Pianist Tragedy And Redemption, From Warsaw To Southern Lebanon

-Analysis-

BEIRUT — In the first scene, Julia Alli sits confidently on a leather piano chair, her fingers gliding over the black and white keys as she plays a classical piece by the French-Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.

The song is the “Nocturne” or “Dreamy Piece,” composed by Chopin as a simple exercise for his sister Ludwika to help her master the piano. Over time, it became one of the pieces every aspiring pianist must learn. Perhaps due to its simplicity and flow, it gained fame and became one of the classics of musical exercises, which is perhaps why Julia plays it with such mastery and professionalism.

The setting is Julia’s house, perched on a hill in the town of Khiam in southern Lebanon. All of Khiam stands on this rising hill, with houses scattered like open eyes in astonishment as they overlook two fertile plains — Khiam Plain to the west, where the hum of poplar trees mingles with the gurgling of the Dardara River, the chirping of fig birds, and the murmuring of cicadas, all bowing in reverence to create a musical piece as simple yet intense as Chopin’s.

Then there is the Hasbani Plain to the east, adding visual elements to the music: a palette of almond, peach, plum, and apricot blossoms with their gradations of color, fragrances, and delicious flavors, like a divine miracle that urges the eye to marvel and believe that this beauty-filled spot is not just an imaginary dream, but a town fluent in all the languages of love and life, cradling poets, writers, musicians, doctors, and martyred journalists behind every stone and tree.

Chopin’s melody echoes through Khiam

Everything in the first scene could be a fragment of a dream: the spacious house, high ceilings, wide hallways, carefully chosen classic furniture, the recurring velvet blue among the curtains and sofas, the golden lights streaming from large chandeliers, the huge window concealed behind a thin white curtain — and the girl with her long brown hair, sitting upright at the piano, her fingers moving gracefully, occasionally leaning forward.

The dreamy notes of Chopin’s “Nocturne” flow out through the windows and open doors, down to the Dardara, gently brushing off the traces of sleep from its springs, awakening it and saying, “Rise, bring us more poets and poems.”

Then the music ascends, swaying left and right, smiling upon Mount Sheikh … A mountain, smiling? Yes, this only happens in Khiam.

Echos of war

In the second scene, in the same house, a soldier sits at the same piano, pressing the keys as if pulling the trigger of his rifle, and the sounds come out like bullets, filling the space with their sharpness.

The “Dreamy Piece” that the soldier cannot master wouldn’t have gained such fame if it hadn’t saved the famous Polish pianist Natalia Karp from certain death in a Nazi camp, after she played it before a soldier with a swastika on his sleeve.

Music is an inherent goodness within the human soul.

It later became a symbol for Holocaust survivors, used by Polish director Roman Polanski in The Pianist, a film based on the memoir of Jewish-Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who recounted the suffering of Polish Jews during the Nazi era.

Such a composition forces us to recognize the tragedies of war, even those where the victims’ identities might sometimes confuse us. It reveals that in the playing of Julia, Natalia, and the soundtrack of Warsaw’s devastation in Polanski’s film, music emerges as an inherent goodness within the human soul, forbidden to the wicked who neither love music nor master it. Its symbolism is a crescendo, becoming an indictment of the descendants of Holocaust survivors.

A fragment of hell

Khiam is far from Warsaw, yet in this second scene, the soldier wears the Star of David on his sleeve, while his comrades, obsessed with destruction, rely on their power to erase colors, dancing on the ruins, laughing wildly, mocking the world as one lies stretched across the piano, as if to say to the world, “Your opinion is worth nothing”

War only believes in one color — destruction.

Everything in the second scene could be a fragment of hell — the house, once lively, now resembles a charcoal sketch, with destroyed hallways, torn curtains, and shattered furniture. Between the soldiers and colors is enmity; their rifles turn everything to ashes.

The soldier fears the liveliness of homes, the sunlight on the curtains, the flowers on sofa fabrics, the walls adorned with pictures, and ceilings shaped like a sky. He turns to the beast within, invoking it to annihilate the city, to abduct and drag it to the wilderness.

War is sharp in its essence, an act that halts the imagination’s production of images of life. War only believes in one color — destruction. And destruction has only one color, black, which is sorrow, oppression and loss.

From harmony to devastation

In the dramatic transition from Julia’s video in the summer of 2023 to the soldiers in the fall of 2024, we trace the details of decor, colors, music, and body movement, realizing that the elements shaping this scene stem from a massacre.

In The Pianist, scenography sets up the war scenes, arranging destruction and ashes to look as if they were taken in their original locations. In Julia’s video and then the soldiers’ video, the setting looks very similar; the soldiers enter the house they destroyed with their own hands, meticulously setting up its ruins to shoot their “film.”

This video will become a historical document, one we’ll need someday when the scales of justice tip in favor of truth and humanity, just as it happened for the forebears of the soldiers.