Music and Memory, Part 36: Walking Away

After a long illness, Christine, the wife of my friend and former opera colleague G., died a couple of weeks ago, just shy of her fiftieth birthday. I wasn't able to go to her wake or funeral because of my teaching schedule here in Northern Appalachia, but I've spoken with G. at length in the days since. G. is a wonderful lyric tenor, and, beyond that, truly one of the best musicians I know. For a number of years he sang in many of the great opera houses of Europe and America, but he withdrew from all of his contracts a few years ago to care for Christine, and because opera gigs are scheduled at least two years out, that meant his career was effectively over. A late bloomer who grew up in a working-class Irish-American family and spent his early adulthood tending bar and giving guitar lessons, G., after walking away from the opera stage, never looked back. He now lives and sends his daughters to college on the proceeds from his church job and a small income earned teaching music to the disabled.

I've known G. for a long time. We studied with the same voice teacher, and on Thursday nights we would meet at the Liederkranz Club on East 87th Street, which was around the corner from his house (but far from mine), to work out the opera arias we sang at our auditions with a quirky but gifted stage director. "I can still see you twenty years ago," he told me recently. "I can see what you were wearing, and your hair. You were this hilarious, talented Italian chick who just said THESE THINGS." I remember G. picking me up and driving me out to Long Island one evening to run through obscure arias with a brilliant pianist whom I'd never met and never saw again. "I don't coach my repertoire," he said that night, with a cockiness that, in his case, was wholly warranted. "I just know how the music is supposed to go."  He was on the cusp of a great career, and I was on the cusp, for reasons still not completely clear to me, of using my career as a tool in the blowing up of everything in my life.

G. has what I would call -- though he does not call it this -- a visionary gift. Since childhood, he's been able to correctly intuit certain people's fates, including those of relative strangers. He's often able to discern whether someone is going to die, and roughly when. In fact, he and his wife both had the foreknowledge, years before she became ill, that she would not live to see her fiftieth birthday. But this gift -- or call it what you will, and he's often prayed that God would rescind it -- comes in the context of his deep, even mystical, Catholic faith, a faith he and Christine shared. Because of this faith, the death of his beloved, though it's devastated him, hasn't utterly crushed him. He has a kind of palpable, tactile, tangible knowledge of God's great love for him, for Christine, and for all of us, and he talks about it often. It was G. who told me about the rosary novena after I came back to the faith, and I have prayed it during some momentous times in my life. While I'm not sure the novena has always "worked," it has changed my life.

I thought of all this recently when I read some caveats going around the internet against praying the novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. Someone knew someone else who had prayed the novena, upon which the supplicant's life had rapidly started coming apart. A hard-line Catholic apologist I used to date mentioned once that he was terrified to pray to Saint Rita, because, according to popular legend, she would give you what you wanted, but it would come wrapped up in unconditional awfulness. And more than one friend has told me to be careful about praying the Litany of Humility, because that prayer was bound to be answered in particularly humiliating ways. But all of this goes back to the great fallacy of American Christianity across creeds: that when you embrace Christ, your life will get better. This is only a slight variation on that other characteristically American conclusion: that, if your life is good, it's because you deserve it (and conversely, if it's bad, it's because you don't, a faulty maxim upon which much unfortunate policy has been based). It's some combination of gnosticism, paganism, exceptionalism, and fatal self-regard, and it's so pervasive in our culture that, in spite of my own status as a miserable sinner, I have to remind myself multiple times a day that if my life has any good or happiness in it, it's not because of my relative merits. But if I lack merits, which I do, why do I possess or experience anything good at all? So many people I know have little, or even nothing, in their lives that is good. 

When G. and I became friends, I was married to M. He was an artist, and he strongly encouraged me in my singing. I wanted to get at something -- I used to tell myself it was the truth -- in and through my singing. I asked M. once if he would still love me if I stopped singing and did something else, say, became a lawyer. He didn't even entertain the question, because (he said) if I weren't a singer, I would no longer be myself. Ironically, M. is now a lawyer himself. 

Apparently one of THOSE THINGS that I said back in our aria class was along the lines of "I used to be Catholic, but no more." G., whose father is a deacon, took note of that statement. He brought it up recently, and reminded me that without my life blowing up, I would never have come back to the faith, which is true.

Towards the end of his short life, Henry David Thoreau, the great naturalist and visionary in his own right (one scholar has written a book about Thoreau's "ecstatic witness") seems to have lost his vision, the hypersensory awareness of the indwelling sublime that formerly had colored all of his encounters with the natural world. The mystic of Walden, who called the telegraph wire that ran along the railway "the telegraph harp," and wrote of it: 

The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day . . . I put my ears to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is as if you had entered some world-famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. The wire vibrates with great power . . . What an awful and fateful music it must be to the worms in the wood! . . . such vibrating music [must] thrill them to death

by the end of his lifetime had reduced his writing to dry journal notations about the seasonal changes of various plants and animals.

