When I was in high school, I belonged to the Science and Arts Club. (I’m remembering this because my fiftieth high school reunion happened this October.) As I recall the sole purpose of this club was to attend concerts and movies with faculty members and then go out for eats afterward. I don’t remember any science being involved at all. I went to a very small high school and it was the 1970’s – our teachers were young, and they socialized with us frequently. We joked and laughed, listened to music, watched movies and talked about anything and everything. They shared their lives with us, and we shared our hopes and worries with them.
My favorite excursions with the club were to Albany Symphony concerts. Three or four of us would pile into our teacher’s car and we’d head down to Albany, about a forty-minute drive from my hometown of Saratoga Springs. Julius Hegyi was the music director of the Albany Symphony. He led, as I recall, wonderful programs that introduced me to a fair variety of works. I first heard pieces by Charles Koechlin there, and George Crumb. I first saw Peter Schickele as PDQ Bach with the Albany Symphony. One work I recall hearing for the first time in an Albany concert was Ravel’s La Valse and it became a favorite of mine.
La Valse is at once macabre and lyrical. Ravel chronicles the life cycle of that grandest of grand dances, the waltz, from its glory days of empire to the time when war and international strife make it a grotesque farce. I got it at first hearing and haven’t stopped loving it since.
But art, especially music, is a funny thing. It has the capacity to evoke multiple reveries. So, whenever I remember La Valse, I remember also – a sandwich. Actually, THE sandwich. After our Albany Symphony concerts, we would head over from the Palace Theatre to Madison Avenue and Joe’s Delicatessen, an Albany institution that first opened in 1927. You know, the Carnegie Deli made a nice dagwood, but the Joe’s Special – number one on the menu - was the best sandwich I ever ate. Sliced roast turkey (from the bird not the plastic package), baked ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and Russian dressing on three slices of toasted rye. Served with sides of potato and chicken salad and the bowl of half-sours that were on the table when you came in. That and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda and spirited conversation about the music we just experienced could commence. I recall Joe’s closed pretty late and we were often there still talking as they stacked the chairs.
All these memories came rushing back to me just recently at the Musée Rodin in Paris. I was staring at Camille Claudel’s sculpture La Valse. It’s such a beautiful piece – a couple caught in elegant mid-sweep on the dance floor. It’s breath-taking, really, and it captures why the waltz was, and still can be, such a potent spin. Of course, Claudel was, when she created the sculpture, in the flush of her romance with Rodin. Another dance that wouldn’t end so well.
And given all that – there I was, all at once gazing at Claudel’s passionate moment in bronze, hearing in my head the prophetic pulse of Ravel’s music and, yes, dreaming of the taste of cold cuts and Russian on rye. Art’s a funny thing.
