Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
I was thrilled to read this poem today at The Writer's Almanac. Whether or not Brahms and Clara Schumann had a sexual relationship has been speculated about for many years -- it is undeniable that they loved each other profoundly -- but, although they burned most of their correspondence, the evidence is against it. Brahms biographer Jan Swafford has suggested that, after the death of Robert Schumann in an insane asylum in 1856, the younger composer had the opportunity to propose marriage to Clara, but instead left her disappointed. The two remained friends, and Clara, one of the greatest pianists of her age, premiered many of Brahms's works.
The Intermezzi mentioned by Lisel Mueller are opp. 117, 118, 119. Brahms called the three op. 117 pieces, which he wrote while Clara was in her final illness, "cradle-songs of my sorrows." Here is the great German pianist Wilhelm Kempff playing op. 117, no. 1, with beautiful directness and simplicity. The piece was inspired by the text of a Scottish poem, "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament," and Brahms inscribed in the score an excerpt from the poem in Herder's German translation. The English words are:
One of my son's "special interests" (as the autism/Asperger's people say) is the waterways of eastern North America. He has about two dozen books about the Hudson River, the Saint Lawrence Waterway, and the Erie Canal; he loves the classicPaddle-to-the-Sea; and he spends a lot of time drawing maps of the Great Lakes and the cities that are built on their shores. As a reward for good behavior, I recently got him a collection of DVDs called "On the Waterways," which was apparently a PBS series in the 1990s, and is narrated by Jason Robards. The episode about the Mississippi, predictably enough, uses a clip of Paul Robeson singing "Ol' Man River" from the great musical Show Boat, which, in the show, is sung by the dockworker Joe, and includes the lyrics:
Darkies all work on the Mississippi, Darkies all work while de white folks play
and
Let me go 'way from de Mississippi Let me go 'way from de white man boss; Show me dat stream called de River Jordan; Dat's de ol' stream dat I long to cross.
My son turned to me one night after watching this and remarked sadly, "I don't like being black." He elaborated, "I don't like having doors closed in my face because I'm black."
This interested me, since my son is white. It may have interested me even more because my grandmother and mother were committed to the cause of civil rights. What does being black mean to a white boy? Is blackness its own essential suchness? Is it a state defined through self-recognition, or is it a condition demarcated, even imposed, by society? (Interestingly, Show Boat raises some of these same questions.) And why does my son, who is not black, believe that he is?
I am convinced it's because he is starting to perceive himself as different from, as other than, and as outside of. And the most prominent and notable class of people who, in our culture, have been those things has historically been black.
Below is a clip of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the Dick Cavett show, with Lennon explaining the genesis of his controversial song "Woman is the N*gger of the World," and Yoko thumping arrhythmically on a tambourine. Lennon quotes a statement by California congressman Ron Dellums suggesting that, owing to their alienation and figurative disenfranchisement, "most of the people in America are n*ggers." Perhaps this is the real meaning of my son's self-perception of blackness.
I've been scarce here lately for more than the usual reasons. In fact, I spent April doing something I never thought I'd do again in this life: rehearsing and performing a small principal role in a Mozart opera with a reputable regional opera company. To make a long story short, the music director of company in question, which is about seventy-five miles from where I live, called me when the singer who was originally cast was offered a more career-making sort of role with a different company, creating a scheduling conflict. I didn't know this conductor personally, but another conductor had recommended me. I demurred at first, because it just seemed crazy. I'm not in the game anymore, and it really wasn't the kind of role I would sing if I were; it's usually cast with an up-and-coming singer, whereas I am more of a down-and-outing one. I explained to the conductor that I don't do opera anymore, that I have children, and that it would be very difficult for me to make rehearsals because of the distance. I also told him that I could recommend two excellent colleagues who had sung the role. But it seems the referring conductor's recommendation counted for a lot, and in the end I was offered the job, and, after my initial protestations, I figured I should take it, because . . . . well, I'm not sure why. I had been strongly prevailed upon; the money was good; and it was the chance to sing in a Mozart opera. And I had been told that I would only have to make it to three rehearsals, which turned out not to be true. I think I had to make the trip back and forth from my home to the city where the opera company is located twelve or thirteen times, and as a result I had to make some creative child care arrangements, and I spent most of the month more sleep-deprived than usual, since I was getting home well past midnight and my children wake up well before six a.m. During the production process, I felt like an undercover anthropologist. After so many years away, I was overwhelmed by how vastly different my life was from the lives of my colleagues in the show, and, indeed, how different my life is now from the way it used to be when I was pursuing an opera career. I didn't have the chance to get close to any