I have in fact been praying the Litany of Humility for a long time now. My hope is that God will give me the humility to walk away from the dreams that damaged my life and the lives of those in my midst, and to do it with good cheer. You'd think this would have happened by now; we've been living in Northern Appalachia for almost seven years, and my professional energies have mostly turned from performance to teaching, which I love. But I still reflexively try to assuage my loneliness in this small (and in some ways sad) place with the old thoughts of my talent and the delusion that it gave me special privileges. I pray that I will be able to walk away simply, as G. did, because, as he knew, in the estimation of God there was something better and far more important to do.

Poem: Psalm

I loved this poem when I read it this morning and didn't want to wait until Friday to post it.
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn

on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor's Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

-- Harvey Shapiro, from A Momentary Glory, (c) Wesleyan Press, 2014.

C'est Son Métier

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go . . .

. . . . Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-- From "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

There was a man I loved desperately when I was quite young. R. was witty, well-read, and almost impossibly good-looking. He was also louche, something of a hedonist.  He spent a great deal of money on clothes and a lot of time in nightclubs, and he regarded himself as being on the cutting edge of cultural expression. I was a teenager from an unhappy home, and he became the first in a series of men about whom I believed that if I attached myself to them, I could escape and, in some essential way, save my life.

Predictably, this relationship didn’t work out. I became suicidally depressed in the wake of its breakup, but recovered, and some years later R. and I were friends. We didn’t see each other that often, but back in New York, in one of the lovely ways that New York can seem like a small town, we would often run into each other unexpectedly on the street. R. was a freelance journalist and didn't have a nine-to-five, and if I had the day off from whatever my bread gig was at the time – waitressing, or secretarial temping, or working as a cosmetics girl at Bloomingdales (my brother happened into the store one day and said of me and my colleagues, "You look like a bunch of Nazi nurses") – we would walk around the city and drink coffee and have conversations that were shimmering, transcendent, incantatory. I still have dreams sometimes about those walks.

As happens, however, our lives went in different directions, and I had not seen R. for many years when I heard the shocking news last year that he had died -- in his forties, and by his own hand. He had achieved some success, and had even written a best-seller nonfiction book, but some controversy had arisen around it, and I assume, though I can’t know for certain, that the minor scandal that ensued had contributed to the deep depression which apparently led to his suicide. R. was childless, but he left his widow behind.

His death, which I learned about around the time my mother also died, was crazy and unacceptable to me. As a young man, R. had been remarkably handsome, as well as generous, funny, and adventurous; but somehow he had become one of those tragic ones, those few who, as A.E. Housman wrote, would "carry their looks [and] their truth to the grave."  He was not a Catholic; I don’t know what, if anything, he had come to believe, though, on one of the occasions I ran into him on the street, he had recently returned from a trip to Nepal, and on that occasion he urged me to read Andrew Harvey’s book A Journey in Ladakh, a luminous travel memoir about the author’s encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. And during much of the time I had known R., he was something of an obvious sinner. I couldn’t help wondering if, with this checkered history, and lacking both baptism and any formal sort of repentance, it was sensible or even seemly to pray for his soul. But because I profess to believe in the forgiveness of sins, I knew I must pray for him, and do so with great abandon, 

One hears occasionally from Traditionalist types the maxim “extra ecclesia nulla salus” – there is no salvation outside of the (Roman Catholic) Church. This is the teaching of the Church, but what does it really mean? The Catechism of the Catholic Church asks:

846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door.

Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.

847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation [emphasis added]. 

It seems to me that the main problem with defining “extra ecclesia” is knowing each unbaptized man’s “fault,” which is, of course, impossible. There are all kinds of mysterious baptisms, including that of desire, about which we know little or nothing. "Betwixt the stirrup and the ground/Mercy I asked, mercy I found": there is forgiveness of which we know nothing. 

In fact, God is a fountain of mercy. God is love. God did not create His children in order to damn them. If He did, He would not be God.  As Heinrich Heine, the great poet of German Romanticism and a convert from Judaism, said on his deathbed, “Of course God will forgive me; c’est son métier.”

When we profess to believe in the forgiveness of sins, we are simply acknowledging, with Heine, that forgiving sins is God’s métier, His business. With this statement, we categorically accept that God can forgive all sins, including the ones (always, it seems, committed by others) that we may not entirely want him to forgive. What we talk about when we talk about forgiveness is actually the possibility of redemption for our enemies, of the complete falling away of what made them our enemies in the first place, of what made them hurt us and of what made us hate them -- nothing less than the belief that anyone can become good in the Platonic sense; that anyone can become holy.

Therefore, I'm constrained to believe in the possibility of R.’s radical spiritual transformation, and of his total moral regeneration. In the end, what we profess when we say that we believe in the forgiveness of sins, is that we believe that God loves everyone else, including those annoying ones in apparent darkness, equally as well as He loves those of us to whom he has given the great and wholly-unmerited gift of faith.

R.'s last book was published after his death. It's a nonfiction work about a morally-suspect character who became a quiet humanitarian, a narrative which parallels the trajectory of R.'s own too-brief life. 

