The Voices That Have Gone, Part 11: It Is Evening

When I was a young singer, I heard the second number in the video montage below, the Monteverdi duet "Baci cari," on a program on Columbia University's radio station, WKCR. I already knew and loved the controversial artistry of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, but I had never before heard the compelling singing of her Vienna State Opera colleague Irmgard Seefried. Schwarzkopf and Seefried recorded a legendary album of duets in 1955, accompanied by English collaborative pianist par excellence Gerald Moore, which included the Monteverdi piece. Though in today's post-authentic-historical-performance age, no one with any pretensions to musicological know-how would dare to sing Monteverdi with a piano, I loved it so much that I sang it, with a wonderful soprano colleague, in the edition for piano in my M.M. voice recital.

Schwarzkopf, a Marlene Dietrich look-alike with an equally glamorous voice, takes the top line in all the pieces. Seefried, whose voice and aspect both convey more a sense of Mitteleuropean stolidity than Schwarzkopf's soaring emotional extravagance, sings the harmony throughout with a remarkably affecting purity, almost an aesthetic of austerity. To me, the highlight of the album is the Dvořák duet cycle Klänge aus Mähren -- Strains from Moravia -- sung in German. In this repertoire, the two voices just seem to work together so naturally, and convey such warmth and intimacy, and such a lovely sense of the conversational, that I've always imagined that Schwarzkopf and Seefried were true friends in real life.  Schwarzkopf, often expressive to the point of exaggeration, is beautifully restrained here, and the two sopranos sing together with an enviable simplicity, more touching by far than a more conventionally expressive interpretation. I couldn't find any selections of this repertoire on Youtube, so here is one of the Dvořák duets, "Fliege, Vöglein," sung by the American soprano Barbara Bonney and the German mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager. 

It is lovely, but to me, it lacks something of the naturalness, the simplicity, of the Schwarzkopf-Seefried performance.

In looking for recordings of the pair on Youtube, though, I found something that I thought astonishingly beautiful: Seefried, again with Gerald Moore at the piano, singing the well-known late Mozart song "Abendempfindung" (Emotions at evening). 

At first I thought the tempo was too fast, but after several bars it seemed to me the perfect framework for the delicacy and restraint of Seefried's interpretation. The text:

It is evening; the sun has vanished,
And the moon shines with its silver rays.

Thus flee Life's fairest hours,

Flying away as if in a dance.

And soon Life's colorful scenes will fly away too,

And the curtain will come rolling down.

Our play is done: the tears of a friend

Flow already over our grave.

Soon, perhaps (the thought arrives gently,

like the west wind, with a quiet foreboding)

I will part from this life's pilgrimage,

And fly to the land of rest.

If you will then weep over my grave,

Gaze mournfully upon my ashes,

Then, o Friends, I will appear

And waft you all heavenward.

And you, too, bestow a little tear upon me,

and pluck me a violet for my grave,

And with your soulful gaze

look gently upon me.

Weep the smallest of tears for me, and ah!

Do not be ashamed to cry thus for me;

Those tears will become

the loveliest pearls in my diadem.

Seefried's singing here seems like the embodiment of the violet in the  text, the most un-showy of flowers, and of the humble tears that become the most beautiful jewels in the beloved's crown. 

Christmas Wrap-Up

Christmas was greatly anticipated in my childhood home. My mother could cook and bake like you couldn't believe, and preparations went on for days and weeks prior to the day. Then after the inevitably un-pretty release of all that tension and expectation -- someone would always be in tears by mid-morning -- we would pile into the car and drive around to look at the impressive displays of Christmas lights put out by our same-ethnicity fellow citizens to gladden the hearts of all.

In contrast, I have tried to keep Christmas relatively simple. I don't cook and bake like a mofo, though my siblings do (my sister rivals my mother's astonishing ability at this sort of thing, while I am merely competent). Christmas lasts for twelve days, after all, or until February 2, if you stick to the old calendar. My son gets one "present" present and some books and candy in his stocking. Here is how we did it this year:

The main course:
- A ten-pound kosher turkey purchased for $4 after Thanksgiving at the local ghetto supermarket, where there can't possibly be much, if any, of a market for that sort of thing, stuffed with bacon-celery-apple-sage dressing, which sort of misses the point, I guess.

The dessert:
- Clementine cake, the easy dessert so good it makes you cry.