of my colleagues, because they were all in residence at a hotel for a month, while I was driving back and forth, so I missed out on some of the best things about being an opera singer: the camaraderie, the jokes, and the friendships that form in the inevitable Canterbury-Tales/Gilligan's-Island-type scenarios that arise when strange singers find themselves together in a strange city (incidentally, there's a wonderful novel on this topic, Now Playing at Canterburyby Vance Bourjaily). My colleagues were uniformly the best singers I've ever worked with; out of the cast of nine, three had already sung at the Met, underscoring the current dire economic climate for opera, in which, because of multiple regional-opera-house closings, A-level singers are working in C-level houses, which is both a boon to those houses and a disaster for singers less-well established. None of the other female principals was married. Only one besides me had children: a three-year-old, whom she'd brought along on the gig, and who was being cared for by babysitters in the hotel room. "I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this," the singer-mother confided in me. Two of the male principals did have children, but they also had wives to care for them back home while they were out on the road. I overheard one of the unmarried, childless female principals ask one of her male colleagues, upon learning that he was going to New York to see his wife on our day off: "Can I live vicariously through your sex life? Because it's going to be a lot better than mine, no matter what." I'm sure I've mentioned this here before: you can't really be a mother and an actively-careerist opera singer. Well, you can, if you time your childbearing perfectly, and if you're commanding fees that allow you to pay for nannies, two conditions which almost never happen singly, let alone simultaneously. Some haters who used to read this blog a few years ago left comments suggesting that I quit opera because I lacked talent. While I don't think that's entirely true, it doesn't really matter that much, because once you get to a certain level of the profession, it's not even about talent. I'd like to say that it's about hard work, and that's certainly part of it; but it's much, much more about a confluence of things that are out of the singer's control, including the stars aligning. And of course, you have to reallywant it. One of the principal singers in my production -- one of the unmarried women who had sung at the Met -- is enrolled in a doctoral program in voice at a prestigious conservatory. Since I loved my own years of doctoral study, I was surprised, when I asked her how she liked it, to hear her say that it was a total waste of time, but that she needed the piece of paper to get a good teaching job. I realized that our reasons for getting our doctorates were very different: I had already transitioned out of opera when I enrolled, and was performing concerts of material I'd found in my own archival research, and I wanted to learn how to be a better researcher. She, on the other hand, is coming up against a wall in the business beyond which, since she's a lyric-coloratura soprano approaching forty, she cannot go, and she does not have a husband, and she realizes that she needs to make a career transition in order to continue to eat. It is an unhappy profession, peopled by lonely, unhappy people. When I told a friend, a Wagnerian soprano who left the career in order to have a family, about my recent experience, she wrote me: I can't even imagine trying to go sing with the diva girlies now. I really think opera is a dying sport/art form, so it is probably worse now than it was when we were out there. The best colleagues I ever sang with were Wagnerians, since they are too busy trying to get all their shit together to be prima donnas . . . and I generally found that they want you to know the stuff so that if they stumble, someone can help!
I think I acquitted myself without shame, and I'm glad it's over.
I see now that, in the recent post here in which I suggested that I'd go to great lengths to avoid an Extraordinary Form Mass, I didn't enumerate the reasons clearly enough. Because there is also this. To quote Mark Shea on the same topic: It brings the faith into disrepute, it causes honest and good people to stumble when they might enter in, it harms innocents . . . and, worst of all, it even tempts new Catholics who think they are embracing “hard truths” but are, in fact, embracing ancient evil to become twice the sons of hell that the Trad anti-semite is. It is pure filth and every Catholic, but most especially every lover of the EF, should smash it flat. People have died by the millions because of this crap. The rite may be beautiful. But its contemporary association with abject hatred, and with those who attempt to justify it -- and even seem to delight in it -- is enough to make every person of good will shudder.
My sister phoned me yesterday to complain about my father, who had driven several hours to spend Easter with her and her family. He was being his usual surly self, his surliness tempered only by the sentimentality that often overtakes him in his cups. I noted that he hadn't changed much since my mother's death in December. "Unless you're committed to self-transformation," my sister replied, "you're not going to change much."
As I've mentioned here before, my sister (once a daily Mass-goer) is now a committed Buddhist, so, while I'm not sure what Easter means to her, I am aware that the notion of self-transformation is a powerful part of her religious practice. But even for faithful Catholics, if there's ever a time to be "committed to self-transformation," Lent is it. And I don't know how other people manage it, but I seem to fail miserably at this attempted self-transformation each year.