Lent: The Underground River

Lent has been bleak. I suppose that's how it should be: we're supposed to acquaint ourselves well with ashes -- with the taste of ashes, with becoming ashes. I've never been good at keeping up my prescribed penitential practices, especially where food is concerned; I've always felt as if giving up this or that food  was just too simple, too elementary, a mere beginner's step in the spiritual life, and that, since I don't have problems or obsessions or issues with food or drink, I'll just move on to the more advanced exercises, all of which shows, of course, exactly how warped I am by pride.

So this year I've been rigorous about, among other things, not eating between meals, and it's been surprisingly hard.  There's something so consoling about elevenses, or that late-afternoon bite of something -- so much so, in fact, that I've come to understand, this Lent, that turning to food has always been a way I've kept myself from crashing emotionally. This Lent, I've crashed.

I spend a good deal of time each day thinking about food, about certain tastes and textures, about how a bite of lemon pound-cake with a cup of black coffee at four o'clock, or a glass of flinty, ice-cold white wine an hour or so later, or even some peanut butter smeared on a saltine at midday, would make me feel. And I imagine that these things would make me feel resplendent, transformed, and would make life seem bright and gay, full of whispered possibilities. And then I shake myself awake and remind myself that this is food we're talking about -- ballast against hunger, disease, and death for most people in the world, and for most people far from delicious, much less redolent of fantasies and hopes -- and that building castles out of pound-cake is a distinctly First-World concern.

And then I think about the other things that I love, that I rely upon, that without which I would feel as if my life were truly a pile of shit. The main one is music. Slipping the Crooked Jades or one of Beethoven's late string quartets into my car CD player opens up worlds upon worlds for me as I drive through the bleak post-industrial landscape of my town; the music lends a warmth, a sort of hazy sheen to the phenomenal world, making what is often merely indifferent and sometimes hostile seem benevolent, making what's unendurable seem like a bad dream from which one will soon awake. But perhaps the world is not really so beautiful after all, and so I turn off the CD and navigate around the winter-cratered streets in silence.

And then I mourn, because, in these moments, it strikes me that everything I love is gone, or is going, and that everything good is disappearing from the world. The record of our earthly sojourn is one of loss. The annals of recorded sound, the smooth pages of poetry, are cries from beyond the grave, where we, too, are going, who knows when? "The curtain descends, everything ends/Too soon, too soon."


Sometimes I so envy our Pentecostal brothers and sisters. They have ecstasy, they have fellowship. We have rubrics, and wandering in the dark, and spiritual dryness. They go from door to door in the ghetto and ask people what they need -- do they need a window fixed, a bag of groceries, maybe someone to pray with them? And then they do those things for and give those things to those complete strangers, those others, those neighbors. My mother used to do this with her church. As for us Catholics, we shun each other at Mass and then have arguments in each others' comboxes.

As I was waking up this morning, I mentioned to God that I'd given up everything I loved for him. My old life, research, singing, travel, pretty clothes, intense friendships, fun, my beloved city, the feeling of being an expert, even an authority, at something. Having only two children means that I also have had to give up the happiness of babies after only a short time, and to move swiftly on to the difficulties of everything else, especially since both my children have medical needs. And adopting means always being aware of a former but unbridgeable pain and loss and wounding, and means praying, as I stumble around in the dark, that I might be able to assuage it, and realizing how impossible that is and how inadequate I am. However, since we don't generally have any of the ecstatic things, the waves of warmth and happiness, the mystical auditions, I got no response to any of this from God.

Lent always seems as if it goes on forever. It seems as if it will go on even after Easter is over. I've always thought that at some point, later on, in the future, everything will be settled and peaceful and good -- that one day the world which is hinted at in the music I so love will become apparent. But perhaps that will never happen, and we are all just headed down, into, as a character in a book I read put it, the underground river, from which there is no return and no going back.

One of Debussy's earliest songs is "Beau soir," with a text by Paul Bourget, which says, in translation:

When streams turn pink in the setting sun
And a slight shudder passes through the wheat fields,
A plea for happiness seems to rise out of all things
And mount up towards the troubled heart,

A plea to savor the charm of life
While one is young and the evening is fair:
For we are going away, like this wave is going away,
The wave to the sea, we to the grave.

I would like to have been able to add something to the annals of beauty, the record of loss, in my brief time here. I don't know if I will, but we must keep doing the work that's assigned to us each day.

Above: Pierre Bonnard, The Breakfast Room, 1930.

The South Wind

In spite of the fact that the cold of this winter seems to have etched itself into my bones, now that I can drive, I go all around in my own solipsistic, climate-controlled little realm, creating my own atmosphere with recorded music. Nonetheless, I have to be careful what I play, because there's a lot of music across genres that can make me cry, even bawl, which makes for unsafe driving. I had to pull over last week while listening to Sam Cooke singing "A Change is Gonna Come." 
But these past few days, I've been playing the same song over and over again as I drive: the eighteenth-century Irish song "The South Wind," sung by Jean Redpath, for which, sadly, there is no Youtube video, though this is a very nice instrumental rendition. 
The Jean Redpath version is on her album A Fine Song for Singing, and is accompanied by guitar, cello, and violin in a chamber-music-like setting. And it is transcendentally beautiful. The four parts evoke a conversation by turns charming, witty, and haunting, trading off the melody between them, with the violin in particular articulating a wide and subtle range of emotions. In the heart of a hard winter, hearing this song reconciles me to the possibility of a coming lightness, a kind of hope.
 