The presents:
- A discontinued Playmobil castle wished for over the course of several months and gotten on Ebay. This is a good strategy if you are Playmobil-assembly-averse, as I am, since most of the heavy lifting -- like the attaching of all those infernal little connecter pieces -- was done for you long ago by another parent.

- Out-of-print children's books about Sir Ernest Shackleton's polar expedition and the voyage of the Kon-Tiki, and The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, which is set in my erstwhile 'hood.

The playlist:
- Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices: Carols from the Old and New Worlds (this is my favorite)
- The Americas Vocal Ensemble: A Hispanic Christmas Celebration
- Chanticleer: Our Heart's Joy: A Chanticleer Christmas
- Saint-Saëns: Christmas Oratorio (a beautiful but little-known piece; I had never heard it myself before getting a gig as the alto soloist a few years ago. The bass on the gig, who was black, told me that it's often performed in Catholic Churches in Harlem on Christmas Eve)
- Assorted Celtic-Traditional artists: Comfort and Joy
- Anonymous 4: Wolcum Yule
- Singing carols in the living room around the piano, the accordion (my husband plays), and the autoharp.

Those of you who revere Bach (which ought to be every one of us) should also know about the yearly broadcast of his complete recorded oeuvre, played nonstop on Columbia University's radio station, WSKG, from December 22 until December 31 each year. It's fantastic.

We miss little Jude today, and wish he were already here.

A blessed and joyful Christmas to all. And a word to the wise: if you're going to post status updates that include your opinion about female reproductive organs (referred to using a schoolyard expletive) on a day that you refer to as "Newton's birthday," I am going to unfriend your ass.

The Book of Tears and Remembering

It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come.  In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working.  And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.

Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me.  I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park.  Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather.  Days like this, I miss everything about New York.  I miss the colors and the smells.  I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job.  When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down.  But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up.  Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.

That was two years ago.  It's been a hard, lonely two years.  There have been many struggles, and few bright spots.  Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend.  I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.

It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility.  My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood.  The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks.  My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client.  My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window.  My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.

But all of this is long ago.  My friends are dispersed, and some are dead.  And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11.  And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.

And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it.  As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long.  And now I really do have to go and practice.

Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.

Is Beethoven the Voice of God?

I'm being facetious, of course.  But it did cross my mind yesterday, after I woke up in the dark of early morning, and, in a bit of a panic, asked God the Father to send me a hug (I'm not usually that sentimental, but waking up in the dark really kicks the ass of my soul).  Later, I turned on the radio, to hear Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 -- again: the last time I asked God for some sort of a sign, the same thing happened, and the same music played (and I was annoyed).  So, I thought, is this it?  Is this you talking to me, God?  I would have maybe preferred the humanity of the Symphony no. 6, the Pastoral, which contains whole worlds of delight and terror and the wistfulness of nostalgia.  But the Seventh is awesome in the truest sense of the world, and this was God the Father I'd been talking to, after all.

Then, today, I was helping my son clean up the dozens of empty wooden thread spools we'd been building with (I've become obsessed with this slim series of English craft-and-early-learning books from the 1960s, Learning with Mother, which features all sorts of things you can do with wooden thread spools), and put on the radio again.  And this time, I felt as if I were not only being hugged by God the Father, but also kissed by God the Son, for it was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, op. 80.

I can't explain why I love this piece with the intense passion that I do, but to me, it is the most perfect piece of music ever.  I love the simple, anthemic theme, so redolent of human hope, which Beethoven cycles through the sections of the orchestra, treating it with grace, wit, and -- if a composer can be said to feel this way about his own tunes -- heartfelt love, before handing it over to the full orchestra, where it erupts into a swelling lyrical outburst that foreshadows his other great anthem, the "Ode to Joy."  The theme starts at 1:20, below.

And then, out of nowhere, what has been, to this point, a piano concerto becomes something else entirely, when the voices suddenly appear as if wafted down from above, singing self-referentially about the consolations of music (about 2:51 here).

I remember hearing the Choral Fantasy fortuitously on the radio one day when I was a lonely new mother, and how I shouted with joy at my newborn, "That's Beethoven!" as if he could understand. Later, when he was two, he was playing the harmonica one day, and I told him he sounded like Bob Dylan.  "Beethoven," he loftily corrected me.