This year, my Lenten penance was a diffuse attempt to rely on God more radically by striving to consume the copious stores of food in my pantry. I would allow myself to go grocery shopping only when they had run out. This meant curbing my usual practice of buying several of something on sale if the something is a thing I use regularly. This way, I told myself, I would be identifying with the poor: buying only as much as I needed at one time, buying the cheapest things possible, and eschewing my usual penchant for shopping in the gourmet and organic sections of the supermarket. I worried that I had a tendency to hoard food, and I imagined flinging myself on the mercy of God and relying on him to provide for all our needs.
This didn't work out for several reasons. One was that I realized how time-consuming and costly it was to dash off to the store when I'd run out of an essential item like eggs, instead of buying an extra carton on my regular grocery-shopping trip even if the carton at home in my refrigerator still had four eggs left in it -- even if, in other words, my egg stock wasn't yet depleted. So I soon gave up identifying myself with the inconveniences, logistical difficulties, and annoyances that the poor put up with every day -- because I could.
I failed even in the small matter of coffee. As with most comestibles, when it comes to coffee I'm a fearful snob. My favorite coffee is Peet's Major Dickason's Blend, but, in some pre-Lenten paroxysm of penance, I had told myself that ten dollars was too much to pay for a bag of coffee beans, and I bought Eight O'Clock French Roast instead when it was on a buy-one-get-one sale. I made myself drink it during Lent, and it made me pretty sad -- so sad, in fact, that I cheated, and snuck in a bag of Starbucks toward the end of the forty days (I consoled myself that it was a bag of Starbucks Holiday Blend that I'd found as a deeply-discounted overrun at the local job lot). On Holy Saturday, with palpable relief, I threw out the remaining several-cups'-worth of Eight O'Clock coffee. So I failed to identify myself even with people who couldn't afford to drink expensive coffee, but who still needed, as I do, the buzz that coffee confers.
And then there was the other small matter of anger. I stayed mad at practically everyone I knew during the entire forty days. I found it very hard to let go of my everyday frustration with, and self-righteous indignation at, people who don't do the things I want them to do, or who don't do them in the ways I want them to be done. I cursed and swore many times a day, almost always in a room where I was momentarily alone, but even so. I wanted my family to be different. I wanted my three-year-old to stop acting like a three-year-old; I wanted my autistic son to stop being autistic; I wanted my husband to be less like a man and more like a woman in his emotional presentation and responsiveness. At the same time, I wanted everyone to like and admire me.
I see now that, instead of striving to be holier during Lent, I became obsessed with grocery price-points and whether or not I was getting the respect I felt was my due. And I see that this doesn't make me so different from my non-committed-to-self-transformation father, or from anyone in the world who doesn't observe Lent, since I had substituted material things and material results for that which is real.
And what is that which is real? I long for transformation every week at Mass -- for a transformation that can be felt. I beg God, when I receive him in Holy Communion, to transform me, to make me different, in a perceptible, lasting way. I want the miracle of transubstantiation to change me, too, utterly. I want to see my old self go up in a conflagration, a holocaust upon the altar.
More often than not, however, I leave Mass feeling the same way I felt when I came in: angry, petty, frustrated, drab, lifeless, irreparably broken.
The Easter flowers were beautiful on the altar today, and the music, while not exactly good in any Platonic sort of way, was much better than usual. In a few weeks, the flowers will be gone, and the choir will be back to its usual quality. And I will be the same. Or will I?
Perhaps we are all constrained to believe that, through our longing for Him, and through His gift of self to us, God is transforming us in ways that, though they may be imperceptible to us, are truly radical. We may pray for the sensation of knowing, of feeling, this transformation, but this is just as materialistic as my Lenten grocery obsession. We need to believe without seeing, and also without feeling. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the "East Coker" section of Four Quartets: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
I came back to the Catholic faith ten years ago. I was a graduate student and a working mezzo-soprano with a busy performance schedule, and I had a part-time job crunching marketing data for a pharmaceutical company. Every morning I would kneel beside my bed -- a bed that was, no doubt mercifully, too big for me for the first time in a long while, and I would weep, and would pray that God would give me a true conversion. Sometimes now, when I think back upon all the many things I've prayed for subsequently (among others, for a happy and holy marriage and family, that my unborn children would survive pregnancy, that a miracle would heal my mother of the rare neurological disease that killed her, and that I would be able to find a friend in the barren new place I now live), it strikes me that that earlier, ten-year-old prayer was by far the most important.
