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.

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday

And what better way to celebrate it than by listening to Kurt Weill play and sing his own ballad "Speak Low"?

When Weill and Ogden Nash were collaborating on their musical One Touch of Venus, Nash's idea was to use a line from Much Ado about Nothing as the linchpin of the song's lyrics.  The Shakespeare quote is "Speak low if you speak love" (Act II, scene i).  The German word for "if," however, is wenn, and Weill unconsciously substituted it while writing the song, giving us the haunting line, "speak low when you speak love."

This beautiful recording is from a tape that Weill made for Venus's backers while the musical was in the writing-and-rehearsal stages -- sort of like the daily rushes from a film shoot.  Enjoy.

Six Quick Takes from a Winter of Discontent

1.  I have noticed that this is the sixtieth anniversary of Dunkin Donuts's existence.  This is by no means an occasion I think worth celebrating, since I find their coffee to be both bitter and weak, and, on the whole, virtually undrinkable.  But then, I find most coffee undrinkable these days.  I used to only be able to drink coffee brewed in my own Neapolitan coffee maker on my own stovetop, but now even that is undrinkable to me.  The coffee hath lost its savor, in spite of the fact that the idea of coffee is almost always somewhere in the nimbus around my conscious mind.  (Incidentally, as much as true coffee snobs claim to hate Starbucks, those who know cannot deny that Starbucks did New York City a great public service when they came to the city in the 1990s by uniformly lifting all New York coffee to a higher level.)

2.  I'm listening to the live broadcast of Ariadne auf Naxos from the Metropolitan Opera, and reminiscing about seeing the same production around the time that Starbucks first came to town.  It almost never happens, at least in my experience, that the tenor who sings the role of Theseus sings it well, but perhaps I'll be surprised today (or maybe not, since my son just said, "I want that song to be turned off," and I can't say that I blame him, because, although Richard Strauss may have been one of the greatest composers who ever lived, especially in the way he wrote for orchestra, I find his music creepy, unsettling, even, if amorality can be said to have a sound, amoral.  I do love Zerbinetta's aria, though).  When I went to the Met's Ariadne in the mid-1990s, the Theseus was so bad that, after his aria, my then-husband called out, "Go for it, brother!" from his seat next to mine in Family Circle, and I nearly died of exaggeratedly-virtuous embarrassment.

3.  I don't know if such mortifying prickings of memory and conscience are Lenten in origin or not, but I have just remembered that I borrowed money from a Columbia boy I dated during the summer I was twenty and never paid him back.  The circumstances under which I borrowed the money were unhappily clouded, as I recall, by my sense that, because he was rich and I was poor (and since we were sleeping together), the loan wouldn't, or shouldn't, be a problem for him.  Thank God for the internet, and for the fact that I have some concert gigs coming up.  As soon as I remembered his last name, I was able to find out where he now works, and as soon as I get paid I am going to send him a money order.  And thank God for conversion, too.

4.  Speaking of Kurt Weill, I also recently remembered one of the worst experiences of my life, which happened when I had a club date with an avant-garde outfit called the Imploding Head Orchestra.  Believe it or not, I sang this song, as well as the "Youkali Tango," and the man whom I loved desperately arrived, while I was singing, with the woman whom he loved desperately.  Because I was the sort of person who did things like that referenced in number 3, above, it wasn't all that much longer before we were married, but not before we'd sacrificed our unborn child on the altar of our desperation.

5.  At the library today, I saw a family of young women who I assumed, based on their style of dress, were Christian, perhaps even trad Catholic, homeschoolers.  If you were from New York, you might at first have thought that they were Orthodox Jews (just as, if you are from New York and you see an Amish man in these parts, you at first think he's an ultra-Orthodox Jewish patriarch, and your heart longs for home).  But if you put a family of Christian homeschooling girls next to a group of Orthodox Jewish girls, you'd notice at second glance that, although the Jewish girls also have skirts down to their feet and sleeves down to their wrists, they are ineffably more elegant and fashionable and, I might add, prettier than the Christian homeschoolers.

6.  I hope and pray that God will use my sense of exile from my city and all that I once knew, my remorse for my misdeeds, and my confusion for His glory and honor and for the help of someone else who, like me, is stumbling brokenly through the Lenten desert.

