In fact,
his blood alcohol was .215%, which is high indeed.
Sour minds
on the island are wondering what Sánchez Betances was doing there, and some
have even gone so far as to breathe aspersions. But relax, dear Reader, there was
no impropriety involved—in fact, Sánchez Betances was there to make absolutely
sure that the rules were being followed, and that no special treatment was
given. He was just there for a friend! Something anyone would do!
And now, of
course, warped and twisted minds are attempting to misconstrue a perfectly
normal action—how dare they! Here,
for example, is an ex district attorney, Osvaldo
Carlo:
El
exfiscal Osvaldo Carlo dijo en NotiUno que “la mera presencia del secretario de
Justicia allí, sin decir una palabra, crea una presión indebida sobre estos agentes
de la Policía. Porque, por qué un secretario de Justicia va a estar en el lugar
de los hechos si no es para crear un ambiente negativo de la investigación. No
tenía ni que decir una sola palabra. Él tenía otras maneras de trabajar con ese
asunto que no fuese presentarse allí, porque al presentarse allí iban a sentir
la presión del cargo”.
(The ex
attorney Osvaldo Carlo said to NotiUno that “the mere presence of the secretary
of justice there, without saying a word, creates undue pressure on those police
agents. Why? Because why is a secretary of justice going to be there if not to
create a negative environment for the investigation? He doesn’t have to say a
word. He has other ways of working this affair without being there, because by
being there they were going to feel the pressure.”)
Poppycock!
Turning
away from such negativity, what’s the deal with Lee Hoiby?
Why, you
may ask, am I worrying about Hoiby? Because over the weekend, I was watching Renée Fleming talk
about Leontyne Price,
who had championed Hoiby’s work. So what was up with Hoiby?
Well, I
knew he had a Wisconsin connection, but I didn’t know that he was actually born
in Madison in 1926, had studied with Gunnar Johansen, and
had later attended Mills
College. His compositions draw the attention of Gian Carlo Menotti,
who showed them to Samuel
Barber. Menotti also invited Hoiby to Curtis to
study with him: no small thing, since Menotti was the leading opera composer of
the time.
And Hoiby
didn’t follow the fashion of the time—which was to compose highly dissonant
music. Instead, his music is tuneful, lyrical, and sophisticated. And his
specialty? Here’s
what he told Zachary
Woolfe:
“It was the
singers, not the instrumentalists,” he said. “The instrumentalists didn’t know
who the fuck I was. I didn’t have any instrumental music played. Singers, you
can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going
to make them sound good. And mine do.”
Here’s
what Woolfe has to say about the songs:
Indeed, it
seems likely that his songs-whose brilliant and varied texts, chosen by Mr.
Shulgasser, range from Bishop to Roethke to Stevens to Rilke-will be what last
the longest of his work. Perfectly honed little worlds, they benefit most from
his modesty. Small shifts, like the opening into ecstatic brightness of the
third stanza of “The Message” (set to a John Donne poem), take on a kind of
humble grandeur.
In the
interview with Woolfe, Hoiby said the following: “All I did was compose. I
never went anywhere, I didn’t know anybody. I never went to any parties. I
never met anybody. I’m basically not interested in social life, I guess.”
Well, he
must have watched television, because his spoof on Julia Child is bang on. In
the words
of Joseph Dalton:
All
of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts
egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on
undaunted. She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked
one. Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no
additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a
light and colorful orchestration.
And as
light as the piece—and the cake—is, there’s also something tinged with
melancholy about Hoiby’s work. Is it because I know that he must have been
dealing with being gay in a decade—the fifties—that was perhaps the most
homophobic of the century? Is it because he never quite attained the celebrity
of Gian Carlo Menotti? I feel about him what I feel about Barber: at the end,
he must have felt he had given too much, and gotten too little.
