Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls

The music department at the community college where I teach moved to a new building over the summer. This is a good thing, even an excellent thing, since, up until now, the music department has been housed in a building that was apparently designed as a bomb shelter. All the classrooms in the old building were in the basement, and all their carpets were mildewed; I stopped reminding my students not to bring drinks to class, because the odor of stale spilled coffee was a marked improvement over what it could have been. The large number of linoleum tiles missing from the ceiling gave it the appearance of a menacingly-grinning, upside-down clown-smile, and the choir couldn't rehearse in the building, because so many of its members were stricken with mold-induced asthma attacks during practice.

Last week, before the semester began, we music-department adjuncts (who make up, incidentally, around eighty percent of the music faculty) converged upon the new building to clean it up and make it ready. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and my heart did strange things when I stepped outside the cinder-block building to make a phone call. The Soviet-bunker-style campus is nestled in a depression in the achingly-green northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, hills that look so gentle, so kindly somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," about how the jar on the hill in Tennessee "made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill," and how, here, the anecdote was turned upside down: how here the hills surround the makeshift slovenliness of the college, but the artifice of man does not add order to or impose mastery upon those surrounding hills. I thought, too, of Emerson noting that

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

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I've been asked to give a paper at a conference being held in honor of my dissertation advisor, an important musicologist now retired after many years of teaching, an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn with whom I became, during the time we worked together, somewhat uncomfortably enmeshed in a sort of artificial mother-daughter relationship. She remarked to a friend at my wedding that she hoped I wasn't going to take my husband's name, because I had worked so hard to build a scholarly reputation under my own (Italian) name. When my dissertation voice recital was approaching, she, apparently worried over what I would wear, confronted me awkwardly in the hallway of the university, where she was a full professor and I an adjunct, and anxiously enquired how I was planning to do my hair. When my first son was born, she said something I wasn't sure how to interpret at the time about how some people thought you should change your life for your children, and others thought you should fit your children into the life you already had; to this day, I don't know which camp she, a mother as well as a scholar, fell into. I still worry that I'm disappointing her with my hair, my life, and my scholarship, and I still don't know what my paper in her honor is going to be about. But I felt like hanging my head when I saw the website for the conference, and saw my name (the version of it that's trotted out for performance and publication purposes, Italian maiden name first, followed by married name) and my affiliation (northern-Appalachian-county community college) next to the names of well-known musicologists who teach at Case Western, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Harvard, and Yale. I recalled how I wanted to be something great, to do something important, and yet, here I am.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Someone once said that teaching is casting artificial pearls before real swine, which, to the extent that it's true, does not make the thrower of pearls any less swinish than his intended audience. How am I supposed to do this job -- to teach music to my students at northern-Appalachian-county community college? I want to do it, I burn to do it, because, as William Carlos Williams wrote (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there.

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

While singing along to the radio, I saw a shabby-looking, morbidly obese man with dirty legs riding in a self-propelled wheelchair in the oncoming lane. I thought about my mother's LP. Where would I be, who would I be, if my mother had not had it? Classical music is not salvific by any means (I remind myself), but, for me, it's always been anodyne, palliative, hallucinogen, and opiate all in one. It dulls pain, it comforts, it heals, it confers vision. Without it, I would be a miserable worm of a person, even more than I am now. And I wonder if this is true for everyone: if everyone, had he had access to my mother's record collection, would be a better person.

I thought about my wonderful voice teacher and mentor, A.B., who grew up, as it happens, in rural Tennessee. His parents were mountain people; his father was a self-taught singer who worked for a biscuit-flour company. The flour company would send out a string band to drive around the rural counties in a flatbed truck, from which they would play music, and then give a baking demonstration with a portable oven. A.B. told me about how, as a child, he was given a recording of the Nutcracker on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of La Bohème at the public library, and played it, too, into the ground, memorizing every word and note of Rodolfo's Act I aria, but -- as he found when he got to conservatory -- memorizing it wrong, because the record had a skip in it that obliterated part of one measure.