But I also hear the song, in these last few days, as a kind of accidental-but-apt encomium for the husband of a friend of mine who died suddenly last week. He was a beloved public school teacher, many of whose former students have said that he changed -- even saved -- their lives. His funeral was at an orthodox Jewish synagogue, and during it I found myself longing for the kind of warmth and community I've often noted among observant Jews, which seems so absent from Catholic life as I've known it (they have joy, mysticism, fellow-feeing, and an ethos of life in its fullness; and we have, it often seems, sourness, primness, division, and an ethos of life in its meanness. Why should this be? I've heard that it's the result of the Jansenism imported by the Irish clergy, and also that it's a Northern thing. But it's enough to make me sometimes feel like the Inuit seal-hunter who supposedly asked the missionary priest if he would go to hell if he didn't know about the truth of Christ. No, said the priest; the risk of hell was only for those who knew the truth, but chose to reject it. To which the hunter replied, Then why did you tell me?) 

Tonight I'm going to sit shiva with his family, including the adolescent daughter who has been an occasional voice student of mine. I've never been to a shiva before, but my understanding is that one goes to keep the mourners company, to be with them in their grief, to let them know that they are not alone (I wish we had a tradition like this!). I will bring them a platter of cookies, and also a copy of the Jean Redpath CD. The words of the song go, in part:

South wind of the gentle rain,
You banish winter weather,
Bring salmon to the pool again,
The bees among the heather.
If northward now you mean to blow
As you rustle soft above me,
Godspeed be with you as you go,
And a kiss for those that love me.

From south I come with velvet breeze;
My word all nature blesses;
I melt the snow and strew the leaves
With flowers and warm caresses.
I'll help you to dispel your woes,
With joy I'll take your greeting
And bear it to your loved Mayo
Upon my wings so fleeting.

I will pray that God will send solace to this family, and that, like the south wind, He will, some day in the future, coax the grief of this long winter slowly from their hearts.

Poetry Friday: The courage that my mother had

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.

Please

Pray for little Ronan and his grieving family.

Farewell to a Righteous Woman

As some of you know, my mother died on December 15. She had asked me to sing the great Negro spiritual "My Lord, What a Morning" at her funeral, which I was able to do in part because of the impressive sangfroid I'd developed over years as a professional singer, and in part because it occurred to me that this was the whole reason I'd become a singer in the first place.

My mother was a righteous woman who loved God, and who was inspired by this love to do good works in her community, especially for the benefit of disadvantaged urban children. In her long suffering I worried sometimes that she was losing her faith, but my worry, I now think, reflects on my own weak faith and understanding of God, for certainly God knows the effects of illness and medication, and, as we know, he did not send His son to condemn, but to redeem.

When I read the Mass readings for today, I imagined that Christ might be speaking these words to my mother (who, incidentally, did have a beautiful speaking voice):

Hark! my lover--here he comes
springing across the mountains,
leaping across the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Here he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattices.
My lover speaks; he says to me,
"Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one,
and come!
"For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come!

"O my dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret recesses of the cliff,
Let me see you,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet,
and you are lovely."

Music and Memory, Part 29: Pavane for a Dead Soprano

One early-summer day fifteen years ago I saw, while walking around my old neighborhood, a flier for an apartment sale -- one that promised opera scores, costumes, and gowns. Being not only a struggling young opera singer but also an inveterate apartment- and stoop-sale junkie, I made my way over to the address listed, a couple blocks from my own building. There I saw a middle-aged singer I knew by sight from the neighborhood, the friend of friends of mine, presiding over the sale of the contents of a pre-war tenement apartment, the kind whose walls have been painted so many times without being scraped first that they look wavy, with a bearded middle-aged man. I pieced together that the things for sale had belonged to the man's sister, a soprano. This woman, whom I did not know, had died suddenly of an aneurysm in the middle of a Thursday-night rehearsal for one of her bread gigs, a church job at the lovely little Dutch Reformed church just down the street, whose choir was blessed by an abundance of local talent in the form of struggling opera singers from the neighborhood (there were a lot of us). She was in her mid-forties.

The soprano must been a lyric coloratura. The ghoulishness of the situation notwithstanding, I made off with the Schirmer scores of Traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor, along with a pile of sheet music, some costume jewelry, and a couple of recital gowns. In fact, I bought so much of her stuff that her grieving brother, seeing me eyeing a tea-strainer -- the kind that looks like a little colander on a stick -- tucked it into the pocket of the big old man's shirt I was wearing. It appeared that he and the singer who I recognized from the neighborhood (she had sung with the dead woman in the church choir) had started some sort of romance, and I was glad for them.  On the way out, I saw a pile of the deceased woman's promotional postcards, no doubt ready to be mailed out to booking agents. They showed her in a variety of comedic poses, and I realized that the soprano, no longer young and easily cast-able as Lucia or Violetta, was attempting to move into character-actress work.

