The Voices That Have Gone, Part 9: R.I.P. La Stupenda

I'm terribly saddened -- though it was not untimely -- by the death of the great Joan Sutherland, who did so much to revitalize Italian bel canto repertoire in the twentieth century, taking up the mantle dropped by Callas in a way completely different from that of the older (and, arguably, greater) soprano.  Dame Joan was also, by all reports, a genuinely kind person and a gracious colleague.

Enjoy this great, great live performance -- I'm guessing it's from her 1959 Lucia at La Scala, conducted by Tullio Serafin -- of "Ardon gli incensi," the second part of Lucia's mad scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
 

"Solidarity with the souls in hell"

Heather King has written a really interesting post about Simone Weil's troubling refusal to be baptized.

The Mercy of a Rude Stream

I will be posting relatively lightly over the next few weeks, as I'm working against deadline on a big copy-editing job for a scholarly book, as well as using my spare time to practice.

I just wanted to link here to a heartfelt post on Simcha Fisher's blog

She writes:  "The mercy of God is like a flood . . . . You can go back and salvage some of your stuff, but you won't be living in that house again."

(The title of this post is the title of a late novel by cult writer Henry Roth.  I've never read it, and it's probably not apropos, but it came into my head when I read Simcha's post.)

Music and Memory, Part 18: Dreams Dashed

I got a letter in the mail today -- a real one -- from my beloved friend Soprannie.  She writes of attending a production of Le nozze di Figaro, an opera in which she and I once performed together: 

I missed [some] parts because I was busy weeping silently as my husband held my hand.  Mostly in Act II, that perfect, beautiful thing.  I try to feel lucky that I got to be a part of that gorgeous music -- twice! and once with a dear friend.  Ah, we were so full of hope.  I remember [my voice teacher] saying to me, when I called her, tearful, from [an audition tour in] Germany, "You're not the first girl to get her dreams dashed". . . . It was . . . the first time I have gone to the opera without thinking, "that could be me some day . . . " Instead, I thought, "that will never be me."  

But it is OK, isn't it?  I think so.  We could have kept striving and striving and still never hit the big stage.  My friend R. [a gifted baritone] is a great reminder of that.  He's doing well -- a few small directing gigs, constant choral work (New York Philharmonic, American Symphony Orchestra, etc.), occasional step-out [solos] with ASO, a few opera gigs at regional houses around the country . . . but at 45 he is still couch-surfing, single, and hoping for a B-house gig.  I don't envy him.  Usually.  Mostly.

Soprannie is one of the best musicians I know.  In some way, I think I immunized myself against the depth of her present grief, having preempted it by leaving opera, focusing on the rare recital repertoire that became my specialty, and getting my doctorate in voice performance.  Sometimes I think those were all dodges, ways to avoid a fate that is shared by the vast majority of singers who graduate from conservatories and voice programs at American universities each spring.  There are thousands of them, young singers who are talented, well-trained, and hungry, and I estimate that there are currently only around a hundred or so American singers making a living as soloists in opera.  About ten or fifteen of them are famous; the rest you'll never hear of, but they're working.

A couple of years ago my comboxes played host to a rather vicious woman who saw to it to remind me that the arts were for "those who have talent," myself, presumably, not included among them (this same commenter urged Dawn Eden to drop me from her blogroll after interpreting an emoticon I had used in my own combox as proof of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  If I were made of tougher stuff, I would tell you truthfully that this didn't make me cry for months, or send me to the confessional about seven times just to make sure I hadn't somehow unintentionally committed such blasphemy, but this was not the case).  I can only assume that this reader, who is perhaps by now plying her own talents elsewhere, didn't know many classical musicians personally.  In the layman's world, is there really the idea anymore that if you're good, you make it, and if you don't, that's proof of your lack of goodness?  The professional and academic classical music world is the world in which I've been brewed, steeped, and simmered for almost my entire life.  My friends -- singers, conductors, instrumental soloists, orchestral players -- are not getting work, and in case there was any doubt, many of them are musicians of the highest level.  I subbed on a couple of church gigs on Long Island, for instance, with one of the best conductors I've ever worked with.  Another friend, a cellist who was acclaimed for his performances of new music and played a few gigs with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was shunned by other classical musicians when he started subbing in the pits on Broadway shows after his children were born; a few years later, the scorners were approaching him, hat in hand, to ask how they, too, could get sub work on Broadway.  A kick-ass oboist I know is working for a bank; a truly great pianist moved to Vermont in order to place his autistic son in a better school, and did financial consulting work from home when he could get it, mostly borrowing, as he told me, from "the bank of Mom and Dad."  I know of at least one marriage that has ended as the result of there being simply no work in classical music.  This is bitter indeed for "those who have talent," and who have spent their entire lives learning to speak the language of beauty in order to share it with others, to help others to wash, as Picasso put it, the dust of the everyday from their souls.