Classical music, discovered as a child, taught me how to live, how to breathe. It did the same for A.B. I wonder if it might do the same one day for one of my students. I think of a recurring dream I've had for years, in which I am walking certain streets in New York that I know as well as I know the Mozart Piano Concert no. 27, but finding them slightly and ineffably altered, and looking for something as I walk -- something that, while I can't quite remember what it is, I know to be the key to everything. There's a beautiful children's book by Barbara Helen Berger called Grandfather Twilight, in which the twilight is personified as an old man who each night takes a pearl from an endless strand and walks with it to the sea, while the pearl grows larger and larger, eventually becoming the moon. I hope that the artificial pearls I offer to my students this semester -- not out of perversity, but because they're all I've got -- might be able to change into something real and beautiful for them, too.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Opera Singers

I've been scarce here lately for more than the usual reasons. In fact, I spent April doing something I never thought I'd do again in this life: rehearsing and performing a small principal role in a Mozart opera with a reputable regional opera company. To make a long story short, the music director of company in question, which is about seventy-five miles from where I live, called me when the singer who was originally cast was offered a more career-making sort of role with a different company, creating a scheduling conflict. I didn't know this conductor personally, but another conductor had recommended me. I demurred at first, because it just seemed crazy. I'm not in the game anymore, and it really wasn't the kind of role I would sing if I were; it's usually cast with an up-and-coming singer, whereas I am more of a down-and-outing one. I explained to the conductor that I don't do opera anymore, that I have children, and that it would be very difficult for me to make rehearsals because of the distance. I also told him that I could recommend two excellent colleagues who had sung the role. But it seems the referring conductor's recommendation counted for a lot, and in the end I was offered the job, and, after my initial protestations, I figured I should take it, because . . . . well, I'm not sure why. I had been strongly prevailed upon; the money was good; and it was the chance to sing in a Mozart opera. And I had been told that I would only have to make it to three rehearsals, which turned out not to be true. I think I had to make the trip back and forth from my home to the city where the opera company is located twelve or thirteen times, and as a result I had to make some creative child care arrangements, and I spent most of the month more sleep-deprived than usual, since I was getting home well past midnight and my children wake up well before six a.m.

During the production process, I felt like an undercover anthropologist. After so many years away, I was overwhelmed by how vastly different my life was from the lives of my colleagues in the show, and, indeed, how different my life is now from the way it used to be when I was pursuing an opera career. I didn't have the chance to get close to any of my colleagues, because they were all in residence at a hotel for a month, while I was driving back and forth, so I missed out on some of the best things about being an opera singer: the camaraderie, the jokes, and the friendships that form in the inevitable Canterbury-Tales/Gilligan's-Island-type scenarios that arise when strange singers find themselves together in a strange city (incidentally, there's a wonderful novel on this topic, Now Playing at Canterbury by Vance Bourjaily). My colleagues were uniformly the best singers I've ever worked with; out of the cast of nine, three had already sung at the Met, underscoring the current dire economic climate for opera, in which, because of multiple regional-opera-house closings, A-level singers are working in C-level houses, which is both a boon to those houses and a disaster for singers less-well established.

None of the other female principals was married. Only one besides me had children: a three-year-old, whom she'd brought along on the gig, and who was being cared for by babysitters in the hotel room. "I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this," the singer-mother confided in me. Two of the male principals did have children, but they also had wives to care for them back home while they were out on the road. I overheard one of the unmarried, childless female principals ask one of her male colleagues, upon learning that he was going to New York to see his wife on our day off: "Can I live vicariously through your sex life? Because it's going to be a lot better than mine, no matter what." 

I'm sure I've mentioned this here before: you can't really be a mother and an actively-careerist opera singer. Well, you can, if you time your childbearing perfectly, and if you're commanding fees that allow you to pay for nannies, two conditions which almost never happen singly, let alone simultaneously. Some haters who used to read this blog a few years ago left comments suggesting that I quit opera because I lacked talent. While I don't think that's entirely true, it doesn't really matter that much, because once you get to a certain level of the profession, it's not even about talent. I'd like to say that it's about hard work, and that's certainly part of it; but it's much, much more about a confluence of things that are out of the singer's control, including the stars aligning. And of course, you have to really want it.

