Half an hour late, as dusk came to the PiazzoVecchio, Zubin Mehta appeared on stage and theentire crowd applauded. He gave a brief speech inItalian which some friendly men next to ustranslated.
The concert, he said, was designed to give backthe art of Florence to the people of Florence.Nods and smiles and sighs swept through the massof people.
Mehta announced the program, of which I caught"Beethoven" and "Verdi" and little else. Theentire audience was absolutely silent as the musicbegan.
The first notes of "The Magic Flute" piercedthe evening and I noticed that the turrets on thePalazzo Vecchio flickered with flames. I couldn'tstop looking at them. If I didn't look down at thenatives clothed in halter tops and shorts, I couldalmost imagine myself in medieval times.
Wagner came next, a typical Wagner piece withbombast, angst and verve, and then a Verdi piecewhich I didn't know then but searched forafterward.
It's a sad melody, slow chorus from Verdi'sNabucco, part of which translates roughlyas "Oh, my country, so lovely and so lost! Oh,remembrance, so beautiful and so despairing!"
I didn't understand then why old men wereweeping as the chorus sang, for I didn't know thewords. I understood later.
Until the last piece, I stood there, hemmed inby the crowd, intermittently jumping up to try tosee the great Mehta in action. His hands wavedwildly, his body swayed at times to the music. Ihad the feeling that I was a part of somethingthat would never happen again.
And yet the significance didn't really hit meuntil the first four rolling notes of the lastpart of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony came driftingover the air. And then they repeated. Andrepeated. And I, somewhat hat to my surprise,started crying.
It sounds sappy, but it just hit me that to bein the square in front of the Uffizi, watchingMehta conduct a concert of some of the best musicin the world--a concert symbolically returning tothe people of Florence the art that was rightfullytheirs--was something lucky and magical.
As the last few notes of the Fifth pulsedthrough the air, I returned to this world slowly,walking home quietly and pensively with myfriends. A few blocks from the hotel, we ran intoa few members of our group at an outdoor cafe.
They were drinking kahlua and beer, looking atpicture postcards. They were talking about longvan rides and Italian ice cream. The jukebox wasplaying Madonna.
I sat down, ordered a glass of wine and sippedit while staring at the jukebox. The jukeboxdidn't play Beethoven but somehow that seemed allright.
You have to return to this world sometimes,after all.