Host of "The Romantic Hours" Radio Program

March 24, 2000

Grammy ™-nominated classical pianist Mona Golabek discusses her nationally syndicated radio program, “The Romantic Hours”, plus romance in the 21st Century.

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HomeArts: Good afternoon and thanks for joining our one-hour chat with Grammy ™-nominated classical pianist Mona Golabek. Mona is the creator and host of the nationally-syndicated radio program "The Romantic Hours." She was recently featured in Victoria Magazine and in Victoria Online's Book and Arts Roundtable. Welcome, Mona!

Mona Golabek: Thank you! I'm just thrilled to be here. This is my first Internet chat, so I'm a virgin! And it's terribly exciting. I'm just delighted to hear--and hope to hear from everyone out there-- your thoughts about romance in the 21st Century, romance through the ages, questions about some of the great poets, authors, thinkers, what we gain from perhaps reading the journals and love letters through time-- the kind of support that it gives us as we go about our own love lives. My mother always quoted from a young girl named Eloise who lived around the 12th Century and the quote is "What do letters inspire? They contain pieces of our souls." So I'm looking for pieces of souls out there.

Librarian: How do you work out the matches you make between music and literature? Where do you find your inspiration?

Mona Golabek: Librarian - The inspiration comes from many sources, and usually there is no particular method to the madness. But I'm blessed to have an amazing producer named Doug who is obsessed with music and spoken word, and for some reason when I'm quoting from Chopin's lover, or from a Chinese poet, he seems to know the music that will go against it and compliment it, and somehow synergize soul to soul, so to speak. And sometimes I feel very comfortable in suggesting, okay, we are going to do a show on a Chinese poet named Han Shan (which means Cold Mountain) and it's the true story of a man who left everything behind in the Seventh Century and went to live up on a mountain, and he wrote more than three hundred poems inscribed on rocks And when I imagine this man on a mountain top with the cold air and the wind and the vista and the stillness I can't help but think of Debussy's Preludes for Piano, and it made sense to me to put the two together.

KityM: What inspired you to create "The Romantic Hours"?

Mona Golabek: KityM - Beautiful question, thank you. The inspiration came from my beloved mother Lisa, who was fond of quoting a 19th Century poet named Jean Paul Richter. The quote goes as follows, "Life fades and withers behind us; but of our immortal and sacred soul all that remains is music." And my mom's point to me was that our lives are very short, but through music and through letters and through words we will be immortalized. She would often say that when you are listening to a piece of music, if you are very still and if your heart is truly opened, you will feel the soul of the person who wrote that music, and the soul of the person who inspired the composition. She was a hopeless romantic, my mother, and in love with passion.

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