One of the principal singers in my production -- one of the unmarried women who had sung at the Met -- is enrolled in a doctoral program in voice at a prestigious conservatory. Since I loved my own years of doctoral study, I was surprised, when I asked her how she liked it, to hear her say that it was a total waste of time, but that she needed the piece of paper to get a good teaching job. I realized that our reasons for getting our doctorates were very different: I had already transitioned out of opera when I enrolled, and was performing concerts of material I'd found in my own archival research, and I wanted to learn how to be a better researcher. She, on the other hand, is coming up against a wall in the business beyond which, since she's a lyric-coloratura soprano approaching forty, she cannot go, and she does not have a husband, and she realizes that she needs to make a career transition in order to continue to eat.

It is an unhappy profession, peopled by lonely, unhappy people.

When I told a friend, a Wagnerian soprano who left the career in order to have a family, about my recent experience, she wrote me:

I can't even imagine trying to go sing with the diva girlies now. I really think opera is a dying sport/art form, so it is probably worse now than it was when we were out there.

The best colleagues I ever sang with were Wagnerians, since they are too busy trying to get all their shit together to be prima donnas . . . and I generally found that they want you to know the stuff so that if they stumble, someone can help!

I think I acquitted myself without shame, and I'm glad it's over.

Recordare

Ultra-light blogging, I know. I'm up against some intractable deadlines in my real-life projects.

In the meantime, there is this, from Mozart's Requiem. 

I think if Mozart had written only this one number and nothing else, nothing at all, he would still count among history's greatest musicians. I love the way that the piece's anxiety resolves into confidence in Christ's mercy.

The conductor is John Eliot Gardiner, the orchestra is the English Baroque Soloists, and the solo quartet is the exceptionally fine foursome of American soprano Barbara Bonney, Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie Von Otter, and the English tenor and bass Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Alastair Miles. The tempo is on the fast side, because the orchestra is playing period and period-replica instruments, whose sounds have a rapider decay than their modern counterparts.

The translation:

Remember, kind Jesus,
my salvation caused your suffering;
do not forsake me on that day. 

Faint and weary you have sought me,
redeemed me, suffering on the cross;
may such great effort not be in vain. 

Righteous judge of vengeance,
grant me the gift of absolution
before the day of retribution. 

I moan as one who is guilty:
owning my shame with a red face;
suppliant before you, Lord. 

You, who absolved Mary [Magdalene],
and listened to the thief,
give me hope also. 

My prayers are unworthy,
but, good Lord, have mercy,
and rescue me from eternal fire. 

Provide me a place among the sheep,
and separate me from the goats,
guiding me to Your right hand.

No Shame in Smallness

In my final master's degree recital, I sang a group of Mozart songs, including a rather odd and rarely-performed one, "Verdankt sei es dem Glanz der Großen." Not being then the experienced and avid researcher I later became, I must admit that at the time I really didn't know what I was singing about. Yes, I translated every word, as I used to insist that my own students do when they were working on art songs in languages other than English, and I knew what it meant in literal terms; but the song, for all its simplicity, remained strange and rather mystical to me, and I assumed that it had something to do with Mozart's masonic affiliations. Here is a partial and paraphrased translation:

Thanks be to the glory of the great for showing me my insignificance so clearly. . . . I esteem those narrow boundaries in which I am so insignificant. Here I see stars and ornaments glistening, but they are of no interest to me, and cannot draw me out of my small circle. . . there is no shame in being small. 