Little girls who sing with preternatural vocal (but not musical) maturity on national television will work, in the sense of getting Vegas acts with lots of costume changes and making lots of money.  But they will miss the chance they might have had to enter into the enchanted realms of art, of beauty, of poetry, of music.  It's a pity that the world values classical music so little, and values classical musicians even less; every true musician I've ever known has wanted only to share their joy in that "holde Kunst," as Schubert and the poet von Schober put it -- that wondrous art that transports the hearts of the suffering in their darkest hours to joy, to companionship, to the knowledge that God exists and that they are not alone.

"God's Girl"

An absolutely amazing speech given in Australia in 2008 by Gianna Jessen, the survivor of a late-term abortion.  The second part of her speech is also on Youtube.

Suffering World

I have been pondering the place of suffering in the Christian life a great deal lately, as I have been experiencing suffering myself with more intensity than usual.  How is it that Saint Paul can exhort believers to "rejoice always," when Christ has commanded us to take up the cross?  Christ Himself by no means rejoiced on the road to Calvary, after all.  I try to offer my own suffering for either the general or the specific needs of others, and I wish fiercely that I might be allowed to know that this offering is efficacious; not knowing causes me to grieve more, in what seems like an endless cycle.

I found this blog today.  It is written by a doctoral student in classics at Oxford, and beautifully explains theodicy, the paradoxical permission of suffering by God, who is nonetheless all good.  I am going to be reading this blog regularly, and thought perhaps some of my readers would like it, too.

"You that shall cross from shore to shore years hence . . . "

I'm still a member of the union that represents adjunct teachers at the university where I taught and received my doctorate, and I still get the union paper.  It came in the mail yesterday, and featured an article on urban studies, an interdisciplinary field that uses the the suchess of the city itself to teach various subjects.  I loved reading about an English professor who teaches a course called "Literature of the City" (wouldn't you love to take that course?) and leads her students on a foot journey across the Brooklyn Bridge when the class reads "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."  She said about one such outing:  "The students felt connected to [Whitman] through crossing this water. . . They felt like they were walking in his footsteps.  They were ecstatic and smiling from ear to ear."

The park at Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn has a series of railings inscribed with the text of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."  The professor described her students' reaction to seeing Whitman's words made public and worked into the architecture of the place where the ferries used to arrive and set out:  "Students were incredibly moved by seeing his words -- words they had read -- there on a wall . . . they ran their hands along the words as if they were somehow Whitman's own imprint, evidence of his having been there."

I thought this was incredibly moving, too.  I will be in Brooklyn this weekend for a family gathering, and may try to make it over to the Fulton Ferry Landing park.

When I Am Weak

It's been a hard day, and a hard time in general, I suppose.  I am everywhere conscious of my inadequacies and my loneliness.  I know I was supposed to rejoice with my Facebook friend over her status: "I get to snuggle my newborn. I get to chase my 1 yr old. I get to watch my 3 year old practice cart wheels & I get to teach my 4 year old how to read. On top of that I get to be married to a loving, faithful husband. Praise God!"  but instead it made me want to roll my eyes a little (um, that's a euphemism).  Does anyone deserve such happiness?  No.  But so many of our problems, whether we have such happiness or not, stem from the simple fact that we keep forgetting that we don't deserve it.

