The Great Event

It’s going to happen very soon. The great event which will end the

horror. Which will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun

goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will

reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge into suffering, for the

last 200 million years. What a lovely night that would be. What

a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and

the retired nightingales, pick up their dusty tails, and assert the

majesty of creation!

Included on More Best Of Leonard Cohen (1997), this previously unreleased track – it can hardly be called a song – was recited by “Victoria”, clearly not a fluent English-speaker (if indeed she speaks English at all) whose stresses are wrong and whose emphases are those of someone reading an unfamiliar, foreign text. Though produced towards the end of his career, one can imagine such an experimental piece emerging from the Montreal avant-garde of the Fifties in which Cohen first cut his artistic teeth.