Today I did something similar, feeling like a real music geek.  I could feel my face light up as I turned the volume higher and explained to my now-four-year-old that the music had been composed by Mr. Beethoven, and then pointed out, one by one, the different instrumental entrances.  I know he's going to be really embarrassed by me one day; I was embarrassed by myself.  And then, without meaning to and without any warning, when the piece was over I burst into tears.  "What's wrong, Mommy?" he said, alarmed.  "Nothing," I replied. "Just that the music is so beautiful."  "It's not beautiful," he said, trying to comfort me.

I read once long ago, in a book of essays about English literature by an early twentieth-century Indian scholar whose name, like the title, I can no longer remember, that the aim of literature is "the total eradication of sorrows and miseries."  God must have intended music to be a similar balm.

(The picture above illustrates a famous incident in the life of Beethoven.  He and Goethe were walking together one day in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens in Vienna when they met the Archduke and Archduchess.  Goethe made as if to move aside to let the imperial party pass, but Beethoven linked arms with him and made him walk on.  They marched right into the midst of the royal entourage, which humbly parted to make way for the two great artists, the true nobility of the modern age.)

Music and Memory, part 14: The Carousel

I had the radio on in the kitchen yesterday afternoon during "Performance Today," which has a fun feature on Wednesdays (fun, that is, if you're a total music nerd) called Piano Puzzler, in which the pianist and composer Bruce Adolphe plays a popular or show tune in the style of a great composer, and then asks a call-in contestant to identify both the composer and the tune.  As a committed Brahmsophile, I immediately recognized the composer and the piece Adolphe pinched, Brahms's Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2 in A Major, one of the pieces perhaps most redolent of a sort of restrained but heartfelt nostalgia in the entire western canon.

Adolphe substituted Brahms's B section with the Rodgers and Hart tune "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."  It was skillfully and beautifully done; to hear it, you can go to the Piano Puzzler link above.

I first heard the op. 118 no. 2 while growing up in my culturally-anachronistic classical-music-loving family.  My mother had the Glenn Gould recording, which is why I chose a Youtube video of Gould's performance for my example above.  Gould is not the pianist most aficionados of late-Romantic piano repertoire would immediately think of for this piece, but his performance of it is remarkably true, I think, to the practice of classical restraint that Brahms always used in his most profoundly moving pieces, which serves only to make them infinitely more moving than if they had been composed by one of his more overtly passionate contemporaries.  And Gould brings out the complex network of Brahms's inner voices, teasing multiple melodies out of the piece's dense construction, so that, while you listen, your heart can be broken at several spots and in several different registers of the keyboard.

Coming late to the party, as is my wont, I have only recently discovered the AMC television series Mad Men.  It happened when my husband was out of town.  We don't have real television here, so, after seeing the first episode on a free site that has since shut down, I took to downloading every other episode of the first season.  I got a couple of free ones through an Amazon promotion, and then I couldn't stop.  I watched the first-season finale last night, which includes a brilliant, marvelously-acted scene in which the troubled ad-man Don Draper makes a pitch to Kodak to create the campaign for its new slide projector, overriding the client's initial branding instructions and calling the device, in his own copy, "The Carousel."  (You can watch the scene here; copyright laws prevent me from embedding it in this post.)  Advertising, Draper tells them, is about nostalgia, which, he says, means in Greek "the pain from an old wound."  A Mad Men fan site challenges Draper's definition, translating the Greek as, essentially, homesickness -- or, for Brahms, who wrote several songs with the title, Heimweh.  Here is the best known of his Heimweh songs.

The text, by Klaus Groth, is translated thus by Leonard Lehrman:

Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?

Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!

And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!

Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!

There is a large, lovingly restored belle-époque carousel in a public park within walking distance of our house.  It's painted with idyllic childhood scenes à la Kate Greenaway, and it booms out its highly-orchestrated turn-of-the-century tunes from a period Wurlitzer calliope.  Admission is free, so when we ride it, we usually ride it for an hour or so, which gives my son all the time he needs to pretend that each separate ride is one of the stations on the Metro-North Railroad from our old neighborhood in the Bronx down to Grand Central Station (he, train-obsessed, also calls the carousel "the magic turntable").  This also gives me time to think.

Occasionally at the carousel I see a haggard young redheaded woman.  She is surrounded by seven redheaded children between the ages of about one and thirteen, and is pregnant with another.  A social worker with a name badge sits on a bench and looks on.  I have seen this mom waiting for her kids by the parking lot, talking with the social worker, and then seen a minivan taxicab pull up and all the kids piling out of it, including the baby in a car seat. The mother has plastic grocery bags full of soda and chips for their picnic, and they all make their way over to the playground area, where the social worker helps with pushing the little ones on the swings and mediating their childish disputes.  My friend who knows the director of a local foster-care agency tells me that this mother has lost custody of these seven children temporarily, and of an eighth permanently, while awaiting trial for soliciting johns for one of her pre-teen daughters.

