Imaginary

Visual Arts

• Valentin Serov, Portrait of Anna Benois (1908)
• John Heinrich Ramberg, Papageno (c. 1770)
• Gerrit van Honthorst, Merry (1623)

Music: songs and other short pieces

When You're Smiling, performed

• by Louis Armstrong
• by Billie Holiday
• by the Art Pepper Quartet
• by Louis Prima
• by Michael Bublé

From others:

• Schubert, Frohsinn (Cheerfulness), D. 520: on the many benefits of good cheer

Film and Stage

• Mary Poppins, about a nanny who gives the children of a dour man a different perspective, the one they wanted in their unspoiled wisdom
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a cautionary children’s tale against cheerlessness

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

The Stanley Brothers mastered the art of bluegrass. Even when they sang of heartache, their banjo pickin’ and always-driving rhythms took sadness out of the picture.

• Man of Constant Sorrow
• Roving Gambler
• Mountain Dew
• Weeping Willow

Other bluegrass albums:

• Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, “Crooked Tree”

Swing music in American Jazz, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s:

• Benny Goodman
• Ray Anthony and His Orchestra, “Swing Back to the 40s” album

In his Rondo in D major for Piano and Orchestra, k. 382, Mozart takes us through a series of variations on a simple theme, evoking a vision of a happy child at play or perhaps an adult at blissful peace with her world.

Willem de Fesch (1687-1761)

• Concerti Grossi and Violin Concerti
• 8 Violin Concerti, Op. 10

Field, Piano Concerti:

• Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, H27 (1799)
• Piano Concerto No. 2 in A-flat Major, H31 (ca. 1811)
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 32,  H29
• Piano Concerto No.4 in E-flat Major, H28
• Piano Concerto No. 5 in C Major, “L’Incendie par l’orage,” H39
• Piano Concerto No. 6 in C Major, H49
• Piano Concerto No. 7 in C Major, H58

Other compositions:

• de Fesch, Violin Concerti and Concerti Grossi, Opp. I-X (sampler)
• Weber, Introduction, Theme and Variations, Op.posth
• Gounod, Petite Symphonie for wind instruments

Albums:

• Bob Brozman, “A Truckload of Blues”
• Jesse Fuller, “San Francisco Bay Blues” (track)
• Johannes Pramsohler & Ensemble Diderot, “Concertos pour Violon: The Beginnings of the Violin Concerto in France”

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

• Nina Stibbe, Reasons to be Cheerful: A Novel (Little, Brown & Company, 2019): “ . . . maybe I’m just a sucker for a novel that opens with a British dental surgeon named JP Wintergreen injecting himself with lignocaine and attempting to pull his own teeth. Lizzie Vogel is a wise and cheerful guide to the absurdities and injustices in the dental surgery where she works.”

Poetry

Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land; / When you can no more hold me by the hand, / Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day / You tell me of our future that you plann'd: / Only remember me; you understand / It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve: / For if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.

[Christina Georgina Rossetti, “Remember”]

Other poems:

• Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Solitude”
• Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Sadness”
• William Wordsworth, “What Heavenly Smiles! O Lady Mine”
• James Joyce, “Alone”

From the dark side:

• John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”