Nostagie de la boue

I woke in the middle of last night with, in my head, Germont's aria from Act II of La Traviata. (Curiously enough, Traviata was discussed on Radio 3 this morning, as I was having breakfast - entirely a coincidence unless I had picked up something from the ether while sleeping.) It's sung by the hero's father, who has come from Provence to try to save his son from the dissipated life into which he has fallen in Paris. I remember listening in bed to Dmitri Hvorostovsky's recording of this, for the first time, almost twenty years ago: it made me cry then, and still does so. Not just because of the beauty of Hvorostovsky's singing, but for some personal connotation which I don't fully understand.

Di Provenza il mar, il suol
Chi dal cor ti cancello?
Al natio fulgente sol
Qual destino ti furo?
Oh, rammenta pur nel duol
Ch'ivi gioia a te brillo;
E che pace cola sol
Su te splendere ancor puo.
Dio mi guido!

I associate the song with my maternal grandfather, who spent his life in a small town on the west coast of Scotland. Girvan has sea, but it does not have the sun of Provence: rather, it has strong winds and cool summer days. My grandfather spent his life in public service and his spare time in painting. I have no reason to suppose that he would object to my life in the city, but the aria reminds me of the distance I have travelled.

I regret not talking more with my grandfather, whose deafness was discouraging. I remember being close to him one Saturday afternoon, when we watched together the Scottish football team being demolished by England, and shared in the wry amusement that we could ever have expected otherwise.

My attribution of a simple life, confident in his values, is of course a vast over-simplification. My grandfather spent time in the mud of the trenches in Flanders, for which I hardly feel nostalgic. That must have raised questions about his faith and his patriotism. His position as town clerk must have been stressful; his apparent lack of any ambition for recognition of his painting may have been more complicated than it seemed.

So why does hearing even the first few notes of the introduction of this aria bring to my mind a feeling that I have let my grandfather down? Rationally, I have no reason to suppose that he would be critical of my life. Why do I have this longing for more confident times, when life wa simpler, religion was unquestioned, and quantum physics and Godel's Theorem hadn't impinged on my consciousness? I don't have and don't want the values of small-town Scotland of the last century, so why my guilt when I hear this music? I suppose I am regretting my rejection of some of my grandparents' values, in the same way as, without wishing to abandon it, I regret that my vegetarianism prevents me from sharing my father's pleasure in steak.

(I'll post the recording when castpost allows me to upload it!)