It has crossed my mind lately that my life, background, and upbringing couldn't be more different from those of most of my readers here, including those whom I consider my friends. I was not raised for the life I'm living now. It's hardly necessary to detail the damage that I encountered early in life and later learned to replicate, but suffice it to say that I did not grow up with good values, morals, or catechesis, as you, perhaps, did. I did not go to Catholic school or university. I was not encouraged to become a wife or mother. I stopped going to Mass when I was eleven and didn't start again until years later. It never crossed my mind that a man would or should take care of me, and it wasn't something I particularly sought after or wanted. Rather, in spite of, or because of, my life of damage, I became a singer. From childhood on, I chased after the ethereal, the disembodied, the ungraspably beautiful that seemed to tend toward God (I would eventually learn that singing is anything but ethereal or disembodied). I tried to build my life on shards of color, scraps of sound, remembered fragrances and slants of light. In some ways it worked, and in others it failed miserably. I wonder if it failed because I was trying to make something hard out of something soft, something sharp-edged and useful as a tool or a weapon out of something warm and intimate. But in fact, I handled most phenomena in my life the same way.

Indeed, I never imagined what it might be like to be small in the essential way described in the text of Mozart's song, and the thought of being happy with such limitations frightened me. My whole life had been about kicking against the boundaries, pushing out of my way whatever conspired to keep me in smallness. So naturally I couldn't possibly understand what I was singing.

I went to Adoration yesterday, and it occurred to me that God is forcing me to grasp that kind of smallness now. I saw someone I knew there -- coincidentally, an Italian guy from the Bronx -- a tough-looking man with a shaved head who, seemingly uncharacteristically, indulges in extravagant gestures of devotion, including prostrations, frequent handling of a very large rosary on which he bestows loud kisses, profferings of monastic greetings when you run into him, and refusals to shake your hand at the Sign of Peace. I must stress that this is a genuinely holy sort of person, but I find the visible manifestations of the supposed state of his holiness a bit off-putting, and I have to admit to feeling chagrined that he was in the Adoration chapel when I walked in. I heard myself asking God, "Do You love this guy more than me? Come on, please don't love him more than me; You just can't!" which made me realize that, in spite of the fact that I was raised to make my own way in the world and for long stretches did so, all I had ever wanted was for someone to love me the best. In fact, I think that's the only reason I ever did anything.

But here and now, there is nothing but smallness. Not the life I had envisioned for myself. If being here in this crumbling post-industrial city is my school of humility, I'd rather have the school of walking around, of being among my people, of teaching my wonderful public university students: My Old School. Here it is hard work all the time and little excitement. Here there are many tears and few accolades. Here there are few opportunities to reveal that beauty that I always strove to uncover, which I later came to know was the beauty of God.

People from my old life email me and ask me when and where my next gigs are. I have to tell them I have nothing booked. I take care of my boys, each of whom has demanding and difficult special needs in different ways; I try to meet my freelance deadlines, which keep me on the edges of academia; and I try to keep the house clean. I try not to feel lonely and I try not to miss my old life, because it is gone, and probably some of it I'm well-rid of. I try to discern what God wants of me, and I can only assume He wants me to do what I'm doing now. Sometimes I long to go away to a hermitage, where I fantasize about the occurrence of profound healing and connection with God, but I understand that whatever healing and connection is going to happen is going to happen in the midst of confusion and brokenness, and I appreciate orthodox Jewish theology for insisting that the encounter with God happens in the midst of the chaos of family life and the marketplace; there is no precedent in Jewish tradition, after all, for monastic living, or celibacy, or hermitage.

"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.)

Ye Kindly Gods, Do Not Deceive Me!

 O ihr guten Götter, täuscht mich nicht.

Prince Tamino utters these words in Act I of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), after the Queen of the Night has asked him to rescue her daughter, Pamina, who has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. Tamino, who has not yet proven his manhood (he faints while being menaced by a dragon in the first scene, and the Queen of the Night's Three Ladies kill the beast while he lays unconscious), sets off to fulfill this charge. In a shocking twist of events, however, he learns in Act II that Sarastro, the high priest of Isis and Osiris, is a good man who has taken Pamina away from the evil Queen for her own good. Because they love wisdom, Tamino and Pamina seek to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of the Egyptian gods.