September Songs

 In childhood, my world was saturated with the music of Beethoven and Brahms, which probably went a long way toward pushing me (as well as my two older brothers) toward a life in music.  One day, however, my mother's record player broke.  This happened at a time of chaos in our family life, and it remained broken for three or four Beethoven- and Brahms-less years. And then one day it was fixed, and my mother came home with an armful of LPs.  The music she brought home was entirely new to us children, and altered my idea of our mother as both a listener and a person:  Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and, inexplicably, the original-cast recording of the Joseph Papp production of Threepenny Opera. 

This record in particular seized my imagination in a way that can only be described as neurotic.  I absconded with it to my room and played it over and over on my own garage-sale-gleaned record player.  The dark landscape of Weill's music, and the tawdry underworld of Victorian England it evoked, worked their way into my imagination, until I dreamt of singing one of the wholly corrupt female roles (in college, I considered it both vindication and high praise when my vocal coach suggested this would be good repertoire for me).

In the decade or so following the Papp Threepenny, there was a minor vogue for Kurt Weill among hipsters.  The marvelous, emotionally-fragile soprano Teresa Stratas released two wonderful albums of lesser-known Kurt Weill songs (the first one is pictured above), and artists like Lou Reed, PJ Harvey, and David Johansen took stabs at recreating the decadent Weimar/Weill ethos. One of my favorite bits of Weilliana is Tryout, a collection of studio recordings of Weill playing and singing his own show tunes for Broadway backers in a whispery, frail, intimate voice.

My father mentioned to me the other day that his favorite version of "September Song" (from Knickerbocker Holiday, a 1938 Broadway show about the Dutch in early Gotham) was Jimmy Durante's.  I hadn't known Durante had even sung the iconic Weill classic, of which there are so many beautiful recordings, Sinatra's being the most famous.  I found the Durante version on Youtube, naturally, and it is certainly worthy in its own way.

A Cradle for Sorrow

When I taught both studio and class voice in my university system, I tried very hard to discern what sort of a person each of my students was, and to choose the right repertoire for each based not only on vocal characteristics but also on everything the student presented to me: his ethos, if you will. Most of my private-lesson students were older than I was, returning students who had been sidetracked by life from finishing their bachelor's degrees at a more usual age. The music department offered two bachelor's degrees in music, the B.A. and the more prestigious B.M.; all of my private-lesson students were B.A. students, with the exception of one frighteningly gifted M.M. candidate. A few of them hoped to transfer from the B.A. in Music degree to the B.M. in Music Performance degree, a switch that was based entirely on an audition before a faculty committee.

I loved my students, and I spent a lot of time worrying about them. They were from wildly divergent backgrounds. One was the daughter of a famous Puerto Rican bandleader who had discouraged her from a career in music, her true love; she made a living selling gloves and hats from a table outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One was a Haitian Seventh-Day Adventist, a highly intelligent woman who spoke German as well as French and whose singing revealed hints of a magnificent natural instrument -- if only we could have freed her physically and psychically to the point that she could have accessed it. Another was T., a shy, socially-awkward man in early middle age who worked as a paralegal, and who confided after three lessons that he was a recovering alcoholic (this didn't suprise me; I had had some experience with the language of the Twelve Steps, which I noticed that he used with some frequency). All of my students were profoundly wounded and heartbroken people. They didn't have to tell me so; the dynamic of the private voice lesson is so transparently revealing, and the rough areas in the voice provide such an accurate mirror of the catches in the soul, that I didn't need to look hard to grasp their woundedness, if not always the nature of their wounds. This is why it is so essential that a voice teacher be compassionate. The voice -- that intangible, ethereal instrument played by the passage of air over two threads of gristle in the throat -- can be not only a diagnostic gauge of the inner singer, but also, ideally, a means of healing for both the singer and her audience.

T. surprised me in our first lesson by bringing in a song he was working on on his own. Occasionally students did this, the song generally being from the Broadway repertoire. T.'s choice, however, was Schumann's "Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden," number 5 of the Op. 24 Liederkreis, settings of poems from the Buch der Lieder of Heinrich Heine, the greatest poet of German Romanticism (and also a notable Jewish convert to Christianity, who famously declared on his deathbed in Paris: "I know that God will forgive me my sins: c'est son métier"). This was an ambitious choice. I usually started my students on one or more of the shopworn Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (known unkindly in the trade as "Twenty-Four Dago Ditties"). But T.'s German was excellent, and he even directed me in how he wanted me to accompany him in the piano part; he had rather well-formed ideas and opinions about how the piece should sound, one of the hallmarks of a true musician.