These memories came rushing back to me the other day when I saw Jude playing with the tea strainer, which has remained in my possession over the intervening years and four subsequent moves. I wondered if, like Babette, she was now delighting the angels in heaven, where she had become "the great artist that God meant [her] to be." I thought of some other middle-aged artists I had known from bread gigs of various kinds, some of them with prominent pasts: the former director of a theater program at a Midwestern university; the former award-winning fashion designer whose management company fired her for being too old when her long-time agent died; the tenor whose childhood of sexual abuse caught up with him just as he was achieving a stable degree of success, causing an undiagnosable psychosomatic condition that robbed him of the ability to walk; and many others. I thought about the untimely death from metastatic breast cancer of the luminous Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who worked steadily and quietly for many years before achieving the international fame she merited, and then died at 52, and of the charismatic voice teacher with whom I'd studied briefly, who'd worked with Bernstein and been friends with Jacqueline du Pré and her widower Daniel Barenboim, and who opined that great musicians seemed to be canaries in some sort of global-spiritual-crisis of a coal mine; since so many of them died in their primes, there must be a cosmic plan to it.

At the same time, I recently finished a new memoir of bohemian New York, a literary genre of which I'm particularly fond, but this one did not call forth the bittersweet elegiac sense that the best of them do. In fact, this one -- ironically, written by a friend of mine -- I found depressing. The book chronicles the author's debauched young adulthood simultaneously with the transformation of Williamsburg, Brooklyn from shunned ghetto to chic arrondissement. I've never lived in Williamsburg and was not part of the circle he describes, but I felt a strange, unpleasant sense of voyeurism while reading about other people's drug-and-sex-addled days and nights, which took place during roughly the same time I was pillaging the dead soprano's apartment and my first marriage, along with my own opera career, was slowly unraveling.

I spoke recently on the phone with an old colleague from those days, a wonderful lyric tenor and devout Catholic who has sung in many of the world's major houses, including the Met, and, after the initial years of struggle, was having an important career. His wife has been battling a debilitating illness for the past few years, and he's cancelled some very important gigs in order to stay home and care for her. "I'm back to where I was fifteen years ago," he told me. He has a church job and is teaching for a foundation that offers free music classes to adults with disabilities. "And," he added, "I'm totally at peace with it." He left his wife at home for years with their children while he was out on the road; backing out of his major career now, he said -- a career that requires ten months a year away from home -- is the least he can do.

"And you," he said, "Look how far you've come." I didn't know what he was talking about. I hadn't had a major career. I'd left everything and moved to the middle of nowhere, where no one knows "who I am," or even, for that matter, who I am. I expend a great deal of my daily strength managing my autistic son's difficult behavior. I barely sing anymore.

But he explained that he meant how far I'd come spiritually. He knew me back in the day -- the young singer who bought the dead soprano's scores and gowns, the young singer who sacrificed everything sacred on the altar of ambition -- and I supposed that he might, in some way, be right.

Tanning While Rome Burns

My family and I recently went on a beach vacation at a spot we’ve been going for several years, having started this yearly sojourn when we still lived in New York.  In fact, it’s not a particularly arduous place to get to from New York, but from where we live now the trip seems counterintuitive at best. It’s full of Italians from the Bronx, so it’s an easy place to slip back into, even for my non-Italian-American husband, who has nevertheless lived among Italian-Americans for a good part of his life. I suppose we keep going back because not only the place, but also its ethos, are so familiar to us, but we can’t help viewing it, now, from something of a critical distance. Or maybe I should say, in my case, from something of a heightened critical distance, because I’ve never been a great one for the beach, and I’m starting to realize that I’m not a great one either for that elusive pursuit of that intangible essence that people know as having fun.

The truth is, I go to the beach, and I see the crowds evidently enjoying themselves as they tan or read or drink or body-surf, and it unsettles me.  I always want to leave before everyone else, because I hate the feeling of having stayed too long, and having to leave as the sun is setting, and you’re hungry and a little dazed from the sunshine and covered with sand, and you have to schlep your chairs, umbrella, and cooler back to where you’re staying. Anyone, I’m sure, would want to collapse under these circumstances, but I also want to cry.  There’s something so brittle about it – all the forced merriment in the bright sun, the making the most of the last days of summer – and it makes me sad. I had the same feeling recently at one of the big events I’m occasionally constrained to attend with my husband for his work.  Having to wear a cocktail dress and attempt something sophisticated with my still-graduate-student-looking hair, to drink and dine with prominent citizens of my new town, and to dance to the same band that plays the same music at every single one of these events (and I actually happen to think this band is very good) sent me halfway toward despair and rushing to the confessional the next day. I told the priest, who knows me, and who had, incidentally, also been in attendance the previous night, that I felt as though I'd been watching everyone dancing before a yawning chasm into which Death was pushing them unawares, and was this normal, or did he think that maybe I needed some antidepressants?