Today I felt overwhelmed by loneliness and frustration, and I asked God to show me He was thinking of me.  I turned on the radio and heard . . . Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.  Well, I love it, of course; but if God had really been thinking of me, the tune would surely have been something very specific, a duet, say, by Schumann or Brahms, not a symphony by Beethoven.  He could have been thinking of anyone at all to that soundtrack.

I had made a promise to Padre Pio on his feast day today that I would go to the hospital chapel that is in walking distance of my house and sit in silent adoration.  But I kept putting it off and putting it off, until finally I had a window of about ten minutes for it.  That's when I went, and I sat and cried.  God knows I'm angry and frustrated with Him, but I begged Him to give me some guidance through the Bible before my ten minutes with Him was up.  I opened to 2 Corinthians 7-10: "That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."  Um, no, God, that's not what I had in mind.  And besides, it doesn't describe me at all.  I was thinking something more along the lines of my friend's Facebook status.

Then I came home, and there was a message from a reader of this blog, who said that reading it had helped her through a very dark time.  I was amazed.  And then I thanked God.

Music and Memory, Part 17: Old Wine in New Wineskins

Does anyone really believe T.S. Eliot about April being the cruelest month, "mixing memory with desire"?  The very presence of desire in the mix would seem to me to add a dash of hope to April's ethos.  But in the early autumn, no such hope -- of rebirth, resurrection, renewal -- is reflected to us in nature; just desuetude, dénouement, and fading away.  Schumann wrote a stirring setting of a poem called "Herbstlied" -- song of autumn -- which goes, in translation:  "The tender summer leaves fall from the trees;/Life with its dreams decomposes into dust and ashes . . . " (If you would like to hear a sample of this marvelous duet, go here and search for "Herbstlied," where you will find the redoubtable Peter Schreier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at it for a few seconds; unfortunately, I couldn't find a free download).

I am preparing for a gig in Boston at the end of the year which will require me to sing the kind of virtuosic repertoire in which I used to specialize, but which I haven't sung in almost ten years.  In the past, I used to use an elaborate, time-consuming methodology to learn florid music and work it into my voice and kinesthetic memory, and I will have to drag it again out of my body, mind, and memory.  But ten years ago my life was so very different from what it is today, and I wonder if I will be able to discover a new methodology, one that allows the singer to integrate old music into the new person.

This repertoire meant something different to me back then; it was my tool, and my ability to sing it well was my secret charm, my magic weapon, my mojo.  If other girls seemed to have lives so much better and easier than mine, or better apartments, or prettier clothes, or fantastic boyfriends, or happy marriages, I would console myself by reminding myself that they couldn't do what I did.  In my heart of hearts, I believed that my ability to sing was the only thing I possessed, and that my way in the world would be carved out through its use.  I would protect myself, keep myself safe and warm and afloat, by my abilities as a singer.  I believed this so strongly that, during my first marriage, my singing, that totem, always held its shining place first in my heart, and I considered my voice teacher a fractionally more important person in my life than my husband.

But then again, everything had become associated in my mind at that time with everything else.  My singing was my mojo, it was all that I had; I felt that with particular keenness after my abortion, which was also the time I began studying with the very influential teacher who was the most important person to me.  I remember how, right after the abortion, I realized that everything in my life had gone too far, and that it now had to stop.  It was a sunny Sunday two days later, and I left my then-just-barely-sort-of-boyfriend's apartment wearing my pajamas, feeling like I had to get out of there or die.  But I was so tired that I didn't make it to the subway, only to the park about a block away, where I fell asleep on a bench for a couple of hours, before heading for home as the sun was just beginning to set.

If my life in all its excess had hit the wall then and there, I would have to chisel my way out.  The only tool for that, as I had always believed, was my singing.  I began studying with the master teacher A.B., just at this time of year, and things began to appear to have more coherence.  He understood what I was trying to do as an artist, and he saw that I didn't have the technique in hand to do it.  He gave me that technique, and he showed me how to release the stream of artistic ideas -- musical phrases, sentences, whole conversations; creativity in collaboration with the composer -- through my voice, my intellect, and my body.