"Schöne Wiege" starts off as a gently-rocking strophic berceuse, then turns quickly into a rhapsodic, though brief, through-composed scena, with the off-kilter rhythmic phrases and the melodic angularity typical of Schumann. Its subject, and the subject of the song cycle in which it is the pivot, is that great theme of German Romanticism: unhappy love that forces the wounded lover on a journey which, in some treatments, ends in death (as in Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) or madness (as in Schubert's Winterreise). My translation follows:

Beautiful cradle of all my sorrows, beautiful tomb of my repose,
Beautiful city, we must part: "Farewell," I call to you.

Farewell, you holy threshhold where my beloved wanders;
Farewell, sacred spot where I first saw her.

And had I never seen you, beautiful queen of my heart,
The wretchedness I now endure would never have befallen me.

I did not wish to touch your heart; I did not seek your love --
I wished only to live a quiet life near the place where your breath flutters.

But you yourself drive me from here; your mouth speaks bitter words.
Madness takes hold of my mind, and my heart is sick and sore.

And I drag my weary, weakened limbs away, leaning on my wanderer's staff,
Until the time I might lay by tired head in some cool, far-off grave.

I was astonished by T.'s innate feeling for this difficult piece, and we quickly came to the point where I felt like I was serving him badly by accompanying him. I hired a student accompanist, an excellent pianist from Sweden, to come to our lessons, paying her myself. Out from behind the piano, I could work with T. more intensely on his breath and his phrasing. This ushered in one of the most thrilling times I've had as a teacher. Working on "Schöne Wiege" in the studio with T. and the accompanist, I felt as if we were riding a cresting wave together as three musicians. T. achieved moments in which there wss a synergy between his line and the equally important piano part, and when not only the melody and the meaning of the text, but even the sounds of the words themselves created multiple layers of meaning in his performance. Especially stunning was the way that he was able to sing each repetition of "Lebewohl!" (farewell!) differently, drawing one out with rubato, clipping another. I would leave these lessons feeling elated, as if I had finally found out what God wanted me to do, and was privileged to know the joy of doing it.

T. wanted to audition for the B.M. degree, so we started working on an audition program. I gave him a piece by Fauré, an Italian piece, the identity of which, oddly, I can't recall (oddly, because for most of my performing career I specialized in Italian music), the aching tenor showpiece "Lonely House" from Kurt Weill's Street Scene, and "Der Lindenbaum," the best-known piece from Schubert's great Winterreise. "Der Lindenbaum" (The Linden Tree) also treats the theme of being made to leave home forever, driven on by the unforgettable pain of love gone wrong, and it has become a kind of folk-song in the German-speaking lands. In one stanza, the narrator describes how, in the course of his journey, the cold wind has blown his hat away, and yet he does not stop. T. mentioned something that I hadn't considered: that in Europe in the 1820s, a man outdoors without his hat would have been unimaginable; the fact that the narrator doesn't turn back for his hat, T. suggested, showed the desperation of his plight, and was a clear foreshadowing of the madness into which he almost willfully descends at the end of the cycle. This was the kind of student I had dreamed of teaching, one who gave serious thought to the meaning of the text and the music, and to the reasons composers might have had for writing as they did.

When the time for T.'s audition came around in the spring, he clutched. I had instructed him to start the audition, at which I was not allowed to be present, with one of his best pieces - the Weill or the Schubert - but he second-guessed the audition committee and decided that they would probably want to hear the Italian piece that I can't recall first. A mistake. He wasn't admitted, and the following year switched his major from voice to music composition.

Near the end of the school year, I organized a recital for my students. T. was to sing "Lonely House" and "Lindenbaum." He rushed in just as the recital was starting, an etiolated, sickly-looking man who I realized was his boyfriend in tow. He told me at the intermission that he almost hadn't come. His beloved cat was near death, and he was beside himself. He got through his pieces, though he didn't shine.

This made me think about all the dreadful times in my life when I had kept on singing. There was simply nothing else to do; many times singing had seemed the only thing left to me. In our next lesson, one of our last, I mentioned obliquely some of these occasions in my own life, which included my abortion. An artist, I explained, has to be cool-headed even in the face of great personal suffering. C'est son métier. It's his job to sublimate his own suffering into a balm that might touch those who hear him, and give them the healing that he seeks for himself.

I never saw T. again after that. He still has a CD I lent him, the wonderful "Tryout," which features recordings of Kurt Weill singing and playing his own songs in rehearsal for his Broadway shows.

To hear fine performances of T.'s repertoire, go here for the Schumann, here for the Schubert, and here for the Weill.