protesters began gathering in Kyiv’s central square. As the footage shows, the original protesters were unarmed, mostly young, and idealistic, exuding more of a sense of a cultural festival than anything even approaching a riot.
Yanukovych, however, met freedom with maximum force. Again and again, his thuggish Berkut special police force, since disbanded, with criminal charges brought against some of its numbers, met even old ladies praying on their knees with barrages of rubber bullets. The officers deliberately fired upon rescue workers and clearly identified makeshift Red Cross trauma centers. They even firebombed a union headquarters. There is no denying how unnecessarily vicious Yanukovych’s police were because there is so much video footage of their inexcusable conduct. This was no documentary assembled merely in retrospect, with participants describing and perhaps exaggerating the events — the footage, extremely raw and astonishing, comes from filmmakers embedded in the very midst of the fray, with bullets whizzing around them and victims dying in real time.
It has become fashionable for some on the Right to invent a conspiracy theory, almost justifying Russia’s invasion, that the CIA went into Ukraine and orchestrated Yanukovych’s overthrow. Tucker Carlson has even hinted at such a thing on the air. But it was the very savage violence Yanukovych ordered against the Maidan protesters that guaranteed his regime would not survive.
In the end, after 93 days, Yanukovych slinked away to Moscow, abandoning his brutish presidency. Free and fair elections followed. The Ukrainian people had triumphed over Vladimir Putin’s poodle.
One cannot watch Winter on Fire, which won wide accolades when first released, without better understanding and even more readily supporting Ukraine’s cause against Russian interlopers. That cause is so inspirational that if Beethoven were alive, he might write a symphony about it.