One of the most remarkable things about Mozart's last opera is its ethos of complete and stunning reversal. What was one way in the first act turns out, in the second, to be its exact opposite; what appeared good proves evil, and vice versa. A close study of the score provides early clues that all may not be as it seems; for instance, the Queen's entrance aria, rather than musically portraying her as a grieving mother, instead clearly reveals her to be steely and domineering, and, when sung and directed well, is actually a little scary (indeed, the voice type that sings it -- dramatic coloratura soprano -- has often been used in opera to represent characters who are not quite, or are somehow beyond, human):  


In a classic moment of overcommitment, I agreed, before Jude arrived, to cover (i.e. understudy) the roles of Second and Third Lady in a production of Zauberflöte being staged by a regional opera company in my area, in spite of the fact that it's been more than ten years since I last appeared in an opera. The conductor had heard me, and was very supportive, even telling me that I could bring my kids to rehearsals (a rare accommodation in opera, where few performers -- at least few women -- have children, and one that in the long run did not go over well with the stage director and his staff). The chances of me having to go onstage are slim, thank God, because I'm not ready; in addition to the usual parenting, homemaking, and post-adoption stuff, I'm also doing some editing and translating work for pay in the few moments I can spare for it, as well as working on my own (academic-musicological) book.

It's hard to describe how strange it is to be sitting on the sidelines during rehearsals, either with or without my children. To be benched, as it were, has forced me into a position of unwonted humility, since singing was always my ticket up and out, the simple tool I used to make a better life for myself. I watch the mostly excellent young singers and learn the staging, and I wonder what their lives and careers will be like. Two of the singers in the cast recently married each other: what will happen to them? Will one be successful, the other not? Will they have children? Will they stay together? In the world of opera, all of these matters are open to question.

And to be here, doing this, in Applachia is doubly strange. I think about my old life in New York, and I wonder if it was really real at all. After moving here, I longed greatly for that life, which I regarded as my true life, and my life here as some sort of shoddy bargain-basement substitute for what I might be doing. But now I'm not so sure of that hierarchy of lives. As I sit and watch rehearsals, I wonder if this was the life I was always meant to have, and if everything leading up to it -- everything which is now falling away as if it were a dream -- was in fact like Tamino's understanding of the world and the cosmos in the first act of Die Zauberflöte: shiny, deceiving, baffling, and completely opposite to the way things really are.

(Above: The Queen of the Night's entrance, from a stage set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for an 1815 production of the opera.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus flee Life's fairest hours,

Flying away as if in a dance.

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

And the curtain will come rolling down.

Our play is done: the tears of a friend

Flow already over our grave.

Soon, perhaps (the thought arrives gently,

like the west wind, with a quiet foreboding)

I will part from this life's pilgrimage,

And fly to the land of rest.

If you will then weep over my grave,

Gaze mournfully upon my ashes,

Then, o Friends, I will appear

And waft you all heavenward.

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

and pluck me a violet for my grave,

And with your soulful gaze

look gently upon me.

Weep the smallest of tears for me, and ah!

Do not be ashamed to cry thus for me;

Those tears will become

the loveliest pearls in my diadem.

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

Music and Memory, Part 24: Theft

My work-study job at the music library notwithstanding, as an undergraduate I was constantly broke.  I used to shoplift at the supermarket sometimes, and one one of these occasions I somehow managed to push a whole shopping-cartful of unpaid-for groceries through the automatic doors and to my apartment a few blocks away.  Unlike a certain friend of mine, however,  an artist who -- questioned by store security about the brick of cheese he'd stuck in his coat pocket while buying some expensive pots of jam -- asserted that he wouldn't pay for something the government gave away for free, I felt bad about these heists.  I even told Professor R., the piano teacher I id0lized, about them. "Oh, Pentimento!" said she, ever a worshipper at the church of aesthetics, throwing up her hands. "You need to feed your soul!  You need to go to concerts, galleries, museums!" She proceeded to tell me with her usual great enthusiasm about an original-instrument performance of some Mozart string quartets which she'd recently attended.  "They were just sawing at their instruments!" she said, at which I must have looked horrified, because she clarified: "It was wonderful!" My kindly German professor, on the other hand, understood how things were.  She used to leave brown paper bags of homemade bread and cookies outside my door.

