April 1.  In many parts of the world, it's April's Fools Day.  But it's also the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia later emigrating to America, and becoming an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano, blending intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination; the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness, taking us to the peaks of ecstasy, dragging us through the nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be a personal being, alive, emoting, and real as anything can possibly be.  His piano touched us all.
     One of Rachmaninoff's closest associates was another Russian pianist, the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz.  In 1987, Horowitz returned to Soviet Russia to perform, the first time he had been back since he had emigrated many years before.  He, too, made his audience swoon with the force and potency of his piano, demonstrating to us once more that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that even if we do not believe in the resurrection as a miracle of God, we can surely believe in the notion of resurrection as a miracle (for it surely is!) and, dare I say, even essential and therefore entirely meaningful measure of the wonder of existence:  wouldn't we, creatures of complex mind as well as passionate heart, all like to live again?