If you are not a musician, you may not know what a Picardy Third is. Put simply, it means that when a piece is in a minor key (think somewhat melancholy), it is the major third chord that the composer uses at the end of the piece to give it a … happy ending. Bach did this all the time. It is also often done in hymns: things may be sad, they may be tough, but it is all going to be alright (assuming you behave yourself and go to the right place when you die).
Humans have always wanted happy endings, even when they weren’t there. Samuel Johnson famously lamented about Shakespeare’s King Lear that
I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.
Because many agreed with this sentiment, Nahum Tate’s revision, The History of King Lear (1681), with a “happy ending” was amazingly successful. Lear gets to be king again and Cordelia lives happily ever after. Tate’s redaction was of negligible literary value as compared to the original; however, it was almost the only version produced for about 150 years. As Samuel Johnson said in reference to the revision, “the publick has decided” for the version where Cordelia “retired with victory and felicity.” Well, there is a victory for sentiment over great literature.
We’ve been groomed to want and expect a happy ending. If you are my age, you might remember watching Lassie on Sunday nights. Lassie always had a scary problem to solve (child and/or dog in trouble) but it always ended happily (rescue, reunion, smiles all around). Lassie was followed by Disney, where even Grimm’s Fairy Tales were cleaned up enough for our innocent minds.
But we all do it, don’t we? We want to end on a major third, a happy ending, a victory lap. But life isn’t like that. Life ends in death; we might accept the end, but making a victory out of it is something else. (I won’t talk about religion here, but you can see the connection.)
We have always known that there is something inherently tragic about life: It ends in death. Jonathan Swift once wrote to a bereaved acquaintance, “Life is a tragedy, where we sit as spectators a while and then act our own part in it.” Spinoza characterized most of life as “vain and futile,” but admitted that he was looking for a system that would allow him “unending happiness.”
If life has always been tragic, it somehow seems more so these days. Many decades ago, Aldous Huxley predicted our current situation: “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.” As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances, computers, and human bodies, but also to the planet that nurtures us.
We are looking for that Picardy Third to end on, but it seems more and more elusive. As Kafka says, “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”
If you want to hear a short piece of music that ends on a Picardy Third, try listening here. If you want a happy ending, you are going to miss a lot of great literature, great music, and the abundance of your life in its major and minor keys. I would rather be living in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies than pretending in the worlds of Tate and Disney.
My short stories do not often end in a Picardy Third. You might try “Closing Time” or “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind.”
When I Come To Be Old 