I remembered all this today as I drifted into a not-unaccustomed reverie of my former life in a particularly obscure corner of one of New York's many hardscrabble bohemias.  I thought of two old friends from that time and place, dancers who'd moved to New York from Austin, where they had performed with Deborah Hay, a legendary postmodern choreographer who'd relocated from New York to Texas in the 1970s.  I found some videos of Hay's work on Youtube, along with this brief recent interview:

I was intrigued by what Hay said about not grasping at experience or phenomena; about, instead, being aware of each moment before it passes away and another arises to take its place. I wondered if my clutching at memories, at emotions, at images and sensations evoked by the music I hear and sing, was a symptom of the millennial materialism that she speaks of. Is it harder, I wonder, to mourn the beauty that has gone, or to accept the present moment in all its apparent emptiness?  And must emptiness be desolation?

I thought of the Gospel reading for today, in which Christ insists that anyone who wishes to follow Him must take up his own cross.  Might one man's cross, I wondered, be that everything beautiful he knows is relegated to the place of memory? Indeed, such a cross must be a rather common one.  And might another's cross be having to confront each moment as it is, free from what he thinks it ought to be, and to stand in the place where he finds himself, and even to bloom where he's been planted, be it ever so far from the time and place he has invested with the meaning of "home"?  Indeed, at Mass today, when the priest read Christ's words, it occurred to me that every gift bears the cross with it, and that perhaps the cross itself is the gift.

All this made me think of William Blake: 

He who binds to himself a joy 
Doth the winged life destroy; 
But he who kisses the joy as it flies 
Lives in eternity's sunrise.


(Above: frontispiece to the 1794 edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience)

Pooh and Eden

Listening to Robert Tear's wonderful album of the Fraser-Simson-A.A. Milne songs -- and it is growing on me, though my ancient loyalties lie, of course, with the Jack Gilford recording -- is turning out to be a poignant, even painful, experience for me.   The songs are so curious -- art music written on children's poetry -- and their beauty is so anachronistic, that they seem almost an aural metaphor for the strangeness and fleetingness of childhood itself.  I wish I could preserve the wonder of childhood for my own son, and of course I wish it could have been preserved for me, and I wonder sometimes how I became so determined to fall so far from the innocence of childhood, which, paradoxically, I managed to retain for a longer time than most American girls.  When the world begins to appear the mirror opposite of how it formerly looked  and felt (the shock and processing of this experience are very much what Mozart's last opera, Die Zauberflöte, is about), some children feel as if they've been driven out of the safe world of childhood, which now seems utterly false, and begin to act out their anger and grief at this loss which reflects the primordial loss of Eden.  This, at least, is what happened to me.

Yet I am strongly drawn to the ethos of childhood.  Most of what I read in my limited spare time is children's literature, and I am always trying to devise ways to bring the things I loved in my own childhood into my son's life (though I will need to accept the possibility that he may not love them himself).  But, I wonder, is it right, is it good to create a world of wonder around childhood, when the real world is such a hateful, mean, dangerous place?

I fervently wish that all children might be immersed in the world of delight that's portrayed in H. Fraser-Simson's wonderful Milne songs.  In my new city,  however, where I see little boys with neck tattoos that match their dads', where I read in the paper every day about horrific acts of child abuse and neglect, and where I hear parents screaming and cursing at their children as they walk them home from school, I'm even more acutely aware that this world is a distant dream for most children.  How fortunate are the few who, through happy circumstance and the efforts of their parents, are able to live in a world of innocence for a few short years.

The existential sorrow that the Fraser-Simson/Milne songs evokes for me is, I think, most of all elegiac -- not only for the world of childhood, which is always slipping away, always being lost -- but also for life itself, which starts out as a trickle of small goodbyes and later turns into a torrent of big ones.