He didn’t address this last question directly, but I sometimes wonder if my relationship with God is just not meant to be one of those joyful ones that I’ve heard about all my life.  I truly believe that not everyone is meant to know that kind of joy in a place that is, after all, known officially in some quarters as “this vale of tears,” and so sometimes I wonder why everyone is trying so hard; after all, the "ego" in "et in Arcadia ego" is commonly understood to be death. But some people are surely meant to struggle more, to swim more arduously upstream, than others, and I am either one of them or else am hopelessly neurotic.  Nonetheless, I pray St. Ignatius’s Suscipe each morning upon waking, because I can’t help but feel that I am so steeped in my difficult past that its color has seeped into my very bones and tinted them the darkest of blues.

Here is a mélodie by Debussy, “Chevaux de bois,” number 4 of his song-cycle Ariettes Oubliées, a setting of a poem by Paul Verlaine about a fairground carousel which in some ways echoes my feelings about the beach and summer vacation in general.

Turn, turn, good little wooden horses,

turn a hundred times, turn a thousand times,

turn often and turn always,

turn, turn to the sound of the oboes.

The child in red and his mother in white,

the boy in black and the girl in pink,

One in pursuit, and the other striking a pose,

each of them pays his Sunday penny.

Turn, turn, horses of their hearts,

while all around your turning

the sly pickpocket is watching --

turn to the sound of the victorious cornet.

It is astonishing the way it intoxicates you

to keep turning around in this stupid circle,

empty stomach, aching head,

feeling sick and yet having loads of fun.

Turn, wooden horses, with no need

of spurs

to command you to gallop;

turn, turn, without any hope of hay.

And hurry, horses of their souls--

Already night is falling, calling to supper

the troops of jolly drinkers, made hungry by their thirst.

Turn, turn! The velvet sky slowly begins

to clothe itself in golden stars.

The church bell tolls sadly.

Turn to the happy sound of the drums.

(Above: Detail from Guyhot Marchant’s Danse Macabre des Femmes, 1491.)

Tragedy

I've just learned that Kimberlie of Welcome to the Dumpling House has lost her husband. The two of them adopted four children from China, including an older boy with medical needs who has been home for less than two years. My heart breaks for her and for their four children, who knew the love of their father for such a short time. Please pray for them.

Music and Memory, Part 26: Heroin

About fifteen years ago I began the transition from pursuing a standard career as an opera singer to pursuing a recital career based mostly on the fruits my own research, a transition that would become final when I left my opera management the day before September 11, 2001. This change was precipitated by my meeting F., a wonderful Italian collaborative pianist and musicologist, on Saint Patrick's Day, 1996. Before long, we were researching and performing together, and he was my exclusive recital partner until he took a teaching job in Europe in 2005.

One day we were on our way to a gig in one of the mid-Atlantic states. We had walked from our late lamented neighborhood across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to rent a used car, had driven back to get our stuff, and now were on our way. On that drive, my colleague F. said two things that astonished me. The first was in response to my putting a Joni Mitchell CD in the car's player: he ejected it, saying, "Life is too short for bad music," and replaced it with a live recording that he had pirated himself at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy (I continue to disagree with his assessment of bad music in this case). The second happened a little further down the road, as he told me about the sunsets, mountains, and animals he'd seen while on a concert tour in Brazil. "Really, Pentimento," he asserted, "all of that is far more beautiful and important than music."

I was speechless. How could that be? Music was my elixir; no, my medicine. Thinking more about it, I wondered if it might not, more specifically, be a sort of chemo drug, a life-saving medicine that carried the risk of certain potent side effects. Nothing was more important to me. It came before, preempted, and supplanted what should have been my most important relationships. My early life had been so tenuously established, my adult life so undisciplined; music was the only constant, and sometimes I felt it was a thing even more essential to my existence than a chemo drug would be: it was oxygen itself, the most basic ingredient for my survival from one day to the next. I clung to it like a vine that heliotropes its maundering way around a trellis to get to a patch of sun. Or maybe music was my heroin, the jab that could deliver a few hours of beauty and a sense of agency into an otherwise bleak life.

Performing -- even rehearsing -- with F. has been one of the high points of my life. Our musicalities complemented one another in a way I'd never experienced before. We had plenty of conflicts in our working relationship, but working with him was one of the essential steps in my maturation as a singer and musician. We performed together just once after he moved abroad, when my first son was one year old and I was pregnant again, though I didn't yet know it. Having a baby meant that I could no longer practice obsessively, as I'd always done before, and, as we rehearsed before the gig -- the only time we had -- F. stopped and said, "How is it that you're finally singing the way you always should have sung?" I suppose it had to do with lowered expectations, with not predicating a hundred other things upon my success in that one particular performance, and with having my single-minded focus distracted and dissipated by the needs of another person.