The orderliness and cleanliness, the gay music, the ethos of innocent fun represented by the carousel make me think of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Anecdote of the Jar."  Like Stevens's jar, our carousel makes the "slovenly wilderness" surround its artfulness, its artifice, its order; but our carousel, like Don Draper's Carousel, also dispenses a false nostalgia, the longing for a home that most likely, for most people, has never really existed.

Here is some vintage carousel footage from Coney Island, set to the song "Carousel" from the original cast recording of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Repost: Breaking Dawn

This morning I switched on the radio, which, for such a routine act, is one that I always approach with eager anticipation: What will it be today?  What strains will knit together the invisible community of listeners?  Well, it was eight o'clock, so I knew it was time for Saint Paul Sunday, a program I often listen to with great interest.  This time, I heard the restrained, wistful opening bars of my favorite Schubert song, "Im Frühling," and the whole scene was suddenly uncannily familiar to me.  I knew that the voice I would hear in a second would be soprano Dawn Upshaw's, and I recalled that at exactly this time last year the exact same show was broadcast.  As a hopeful communicant in the unseen guild of radio listeners, I was disappointed.  But, in the spirit of Saint Paul Sunday, I am rebroadcasting the post I wrote one year ago today about hearing the Dawn Upshaw program -- itself a rebroadcast from 2006 -- for the first time.
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I'm pretty sure that I will never own an iPod, in spite of the offer my Music 101 students made last year to buy me one if they all got A's (they didn't, and they didn't). The truth is that the technology doesn't attract me. The idea of walking around in the big world while cocooned in your own predetermined soundscape strikes me not only as personally isolating but even as potentially dangerous, and I'm sure it's not what Saint Paul had in mind when he set forth his injunction to be in the world but not of it.

On the other hand, I love the technology of radio. Quite the opposite of iPod-inspired isolation, radio gives the listener a thrilling, tenuous connection to a whole secret society of fellow-listeners. The ineffable sensation of being up late at night and turning on the radio to encounter an unexpectedly profound musical experience has given me some of the best moments of my life. It's been both profoundly comforting and wildly exciting to imagine a hidden community listening along with me in those dark hours; it's given me a delicious sense of shared struggle, of silent companionship -- the feeling that, as poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote, "Somebody loves us all." I remember waking in the middle of the night once in Brooklyn and switching on my lo-fi clock radio to hear the beautiful soprano-alto duet “Weg der Liebe II” from Brahms's Opus 20 duets, a piece I knew and loved well. That was twenty years ago, and it still stands out as one of the most beautiful moments of my life (and, if you want to know what beauty is, go here and download the piece for free right now in the version I heard that night, with soprano Judith Blegen, mezzo Frederica von Stade, and pianist Charles Wadsworth. And then, if you want to have a good cry, go here to read the translation). As George at the excellent music-and-culture blog The Big City writes: "There’s a lot of recordings I hear on the radio that I also own, but it’s special to hear them being broadcast, with that extra helping of serendipity and the feeling that you’re sharing your pleasures with others."

So it was with a thrill that I switched on the kitchen radio this morning to hear the opening chords of my favorite Schubert song -- and one that has deep personal meaning for me -- "Im Frühling," played by a pianist who masterfully evoked the music's tension between tender hope and melancholy resignation (the text is here). But when the voice entered, I was confused. I've heard many of the great singers who are currently active, and I'm quite skilled at recognizing voices, but this one sounded unfamiliar. I noticed that, although the singer was a soprano, she was singing the song in the low key, and it didn't sound quite right to me. There was a slight but telltale American accent in the delivery of the German, a distinctive conversational way with the text that I thought was a little overdone, and vibrato added only at the ends of phrases, as a nightclub singer would do. It took me until the third stanza to realize that the singer was Dawn Upshaw.

I'd always felt ambivalent about Ms. Upshaw's work. I had great admiration for her musicianship, her commitment to new composers and new works, and her ability to shape a unique, non-operatic career path as a classical singer. I had seen her début at the Met as Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro in my teens, and, as an aspiring singer, was impressed with her youth, the directness of her expression, and the sweetness of her voice. But I had always found her vocal resources somewhat limited, and had disliked her habit of compensating for their limitations by an attention to the text that bordered on mannerism. Stanislavski is reputed to have told a young actor: "You must love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art," and I had never been quite sure where Upshaw's true love lay.

