The Hidden Human Voice of Classical Music

My night at the Dubai Opera

On Valentine’s Day this past year, my husband took me to watch a concert at the Dubai Opera featuring the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra. The principal conductor was Vladimir Fedoseyev. This was the first symphony orchestra of the Soviet Union and was founded all the way back in 1930! They played songs from Sergei Rachmaninov and Peter Tchaikovsky in a show called Rococo. But the most magnificent part of the performance was how much I learned about the way that music speaks a human language without any words at all.

I don’t know much about music but I love classical music, especially Tchaikovsky, because I recognize so much of his music from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, my favourite fairy tale. I suppose this is what made the concert such a perfect Valentine’s day gift <3 Classical music is often put in the background today, if not in movies then in our own lives. While we work, write, read or clean, it is a safe way to fill the silence with “something nice”. However, when you appreciate classical music as a main character, a piece of art that holds your primary attention, you realize how much this music says that we don’t hear because we were never properly present with it. We often flippantly say that “music is a universal language” and the wordless phrases Tchaikovsky uses to tell a story are a testament to this.