Music and Memory, Part 6: Treason

E.M. Forster wrote that if forced to choose between betraying his friend or his country, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."  While his proposition trifles with the notion of treason, I wonder what the comparable label is for betraying friendship.  If betraying friends were as feared and anathemized as betraying country, perhaps we would do it less casually than we do.  I know that I have sacrificed friends on the altar of my ambition, as well as simply because our beliefs diverged on matters that seemed to me absolutely fundamental (though few things really are).  Often in my life I've come to a fork in a friendship where continuing on has seemed like more energy than I've felt like giving, and so I've let those friendships fade away.  I'm ashamed to think of how lightly I've taken my friendships.  After all, Christ Himself called His disciples His friends, which certainly suggests that friendship is a holy relationship, or should be.

When I was a young singer, I had a beloved friend -- Soprannie, whom I've written about here before -- who was also, sometimes, a bitter rival.  Soprannie was a remarkable person on many levels:  not only a fine soprano, but also beautiful, highly intelligent, a marathon runner, a gifted jazz pianist, and possessed of a dry, wicked sense of humor.  She was courageous and feisty:  she lived all alone in Brooklyn, and once fended off a would-be mugger with a cast-iron frying pan.  Most of all, she had a great talent for friendship.  Her heart was more open than that of anyone I've ever known, before or since, and she suffered compassionately alongside her friends, whom she called her "volitional family."  Indeed, Soprannie's friendship was prized by her colleagues and semblables, for whom she always had a listening ear.  Her friends were so used, however, to her position as the listener, the shorer-up, and the scraper-down-from-the-ceiling, that few of them ever considered that she needed to be listened to and supported as well.  The self-absorption of her friends vis-à-vis Soprannie was probably the reason that, as she confided to me afterward, only two of the many guests at her wedding actually gave her and her groom a gift (I was one of them).  No one, apparently, thought that Soprannie needed anything.

Like every beautiful, brilliant, and talented woman I've ever known, Soprannie was subject to searing romantic disappointment (the more I know women who were raised in faithful Catholic families, on the other hand, the more they appear to me to have been inoculated against this hazard of modern femininity; but Soprannie, like me, was raised in a progressive-activist Catholic family, and she herself used to quip that God offered minimal protection and maximum support).  In those days, both Soprannie and I were scraping by on pocket change -- on one occasion, she had to panhandle her subway fare home from work -- and at one point I tried to set her up with a very nice young lawyer whom I worked for.  He was artistically inclined himself, one of the many lawyers and bankers I encountered during those years who had given up an uncertain future in the arts for the far more reliable and lucrative worlds of finance and corporate law, and he was very taken with Soprannie.  She, however, put the kibosh on their relationship one date night when, having a drink at her apartment, he propositioned her with the suggestion: "You have needs . . . and I have needs."

Soprannie and I used to go to the opera together, and, since we couldn't afford to go out to dinner first, we would each bring snacks -- a bag of baby carrots, a package of pita bread, a little tub of humus -- and meet in a public atrium on Broadway in the West 60s to share them before heading over to the Met.  I remember once we were at a star-studded performance of Mozart's wonderful, underrated opera Idomeneo -- Plácido Domingo, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Dawn Upshaw were all in the cast -- when Soprannie, in tears, asked if we could leave after the first act.  She was going through a painful heartbreak.  We left, and went to a bar instead.

In the mid-nineties, we were both at a point in our careers where we needed more credits and roles on our résumés.  So we did the sort of thing that enterprising young singers in New York often do:  we self-produced a performance of Le Nozze di Figaro, with Soprannie singing the Countess and I (still singing soprano roles at the time) Susanna.  It was not hard at all to find other young singers in need of gigs to take the other roles, and we ended up with quite an excellent cast.  We used the piano-vocal transcription of the score, and our opera was "played" by one of the best coaches and rehearsal pianists working in New York at the time.  Annie's church donated the space, and we packed the house with our friends and colleagues.  Our staging was minimal, but effective:  my costume prop was a sheer little black French maid's apron, and hers a string of pearls, and in the last act, when the Countess and Susanna exchange clothes in order to trick the Count, she put on my apron and I put on her pearls.

During the rehearsal period, I got angry at Soprannie when she explained to a non-singing friend the difference in our voices.  "Pentimento's singing," she said. "is exciting, like baklava.  But I am like a slice of rich dark-chocolate cake."  I wanted to be dark chocolate, too; who wouldn't?  But Soprannie was a singer of great intelligence and musicality, and singing with her, when she wasn't undermining herself with the kinds of semi-conscious, neurotic self-sabotage practiced by many singers, could be thrilling.