And, frankly, I was jealous. Dawn Upshaw was having the career that I and a couple of my friends aspired to. We didn't really want to sing opera. We wanted to sing new music -- contemporary, untried, or forgotten repertoires -- but we'd been told that American singers couldn't have careers as recitalists, and that we'd have to make a name for ourselves in opera in order to be able to perform what we really wanted (I came to personal grief doing as I was told, but one friend was able to mostly circumvent the opera world and become well-known as a specialist in twentieth-century music).

I was up in arms when I heard Dawn sing George Crumb's iconic ensemble piece Ancient Voices of Children at her Carnegie Hall début in the late 1990s, for she didn't just sing; she also did some sort of interpretive dance during the instrumental interludes, which struck me as sacrilege. Then, in the last half of the recital, she sang folk songs with a microphone and some banjo pickers accompanying her, which struck me as smarmy.

Still, the fact was that the enigmatic Upshaw -- was she supremely talented or unjustly promoted? my friends and I could never quite decide -- was having the career we all wanted. A college friend went to a prominent music festival one summer, and when the new semester started, I wanted to know all about her experiences there. "Who were the guest teachers?" I asked her. "Oh . . . Dawn," she said airily, and I ground my teeth in envy at her first-name relationship with La Upshaw. Another friend, also a soprano, used letterhead from the law firm where she temped as a secretary to write to the Metropolitan Opera management, charging them with deception because she was convinced that they used a body mic for the slender-voiced Upshaw. Dawn seemed like a genuinely nice person, but we heard rumors about her ruthless ambition. "She lies about her age," someone whispered, as if everyone else in opera didn't. One friend, a pianist who was a great Upshaw admirer, was disappointed when he worked as the rehearsal pianist for an opera in which she was cast. She didn't really talk about anything except her kids, he said, and he concluded, therefore, that his idol was "a very boring lady."

But later, when I served as a graduate teaching assistant in the music department in one of my university's senior colleges, I was in the women's bathroom one day talking with my accompanist about an upcoming performance, when a stall door swung open, and out came . . . Dawn Upshaw. She was much taller than I'd imagined, and was dressed in a simple black dress with an old red cardigan half-buttoned over it. She came right over to us and asked me about my performance with unfeigned interest. It turned out she was adjudicating an audition for an opera training program that had rented one of my university's recital halls for the purpose. I managed to stay on my feet and stammer out the truth: that I had admired her and her work greatly, and for many years.

Not long after that, Upshaw was diagnosed with breast cancer, the disease that was soon to take her great colleague and friend Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, (you can see them together in a radiant performance by Upshaw of "Angels ever bright and fair" from Handel's Theodora, an oratorio about early Christian martyrs, here in an updated production directed by Peter Sellars), and she did a recital tour without bothering to cover the baldness that resulted from her chemotherapy treatment. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007, the first singer to be so honored, and became the director of the vocal arts program at Bard College's new conservatory. After my son was born, I used to take him to a playground in a posh suburb north of New York City that was a quick train ride from where we lived in the Bronx. I knew that Dawn Upshaw lived there, and I always hoped I'd run into her again, but I never did.

The last time I saw Upshaw was exactly a year ago, when my dear friend Really Rosie and I went to see the New York premiere of La Passion de Simone, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's oratorio about Simone Weil (Upshaw is shown as Simone above, with dance Michael Schumacher; the production was also directed by Sellars). The performance made me critical of Dawn for all the reasons I always had been, and made me love her for all the reasons that I always have.

The radio program I had flipped onto by chance this morning turned out to be a rebroadcast of a Saint Paul Sunday show from 2006, with Upshaw accompanied by the great American pianist Gilbert Kalish. You can listen to it here.

Me Too

[The] great Romantic symphonists [are] great companions, especially on those nights when talk is impossible, when the only understanding companion is the radio. Some of the greatest pleasures I’ve had in life are late nights in bed, tired and restless, and turning on a low-fidelity clock radio. Classical music stations not infrequently abandon the Baroque and Classical top 40 late at night for the longer, deeper, darker works of Romanticism. I first heard [Ralph Vaughan Williams's] 9th and Prokoviev’s 7th in just those moments, and was utterly fascinated. It seemed I was hearing a profound riddle of a bed-time story, a lullaby of contemplation, and in my own moments of fear and doubt knew that there were others listening in tandem to the broadcast, and that the radio was offering companionship to us, and that we were not alone.