Now F. is far, far away, and so am I. And I wonder if there is some way to convert the heroin of my former life as a singer into some kind of methadone, to ease off my addiction to that intense inner world with a duller, less devastating version of it. It's been said that pop music anchors the listener to the place and time that he heard it -- that particular summer, that one party, that boy or girl -- and that, as such, it's a mnemonically static form, whereas classical music is redolent with all kinds of associative possibilities. I'm not sure I buy that; hearing any of dozens of classical pieces evokes for me the time and place when that piece entered my life, directed my thoughts, dominated the world of my senses. It's very difficult for me, for instance, to hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 without seeing a hundred moments from the years of my childhood to the years of my doctoral study; sometimes I cry when I think that Beethoven has to be dead, but I wonder if I'm not really crying for the past in general.

But the past is receding like a world seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I must remind myself every minute to be here now, in post-industrial America, in crumbling northern Appalachia, a wife and mother, in the land where my own mother is dying and where my family members are wandering desultorily or struggling desolately, and where I seem to have lost the power and agency I once had when I was a young singer who lived for and through music.

(Above: Dame Maggie Teyte sings "Oft in the Stilly Night," which is not a folk song, as the announcer states, but rather one of the Irish Ballads of Thomas Moore, set to music by John Sullivan in the early years of the nineteenth century).

"I cry a lot because I miss people . . . "

I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

His words remind me of Holden Caulfield's proscription against telling others what's in your heart, because "if you do, you start missing everybody."

May the great writer and artist Maurice Sendak be finding things more beautiful than he ever imagined in the life after this one. May he know infinite mercy.

(Above: the poster for the Houston Grand Opera's 1980 production of The Magic Flute, designed by Sendak, in which Mozart is greeted by the Three Spirits.)

Love is a Teacher, But a Hard One to Obtain

Kyle Cupp has written a moving post about the brief life of his daughter Vivian. When I read it, it seemed to me to illustrate perfectly the quote from The Brothers Karamazov that prefaces this blog.

"Those that we call monsters are not so to God"

My friend and reader Ex-New Yorker sent me a link a while ago to an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Emily Rapp, a memorist-mother whose toddler son, Ronan, is dying of Tay-Sachs disease. If you click over to the link, you will see what an almost-celestially beautiful boy Ronan is; nevertheless, the progression of his disease means that he is losing all of his senses and abilities -- by this time, he has become blind -- and that he will likely die in a vegetative state before his third birthday.

I check Emily Rapp's blog, Little Seal, occasionally (the name Ronan means "little seal" in Irish), and found a powerful post there today which refers to Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of A Monstrous Child," in which the Renaissance humanist describes seeing a grotesquely-deformed toddler being exhibited by his caretakers as a begging lure. Montaigne surprises the reader by concluding that it is the shock and horror that men express when they encounter something so outside of the ordinary that is contrary to nature, and not the thing itself. As Rapp notes:


The burden . . .  falls on the looker, and the looker is held accountable for the lens through which she sees – and sorts – the world. I love the way Montaigne makes that child . . . extraordinary in the truest sense: brilliant and shiny.  The thing you want most to pick up when it glints at you from the street. The man born blind in the Gospel of John did not exist to make people feel grateful for their vision; the text is very clear that he, in fact, possessed the vision that others did not. That his was a looking that saw wonder, saw God, when others did not.

Rapp also references a politician who has stated publicly, as she puts it, that "disabled children are a woman’s punishment for having abortions in her sullied, slutty, ho-bag past." There is no comment worthy of this perversion of the Christian proclamation, but it is germane to note that it directly contradicts the passage in the Gospel of John mentioned above:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

As Rapp says of the man born blind, "His body was not a punishment; it was a kind of divine revelation."

This reminded me of the assertion of Gerard Nadal, bioethicist and father of an autistic child, that the huge spike in autism diagnoses is taking place so that we may truly learn how to love. It reminded me, also, of the passage in Saint Faustina's diary in which she suggests that God the Father regards the world and its creatures through the wounds of His Son. May we learn to look at each other that way, too.

Advent, Loss, and Childhood Utopia

This Advent is a significant time of darkness for me because of my mother's sickening decline. Alex Haley noted that "every death is like the burning of a library," and it is absolutely true in the case of my once beautiful and vibrant mother, whom I have always, in my heart of hearts, somewhat superstitiously believed knew everything.

She still knows everything, but I can't ask her, and she can't tell me, because, though her fearsome intellectual capacity is undiminished, she is quickly losing her ability to speak.

I have found myself waxing painfully nostalgic for my 1970s childhood, which seems so much more idyllic to me than it really was in the desperate retrospect of impending loss.  In the past few months, I have compulsively begun collecting the now-out-of-print books my mother used to teach us and do arts and crafts with us: this, for example, and this, and this.  When I linger on the simple line drawings and black-and-white photographs in these books, a whole world comes rushing back to me: not just the world of my childhood, but the world of my mother's young adulthood -- a hopeful world, in which both children and their parents really believed that we could call down upon earth the New Jerusalem, and that we could do it through our quotidian work. When I think back to that childhood, why does it seem as if the sun was always shining?

