When we were young, very young, in our mid-teens, music played an important part in our social life, as it does now with young people although the kind of music and its quality to our elderly ears has been much degraded from the romantic, sometimes wistful and always lyrical music we heard back in the mid-1950s.  We danced to graceful music that captured the zeitgeist of our times.

That remains a constant; young people listening to the kinds of music that has some meaning to them.  Popular music of today seems bereft of the gentle romantic and focuses on casual sex and on the violence of the streets unencumbered in the minds of musical thugs by any vestige of social grace, of law and of order in society.  But of course, mine is a very age-opinionated view.

In our teen years the Broadway musical Kismet became a celebrated hit.  And the music mesmerized me, particularly the song "Stranger in Paradise".  It became 'our' song, the music that exemplified for us our growing relationship of emotional intimacy.

We learned eventually that the music was taken from a far more elderly classical source, the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, by the incomparable (of exotic seeming music from the Russian steppes and the near East) Russian composer Alexander Borodin, and completed after his death by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov, which enjoyed its first public performance in 1890.





The music that so enthralled us was first introduced to a Broadway stage in 1953, and later again in 1955, the year we were married, at age 18.  Lately, we have been hearing on the public airways recordings of that time and that music and it recalls memories nestled deep in our consciousness, never to be mislaid.