-- George Grella, writing at The Big City

Update:  A great radio tradition is going on right now:  the annual Bach Festival on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station. From December 21 to December 31, WKCR plays something like Bach's entire recorded output, and there are some neat oddball segments like jazz commentator Phil Schaap's show featuring Bach in jazz. Lots of room for great radio moments.  Listen here.

Music and Memory, Part 3: Emotion and Meaning

I intend no insult to my colleagues, and hope none is taken, when I repeat here the generally-accepted meme that classical singers lack the musicianship skills of instrumentalists. It's mostly true, but not because singers are stupid. The main reason for this skill deficit is that singers start serious study later than instrumentalists. In all but a few very rare prodigies, the vocal mechanism does not mature until a singer is in her teens (sometimes later for men), and it's unwise to attempt to develop a singing technique -- i.e., a reliable physiological method for producing the refined sound required by the classical vocal repertoire -- in a still-developing body. So, while pianists and violinists can start as young as four or five, most singers lag behind by at least ten years. And, while little pianists and violinists are learning to read and analyze music as they learn to play, some singers never acquire those abilities at the highest level. It is well-known, for example, that Pavarotti could not read music easily. But for every Pavarotti -- a truly great instinctive musician -- there is also a Maria Callas or a Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, not only great singers but also virtuoso musicians of the highest possible order, whose musical ability was arguably the true root of their greatness.

When I enrolled in my master's degree program in voice in the 1990s, I found myself among musicians whose skills far outstripped my own. Though I strove to distinguish myself among my singer colleagues, my theory and analysis abilities were relatively dismal, and I was required to take undergraduate theory. At the same time, however, I tested into the highest-level sight-reading and ear-training class on the graduate level, and I recall how the professor, when I came into his classroom at the first meeting, was sure that a mistake had been made (he demanded, "What are you doing in this class?"); singers were almost never admitted to it, especially not singers who'd been demoted to undergraduate theory. But, if my musicianship was weak, my musicality was strong; half of the reason, I think, that I got into the advanced class was that I instinctively knew how a piece of music written in the so-called common practice period was meant to go, and therefore, even under pressure, could sight-sing accurately.

I come from a family of accomplished musicians on both sides, and my two older brothers demonstrated unusual musical ability while still children, and went on to receive advanced degress and have professional careers in music. I, on the other hand, was a comparatively late bloomer. I had always sung, but didn't start doing it seriously until I was fifteen. My sudden emergence on the family musical scene upset the family dynamic to the extent that I was discouraged, rather than encouraged, from continuing, but I stuck to it, because I was receiving encouragement from outside the family (I had begun winning awards and honors as a high-school-aged singer), and besides, I loved doing it, and believed I had found my groove. It wasn't until I was about twenty that my mother, having come to hear me in a rehearsal, tearfully gave her blessing to my pursuit.

In college, my piano professor (mistakenly) believed that I should prepare to audition for the yearly concerto competition -- on piano -- the winner of which played a movement from a concerto written for his instrument with the college orchestra. I declined; I knew my limitations. I was, and am, merely an adequate pianist. But my professor wrote that year in an evaluation of my work with her, "Pentimento spends too much emotion away from the keyboard." I've thought about that caveat ever since. Is emotion what is required of classical musicians? Yes . . . and no. Yes, we must be able to access deep reserves of feeling. But we cannot allow emotion to dominate performance. The singers who do this are often noted for performances that move audiences profoundly, relying on hastily-put-together techniques that too often cause the practitioner to burn out fast. It's not emotion that drives a singing technique. Technique must be mastered so that emotions can be accessed in a safe way for the vocal mechanism, and so that they can be expressed in a way that moves the audience but not the singer. This is one of the most difficult aspects of performance to master. The great soprano Renée Fleming has written of singing the title role in Carlisle Floyd's Susannah at the Met while going through an excruciating divorce. Although she was able to access her despair for the role (Floyd's opera transposes the story of Susanna and the Elders to rural Tennessee in the first half of the twentieth century) to the extent that tears streamed down her face in the midst of her performance, the audience didn't get it; a friend who was there told Fleming, "You really have to work on your acting" (in fact, I was also in the audience for Fleming's short run of Susannahs in 1999, and I felt the same thing). The way to give the audience the emotional experience -- indeed, the catharsis -- that they are craving, and that the singer may be craving too, is to give it away, to forego the pleasure of an emotional transport and use one's technique, as well as gesture and movement, to demonstrate it for the audience instead.