Not long after my reversion, I discovered the existence of a subculture almost entirely unknown to me previously, that of Traditional Latin Mass Catholics (I say almost entirely unknown, because my boyfriend at the time had told me about Mel Gibson's separatist church with a kind of stunned bemusement, and I thought, mistakenly, that Mel and his coparishioners must be some kind of bizarre outliers). I discovered the beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass, and also the painful sort of group neurosis that seems to afflict many of its adherents -- the combination of a siege mentality with a kind of gnosis demonstrated in the belief that they are the keepers of true knowledge and that the majority of Catholics are either stupid or damned, or both. I even went out with a Traditionalist who had some commendable qualities, but who turned out to be a truly scary and unbalanced man (I still thank God, when I remember it, for giving me the momentary wisdom to turn down his proposal of marriage).
I am thrilled beyond belief by the election of Pope Francis. I'm no doubt projecting my own neuroses onto him, for we know little of him as yet, but I feel as if he's a man after my own heart. I was deeply moved by his appearance on the balcony in his plain white vestments, and by the simplicity of his greeting, and that little gesture he made -- so Italian, and, so the people who know the culture of Buenos Aires say, so porteño -- when he said, in his charming Italian, "Fratelli e sorelle . . . buona sera." And by the photos of him washing the feet of the poor, the cast-off, the rejected. And by his words about poverty. And by his taking the name of St. Francis of Assisi, which seemed to me a symbol of his profound humility.
In spite of my (admittedly small) experience of Traditionalists, I have to say that I was really shocked by the apparent contempt that many are demonstrating towards our new pope. A friend of mine was unfriended on Facebook by a Trad, who was horrified by the picture my friend had posted of Cardinal Bergoglio washing the feet of impoverished mothers in a maternity home in Buenos Aires; "I'm sorry but Our Lord didn't do that" was the Trad's explanation in a comment. Seraphic demurred, offering the hedge that the papacy was really not that important before JPII. Charming Disarray, a former sedevacantist, articulates Traddy distress at the election of this clearly holy and doctrinally-orthodox man particularly well.
This is why I never go to the Latin Mass anymore. If it were offered at a parish across the street from me, I might even go a considerable distance to find a novus ordo Mass instead. The Mass itself is beautiful and reverent. The first time I really understood the sacrificial, rather than the celebratory, ethos of the liturgy was at a Latin Mass. But the people are, often, unapologetically mean-spirited and uncharitable.
May God bless our beloved Pope Francis, and may he lead many to the truths of our holy faith.
The courage that my mother had Went with her, and is with her still: Rock from New England quarried; Now granite in a granite hill.
The golden brooch my mother wore She left behind for me to wear; I have no thing I treasure more: Yet, it is something I could spare.
Oh, if instead she'd left to me The thing she took into the grave!- That courage like a rock, which she Has no more need of, and I have. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay More Poetry Friday at Check It Out.
My cousin (who, incidentally, is pro-life) posted the video in the link to Facebook. I'd say it's a pretty textbook example of how not to protest abortion. Ironic that one of the protesters is carrying an image of the Divine Mercy.
Ultra-light blogging, I know. I'm up against some intractable deadlines in my real-life projects. In the meantime, there is this, from Mozart's Requiem. I think if Mozart had written only this one number and nothing else, nothing at all, he would still count among history's greatest musicians. I love the way that the piece's anxiety resolves into confidence in Christ's mercy. The conductor is John Eliot Gardiner, the orchestra is the English Baroque Soloists, and the solo quartet is the exceptionally fine foursome of American soprano Barbara Bonney, Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie Von Otter, and the English tenor and bass Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Alastair Miles. The tempo is on the fast side, because the orchestra is playing period and period-replica instruments, whose sounds have a rapider decay than their modern counterparts. The translation: Remember, kind Jesus, my salvation caused your suffering; do not forsake me on that day.
Faint and weary you have sought me, redeemed me, suffering on the cross; may such great effort not be in vain.
Righteous judge of vengeance, grant me the gift of absolution before the day of retribution.
I moan as one who is guilty: owning my shame with a red face; suppliant before you, Lord.
You, who absolved Mary [Magdalene], and listened to the thief, give me hope also.
My prayers are unworthy, but, good Lord, have mercy, and rescue me from eternal fire.
Provide me a place among the sheep, and separate me from the goats, guiding me to Your right hand.
My children wake up during the five o'clock hour each morning, which means that I do too. I find waking up in the dark extremely demoralizing, though, and often am filled with dread first thing in the morning. In order to mitigate this sensation, I make a cup of strong coffee using this excellent device as soon as I get downstairs to the dark kitchen. The three of us then say a morning prayer, which always includes the petition that God will help us to make the world a more beautiful place that day, and we sing one verse of this, our morning song.
I've had a cold for the past few days, so the other morning, because I was losing my voice, I told my older son to lead the singing. "You can sing, Mommy," he encouraged me, "in your crooked way."