Then M. asked me to come back and live with him.  I did.  It was all I'd ever really wanted, anyway.  We got married a year later, and, as I see it now, that marriage was doomed from the start.  I never forgave him for sending me for the abortion, and we never, ever discussed it.  As Leonard Cohen sang, "Should rumour of a shabby ending reach you/It was half my fault and half the atmosphere."

Around the time I was last performing the music I'm going to perform in Boston, my marriage to M. had recently ended.  I was desperately trying to make someone else love me and stay:  the kind but pathetic Stoner Carpenter, the well-intentioned but ultimately weak sober alcoholic.  And I was having the busiest few seasons that I've ever had in my career before or since; I had management, some small recognition, a lot of gigs, and the belief that more would come.

Since my life in the ensuing ten years has turned out so completely differently for so many reasons, I am wondering how to relearn my old music.  We know from the Gospel that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins, lest the latter burst.  But what happens when you put old wine into new skins?

Complaint

Today is the birthday of William Carlos Williams, the New Jersey doctor and great modernist poet, who wrote in his autobiography: 

I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it. It was myself, naked, just as it was, without a lie telling itself to me in its own terms.

Here is the poem that appeared today on the Writer's Almanac in honor of his birthday,  I had never read it before, and it affected me the way great art across genres usually does, like a punch to the gut.

They call me and I go.

It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
I smile, enter and
shake off the cold.
Here is a great woman
on her side in the bed.
She is sick,
perhaps vomiting,
perhaps laboring
to give birth to
a tenth child. Joy! Joy!
Night is a room
darkened for lovers,
through the jalousies the sun
has sent one gold needle!
I pick the hair from her eyes
and watch her misery
with compassion.

Music and Memory, Part 16: The Gardener

When I was a young soprano, I studied with a teacher who had herself studied in Germany with the great post-war coloratura Rita Streich.  My teacher said to me once in a lesson --it must have been a particularly good one -- "You sound like Streich!" to which I replied, in proper soprano fashion, "Who?"  She proceeded to tell me about the great Streich, adding, as an aside, "What a Nazi."  I later found a recording of Streich, somewhat in her dotage, singing a concert for French radio of duets by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms with the Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester, who died earlier this summer.  This recording, sadly, is now out of print, but it is at the top of my desert-island list (in fact, I've already listened to it three times today).

This recording was very important to me for a number of years.  Not only is it wonderful -- the pared-down honesty and simplicity of expression demonstrated by these two singers, both of whom were past their prime at the time of the concert but whose artistry remained at the highest level, is both instructive and deeply moving -- but it also accompanied me during a very painful time in my life, a time of wrenching loss and longing which, while it lasted, was nonetheless beautiful, and still glows a little in the light of memory (the loss and longing that were to follow for me were far less lovely).

One song I particularly loved was the Mendelssohn duet "Gruß" (Greeting), set to a poem by the Romantic poet Eichendorff.  In a translation by Jakob Kellner, it goes thus:

Wherever I go and look,
in field and forest and plain,
down the hill to the mead;
most beautiful noble lady,
I greet you a thousand times.

In my garden I find
many flowers, pretty and nice,
many garlands I bind from them
and a thousand thoughts
and greetings I weave into them.

Her I must not give one,
she is too noble and fair;
they all have to fade,
only unequalled love
stays in the heart forever.

Eichendorff's sentiments nicely captured the longing in my own heart for a distant beloved, and Mendelssohn's setting, lyrical and at the same time pulsing with an energy which subtly undermines, with its freshness and optimism, the sadness of the text, provided a wistful soundtrack to my heavy heart in those long-ago days.  Here is a recording (sung in English) by the great British singers Isobel Baillie and Kathleen Ferrier.
 

It was at this time of year exactly that I began to see my own life as both illustrated and illuminated by this particular song.  And then, a few years later, I found out that Eichendorrf's poem was not in fact called "Gruß," but, rather, "Der Gärtner" (The Gardener), and that Mendelssohn had left off the last verse, which goes:

I seem to be of good cheer
and work to and fro,
and, though my heart bursts,
I dig on and sing,
and soon I dig my grave.