All of this is a circuitous road to my real point, which is the intersection of music and memory, in particular the chance encounter with music that evokes felicitous memory. During my early days in one of the undergraduate theory classes in which I was embarrassed to be the only graduate student, the professor illustrated a point by going to the piano and playing the opening bars of the Variation VII Grazioso from Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn -- which may be heard here by scrolling down to the right-hand side of the screen -- with such delicacy and understatement that I could feel my insides clench in recognition, though I'd never heard the piece before. And, while my theory-analytical music vocabulary was then, and remains, inadequate to explain why this piece works like that, I can tell you that Brahms is the master of expressing the sense of bittersweet resignation, and of joy muted by grief and experience, particularly through his use of harmonic progression and the subtleties of his writing for the lower voices.

I turned on the radio yesterday, and heard the Variation VII Grazioso, and my gut clenched in exactly the same way as it had in undergraduate theory, and I wondered about my fellow students from way back then -- did Esther, the Orthodox Jewish violinist who wore a shearling coat and platform shoes, end up marrying a scripture scholar and finding an orchestral job that would allow her to get a sub every Friday night, as she'd hoped? -- and our wonderful, humane professor. And what made our professor most humane, I think, along with all the other professors, is that they were showing us how important classical music was -- how it could be a true lifeline that helped us connect to our humanity at the deepest level, and how we could learn how to help our audiences do the same.

Above: the incomparable Bianca Castafiore, the "Milanese Nightingale" of the Tintin series (whose name, incidentally, means white chaste flower).

Breaking Dawn

I'm pretty sure that I will never own an iPod, in spite of the offer my Music 101 students made last year to buy me one if they all got A's (they didn't, and they didn't). The truth is that the technology doesn't attract me. The idea of walking around in the big world while cocooned in your own predetermined soundscape strikes me not only as personally isolating but even as potentially dangerous, and I'm sure it's not what Saint Paul had in mind when he set forth his injunction to be in the world but not of it.

On the other hand, I love the technology of radio. Quite the opposite of iPod-inspired isolation, radio gives the listener a thrilling, tenuous connection to a whole secret society of fellow-listeners. The ineffable sensation of being up late at night and turning on the radio to encounter an unexpectedly profound musical experience has given me some of the best moments of my life. It's been both profoundly comforting and wildly exciting to imagine a hidden community listening along with me in those dark hours; it's given me a delicious sense of shared struggle, of silent companionship -- the feeling that, as poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote, "Somebody loves us all." I remember waking in the middle of the night once in Brooklyn and switching on my lo-fi clock radio to hear the beautiful soprano-alto duet “Weg der Liebe II” from Brahms's Opus 20 duets, a piece I knew and loved well. That was twenty years ago, and it still stands out as one of the most beautiful moments of my life (and, if you want to know what beauty is, go here and download the piece for free right now in the version I heard that night, with soprano Judith Blegen, mezzo Frederica von Stade, and pianist Charles Wadsworth. And then, if you want to have a good cry, go here to read the translation). As George at the excellent music-and-culture blog The Big City writes: "There’s a lot of recordings I hear on the radio that I also own, but it’s special to hear them being broadcast, with that extra helping of serendipity and the feeling that you’re sharing your pleasures with others."

So it was with a thrill that I switched on the kitchen radio this morning to hear the opening chords of my favorite Schubert song -- and one that has deep personal meaning for me -- "Im Frühling," played by a pianist who masterfully evoked the music's tension between tender hope and melancholy resignation (the text is here). But when the voice entered, I was confused. I've heard many of the great singers who are currently active, and I'm quite skilled at recognizing voices, but this one sounded unfamiliar. I noticed that, although the singer was a soprano, she was singing the song in the low key, and it didn't sound quite right to me. There was a slight but telltale American accent in the delivery of the German, a distinctive conversational way with the text that I thought was a little overdone, and vibrato added only at the ends of phrases, as a nightclub singer would do. It took me until the third stanza to realize that the singer was Dawn Upshaw.