The truth was that, as much as we loved each other, Soprannie and I were fiercely competitive.  We concealed information from each other about auditions and coaches.  Once we were able to tag along together on a road trip to Washington, D.C. for an audition, in a car driven by an up-and-coming young woman conductor.  I told the conductor how Soprannie had recently been in a bike accident when a guy in a parked Mercedes had opened his door into the bike lane on Madison Avenue; she'd gone on to sing a performance a few days later with a taped-up cracked rib.  My point was to favorably reflect upon how tough and committed Soprannie was.  Soprannie, however, was furious with me:  the up-and-coming conductor had a car (a rarity in New York), and was, therefore, a driver.  Didn't I realize that New York drivers hated bicyclists?  She was sure my anecdote would have a negative effect on her career, and that I'd told if for that purpose.

Over time, Soprannie's life changed, and mine did too -- hers, it must be said, for the better, mine not so much.  In spite of her unstinting self-giving, she had long been lonely, and she finally met a suitable man.  Some of her friends were not shy about expressing their distaste for this fellow -- he was an M.B.A. working in marketing, and they were . . . artists (I'm wondering now if this may have been one of the reasons for the general withholding of gifts at their wedding).  Some in Soprannie's circle saw her choice as a true betrayal -- as a sort of friendship treason, if you will.  Soprannie wouldn't have to work her ass off anymore, like everyone else in her cohort:  it just wasn't fair.  The consensus was that she was selling out.  You can bet there was not a little resentment abroad concerning her happy reversal in fortune.

I, on the other hand, had gotten married young to M., a conceptual artist, and, while we had a great deal in common, were good comrades, and he was unselfishly supportive of my life as a musician, I, though I could never admit it, was eaten away by mistrust and anger towards him for taking me to abort our child before we were married, engaged, or even a real couple.  I understand now that I had a deep instinct to make him suffer in retribution.  That anger, combined with my selfishness and ambition, and the toxic delusion that neither he nor anyone else could ever really love me, spurred me on to destroy our marriage at the same time that Soprannie was forming the bond that would lead to hers.

For a few years after that, I meandered through my world in a kind of exile from my own life, musically, relationally, and professionally.  Soprannie was kind and reasonably tolerant of my changing cast of boyfriends and spiritual practices, and supportive of my career transition in the direction of scholarship and teaching.  Sometimes I wish that she had been firmer with me -- had told me, especially during the horrible times, that I was going down the wrong path, that I needed to stop.  But an unspoken rule of female friendship among our cohort was that we didn't judge.  Heartbreak and hard times were considered the price we paid for being highly-educated, artistic women making our own way in the metropolis.  In fact, even abortion itself was accepted, though not without chagrin, as part of the mixed bag of modern womanhood, and was thought of as a sad hardship that had become part of our landscape, but never as something that should be restricted in any way.

After Soprannie had her first child, and I underwent my conversion (which happened about the same time), our paths diverged even more.  She had different friends, and I did too.  But I always loved her like crazy.  I haven't seen her now in almost five years.  She moved to the West Coast with her family a few years back, and is now the mother of three boys.  I sometimes picture with envy what I imagine as her perfect life, and contrast myself, still struggling in so many ways, with what I picture.

But the other day I got a message from her on my cell phone.  She was saying, through tears:  "Pentimento, my heart was just filled with you.  Do you remember when we did that Figaro,  and we were so young and so in love with the music, and with being able to sing it so beautifully, and how we just wanted to sing on and on?"

Yes, I remember it well.  In fact, though Soprannie and I had our ups and downs both as musical colleagues and as friends, singing with her in our little home-grown Figaro was truly one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life.  I miss her.

Above:  An excerpt from the Act III Countess-Susanna duettino, "Sull'aria."

Happy Birthday

To Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on this day (in the old calendar, the feast of Saint John Chrysostom) in 1756.

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.