The last verse is the crux of the poem, and catapults it from wistfulness to heartbreak.

Brahms set the entire text in an early work for women's choir, harp, and two french horns; here is a rather lovely recording of what appears to be a Chinese (or Taiwanese, or Singaporean?) girls' choir, singing it in English.

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

-- William Carlos Williams

Saint John of the Playground

It was a beautiful, clear day in Northern Appalachia yesterday, which made me think of that beautiful, clear day nine years earlier when the lives of everyone I know changed forever.  My little son and I walked to the playground, which is in the center of a large park planted with hundreds of tall oaks.  When he saw that no one else was there, my son began to cry.  "I thought there would be children here," he wept. 

I started to cry too, thinking of how I've been unable to give him brothers and sisters, of how lonely he is, and of how lonely I am.  I'd been praying that God would send me a good friend -- a spiritual friend -- but, even if He is so good as to do so, I know it'll never be like the old days, when Retired Waif would pop upstairs for a cup of tea any time at all,  and every other day or so I'd get on the downtown train and go hang out with Really Rosie.  The emptiness of public spaces here, even on a beautiful fall day, is striking, and if other people on my block are home during the week, I wouldn't know it.  It also struck me as poor parenting that, as my son sat on a horsie mounted on a metal spring and cried, I sat on the adjacent elephant mounted on a metal spring and cried with him, mourning the fact that there is so little I can really do to alleviate his own loneliness, or my own, or anyone else's.  Should I distract him with a game, I wondered, or would that just be dishonest, since loneliness is such an unavoidable truth of our human existence?  

And then I thought, Oh God, why can't You just speak to me in a language that I can understand?  Why can't You give me some clear direction about what You want me to do?  Why can't You allow me to feel that the things I profess to believe -- the communion of saints, for instance -- are really true?  For I'm no saint, able to withstand the spiritual darkness that Saint John of the Cross called "nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing."  If not a friend on earth, can't You at least let me know that the saints I pray to are indeed praying with me?  I know I'm asking for my blatant materialism to be confirmed and satisfied, but sometimes I need a symbol, something sensory, just some teeny little phenomenon to let me know that I'm not totally, irredeeemably mistaken about every single thing in my life. 

Soon enough, a little boy toddled up with his mother.  The boy was black and his mother was white, pierced, and heavily tattooed.  She sat on a bench and got on her cell phone, laughing, screaming, cursing, and discussing a friend's seven-year prison sentence for possession of "a pound of weed," while I helped her little son (who told me his name was King) and mine on the monkey bars.  I see many mothers like this in my comings and goings around town -- if I lived in the suburbs, where most mothers of my class and education appear to live, I never would -- and I'm inclined to judge them.  And I wouldn't doubt that they're inclined to judge me -- ethnic, no make-up, sitting on the ground with the kids, wearing a sweater and clogs, with a young son who is not quite like other little boys his age -- as well. 

Eventually, though, King's mother came over, and we got to talking.  Her son's father, it turned out, had recently been deported to Haiti, in spite of the fact that his parents had brought him to America when he was two.  He'd grown up on Long Island, and had been sent back just in time to lose his leg in the horrific earthquake.  Had she seen an immigration lawyer, I asked.  Yes, and even marrying him would not have made him legal, she said.  He was going to try to apply for asylum in Canada.  My heart went out to her, and I told her I'd pray for her.  She soon left, yelling at her little boy every step of the way for having wet his pants, and I walked home with my own son, who was now happy for the chance he'd had to play with another child.

I suppose King and his mother were the sign I'd been railing at heaven for, though I would have preferred a more lovely and gratifying one.  Please, readers, pray for them.

Farewell

I am really posting this video for the second of the three songs played by Pete Seeger and Judy Collins, Bob Dylan's "Farewell," which is really his adaptation of the traditional song "The Leaving of Liverpool."  Judy Collins's recorded version of the song is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, but, alas, it's not on Youtube.