I'd always felt ambivalent about Ms. Upshaw's work. I had great admiration for her musicianship, her commitment to new composers and new works, and her ability to shape a unique, non-operatic career path as a classical singer. I had seen her début at the Met as Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro in my teens, and, as an aspiring singer, was impressed with her youth, the directness of her expression, and the sweetness of her voice. But I had always found her vocal resources somewhat limited, and had disliked her habit of compensating for their limitations by an attention to the text that bordered on mannerism. Stanislavski is reputed to have told a young actor: "You must love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art," and I had never been quite sure where Upshaw's true love lay.

And, frankly, I was jealous. Dawn Upshaw was having the career that I and a couple of my friends aspired to. We didn't really want to sing opera. We wanted to sing new music -- contemporary, untried, or forgotten repertoires -- but we'd been told that American singers couldn't have careers as recitalists, and that we'd have to make a name for ourselves in opera in order to be able to perform what we really wanted (I came to personal grief doing as I was told, but one friend was able to mostly circumvent the opera world and become well-known as a specialist in twentieth-century music).

I was up in arms when I heard Dawn sing George Crumb's iconic ensemble piece Ancient Voices of Children at her Carnegie Hall début in the late 1990s, for she didn't just sing; she also did some sort of interpretive dance during the instrumental interludes, which struck me as sacrilege. Then, in the last half of the recital, she sang folk songs with a microphone and some banjo pickers accompanying her, which struck me as smarmy.

Still, the fact was that the enigmatic Upshaw -- was she supremely talented or unjustly promoted? my friends and I could never quite decide -- was having the career we all wanted. A college friend went to a prominent music festival one summer, and when the new semester started, I wanted to know all about her experiences there. "Who were the guest teachers?" I asked her. "Oh . . . Dawn," she said airily, and I ground my teeth in envy at her first-name relationship with La Upshaw. Another friend, also a soprano, used letterhead from the law firm where she temped as a secretary to write to the Metropolitan Opera management, charging them with deception because she was convinced that they used a body mic for the slender-voiced Upshaw. Dawn seemed like a genuinely nice person, but we heard rumors about her ruthless ambition. "She lies about her age," someone whispered, as if everyone else in opera didn't. One friend, a pianist who was a great Upshaw admirer, was disappointed when he worked as the rehearsal pianist for an opera in which she was cast. She didn't really talk about anything except her kids, he said, and he concluded, therefore, that his idol was "a very boring lady."

But later, when I served as a graduate teaching assistant in the music department in one of my university's senior colleges, I was in the women's bathroom one day talking with my accompanist about an upcoming performance, when a stall door swung open, and out came . . . Dawn Upshaw. She was much taller than I'd imagined, and was dressed in a simple black dress with an old red cardigan half-buttoned over it. She came right over to us and asked me about my performance with unfeigned interest. It turned out she was adjudicating an audition for an opera training program that had rented one of my university's recital halls for the purpose. I managed to stay on my feet and stammer out the truth: that I had admired her and her work greatly, and for many years.

Not long after that, Upshaw was diagnosed with breast cancer, the disease that was soon to take her great colleague and friend Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, (you can see them together in a radiant performance by Upshaw of "Angels ever bright and fair" from Handel's Theodora, an oratorio about early Christian martyrs, here in an updated production directed by Peter Sellars), and she did a recital tour without bothering to cover the baldness that resulted from her chemotherapy treatment. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007, the first singer to be so honored, and became the director of the vocal arts program at Bard College's new conservatory. After my son was born, I used to take him to a playground in a posh suburb north of New York City that was a quick train ride from where we lived in the Bronx. I knew that Dawn Upshaw lived there, and I always hoped I'd run into her again, but I never did.

The last time I saw Upshaw was exactly a year ago, when my dear friend Really Rosie and I went to see the New York premiere of La Passion de Simone, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's oratorio about Simone Weil (Upshaw is shown as Simone above, with dance Michael Schumacher; the production was also directed by Sellars). The performance made me critical of Dawn for all the reasons I always had been, and made me love her for all the reasons that I always have.

The radio program I had flipped onto by chance this morning turned out to be a rebroadcast of a Saint Paul Sunday show from 2006, with Upshaw accompanied by the great American pianist Gilbert Kalish. You can listen to it here.

On the Radio

All alone in my new home and feeling lonely and at loose ends, I turned on the radio to find one of my favorite pieces being broadcast, Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Handel, op. 24. This gave me one of those little shivers of deliciousness that affirm that we are never really alone, for someone else who knows and loves this piece was surely hearing it at the same time as I, and then, of course, God's hand is in all of it too.

Update: I never found out who the pianist was, because my husband and my son came home at the very end.