I wish I could ask my mother how to do it now -- how to do life. How did she teach me, my brothers, and my sister -- as she did -- to love beauty, and then set us free to go and spend our lives striving to create it, to reveal it? (I am calling it a "setting free," but others might think of it as a wildly impractical neglect to help us out with a Plan B.) How did she accept the deprioritizing, the putting second or third or last, of her own impressive powers of creativity?  I continue to struggle with my tangled-up vocation, and I wish my mother could help me. I go to see her every month, but I have not been good with phone calls, because it's virtually impossible to talk with her on the phone; I'm told I'm the only one who can understand her on the phone, but I think my abilities have been exaggerated.  And yet I have heard it said over and over again that you have to talk to your parents while they're still alive, or rue it later.

By an' By

I don't know how much longer my mother has to live.  She could be gone within a few months, or she could linger a year or two.  But I've started planning the music for her funeral, and have already asked a friend to conduct what will probably be an eight-voice choir.  My siblings will probably be angry with me, but, since I have no control over life or death, I find it comforting to try to sort out the little details that might bring someone some consolation.

This is not one of the pieces we will do, though I am planning to include a choral arrangement of the Negro spiritual "Soon-ah will be done."   (My mother is the daughter of a Civil Rights activist, spent most of her own best energies working for equal access to educational opportunities for disadvantaged -- i.e. poor and black -- children, and is well-known and -loved in the local African-American community).  But it is one that I've loved for a long time.  Paul Robeson sings with his accompanist, Lawrence Brown, who has an aching, humane tenor voice. I love the line "I know my robe's going to fit me well/I tried it on at the gates of hell."

A Dying Tomcat

My birthday was the other day, and I have a tradition of pulling a book off the shelf and reading a poem at random on my birthday morning, not for any necromantical purpose, but simply to make a small space for beauty and expansiveness before the diurnal responsibilities come to trample them down.  This is the poem I read: 

For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished his Former Hissing and Predatory Nature

I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
*****************************************************
It's by Mary Karr.  I thought it was wonderful.

Sex, Death, and Mozart

When I was studying for my master’s degree in music in the early 1990s, I took a seminar on the operas of Mozart with a brilliant professor (his other specialty was the Japanese shakuhachi flute, which he played at the level of a master, and for which mastery he’d even received a spiritual name from a Japanese sensei). The class was one of those once-in-a-lifetime learning experiences that make you fall more deeply in love with a subject you love passionately already. I remember particularly well the section on my favorite opera of all, Don Giovanni. Professor B. suggested that when Mozart uses a chromatic descending figure in this opera, it is to illustrate sex – specifically, the destructive force of untamed sexual energy, in an opera in which such a force threatens to loosen society itself from its underpinnings.

That chromatic downward figure occurs throughout the opera; one famous moment is in the duet that Don Giovanni sings with Zerlina, whom he is attempting to seduce on her wedding day, “La ci darem la mano” (the scene is shown above in a photo from Sacramento Opera's production). This duet, wonderful in its simplicity, using such a minimum of resources to show so much about the two characters who sing it, is well-known not only to opera lovers but also to readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Don Giovanni tells the peasant girl that he will take her to his castle, where they will give one another their hands, and where she will say “yes” to him (as Molly Bloom says yes at the close of Ulysses). Zerlina is about to go off with him when she is rescued by another of the Don’s conquests, Donna Elvira, who, in the Don Juan legend but not in the opera, is a nun whom he has seduced away from the convent. The descending chromatic line appears in the orchestra at the duet’s coda, when the two are singing, “Andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor” (Let us go, beloved, to assuage the pains of an innocent love). Its function is to tell us the truth: that the love Don Giovanni offers Zerlina is far from innocent (he later tries to rape her offstage during a party at his house).

The other night, I turned on the radio and heard the third, adagio movement of Mozart’s great Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595, in a live performance by Imogen Cooper with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis on his 80th birthday. It took my breath away – not only the performance, which was full of both brilliance and insight, but also the music itself. I first heard this concerto on an LP that I begged my mother to buy at the supermarket when I was around nine (I don’t know why; I just saw it in a display of classical LPs for $.99 each, and I thought I would like it. It was published by Funk and Wagnall, and featured a nineteenth-century color engraving of Papageno, the birdcatcher from The Magic Flute, on its cover. She acquiesced, and I wore the grooves out listening to it). The elegiac adagio movement is heartbreakingly simple, its theme almost folklike; one can almost see one’s own life pass before one’s eyes when one hears it, in all the bittersweet folly that makes up any life. It also makes frequent use of a downward chromatic figure in the piano theme, later taken up by the orchestra. Hearing it made me think of the long-ago opera seminar. Surely in this autumnal concerto, Mozart was not thinking of sex, but of death; he wrote the concerto just a few months before his own death, when he was living in poverty, and was surely already gravely ill. Perhaps he really used descending chromaticism throughout his work when he wanted to indicate one of those moments of profound, unspeakable truth upon which everything else hinges.