You can sing in your crooked way: I thought about this later, and the expression seemed apt. Hadn't I spent years, after all, singing in my crooked way? I remembered the period in my life when I thought that singing was all I had, my only pathway to salvation. As a young woman, growing up and going out on my own felt like launching a cobbled-together boat into dark and perilous waters, or flinging myself off a cliff into some dark void. The world struck me as unkind and unreliable, and love as fleeting and evanescent. If there was something I could do extremely well, I imagined, it could be my shield against the inevitable bitterness and heartbreak that love and the world would deal out. I could not trust love, nor my fellows, but I could wield my singing like a weapon to cut through the dangers they proffered. Other people might have more and better gifts than I had; other people might have the gift of love. But I could sing, and I loved to sing, and I developed a rigorous self-discipline that enabled me, over the course of years, to become a highly-skilled and effective practitioner of that art.
It's not uncommon even for singers at the highest levels to sing flat. I've heard it happen many more times than I can possibly count, including at the Met. Indeed, I've heard mediocre and even lousy performances there, as well as great performances marred by mistakes, bad notes, miscalculations, and musical train wrecks. It happens to everyone. I remember feeling particularly bad for Plácido Domingo one Saturday afternoon when he was singing the title role in the rarely-performed opera Sly, which ends with a tenor aria, and he flubbed the final sung note in the opera, leaving the audience not with the memory of a compelling performance but with that of a single lame high note. There's something touchingly human, though, about singing flat; it's as if the heart, the moment's emotions, the character's words, all cause one's voice -- or, to be technically correct about it, cause one's ability to accurately replicate pitch -- to fail, and doesn't that happen in everyday, non-singing life, too?
There was a period in my career when I was singing in the wrong fach. I was a small-ish young woman, and my size, combined with my high energy, quick wit, and fast conversation, led some in the field to assume that I was the kind of soprano capable of high, fast, virtuosic singing. As it turned out, I could do the fast singing part, but I could never reliably sing the notes above high C, which is what the fach requires. A famous coach commented on my low speaking voice and the disparity between it and the high-sitting roles I was singing; an assistant conductor at the Met told me that if I even "went one fach lighter" I'd be "working everywhere." I tried to be lighter, higher, faster, perkier. Finally, though, when things were falling apart in my everyday, non-singing life, I began to remember the advice of people who'd known me and my singing for a long time, including members of my own (musical) family, who had always suggested that my voice would darken and deepen. I had wanted to be something else, someone else, but I was not, in fact, that person; and how can the voice be compartmentalized, treated as its own entity separate from the singer's own body and interior suchness?
I listened to my lesson tapes and watched my coaching videos and realized that, when I deviated from pitch, I was not singing flat; I was singing sharp -- above the pitch, even in repertoire that was, really, too high for me -- and I came to see that particular dysfunction as a metaphor for forcing myself into a box (fach, after all, means box) that was not the right size for me. Singing sharp, too, seemed very much in keeping with the use of singing as a weapon -- a sword is sharp, after all; a knife is sharp; so is a switchblade. I switched to the lyric mezzo-soprano repertoire, a switch I've written about in more detail here, and everything settled into place technically; it felt comfortable, like finally finding clothes that fit after you've been wearing someone else's for the longest time.
I sang in my crooked way for years, and my aims, as an artist, were crooked too, in the sense that everything was predicated upon my singing. It was my heroin, the drug I immersed myself in when I was devastated, frightened, falling apart; it was my consolation when girls around me had husbands and families -- had love; I didn't need those things, or so I thought, since I could sing. It came before everything else in my life; I did not know how to have a life that did not heliotrope like a vine around the trellis of musical discipline and accomplishment. In fact, it was my life.
Even in the time since my own life has settled into patterns more closely resembling other, more usual ways of living, I haven't quite known where to fit singing into those alignments. I still sang, taught, researched, and performed after becoming a mother, but without the same . . . graspingness. I still believe that the ability to sing is a gift which, I now realize, God would have me cultivate (like all His gifts) in the interest of bringing beauty and consolation to others. I'm still trying to understand how to do that.
But I don't know if, in this life, I can ever leave my crooked way behind. I'm reminded of Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening," in which the narrator, on a walk through London, overhears a lover declaiming the usual platitudes. Suddenly the declaration of love is cut short by "all the clocks in the city," who argue that
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day. . .
and exhort the lover and his listener to . . . stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
I know now that my singing isn't the only thing I have; the only thing I have is my crooked heart. And because it's all I have, it's all I can give to this world; my crooked heart is the only means through which I will ever be able to live out my daily prayer to make the world more beautiful. I pray that God will bring beauty and consolation out of my own crookedness.
Posts
