Well, the
work of this morning was supposed to be to tell you about failure, since Lady,
Mr. Fernández and I had not so much been to the opera last night as we had been
Igorred.
As in Prince
Igor, the opera by Borodin that the
Metropolitan Opera is putting on for the first time in nearly 100 years. So we
went, all of us, to the broadcast at the Metro Theater. The broadcast (or
rebroadcast, in this case) is absolutely better than actually going to the Met,
since try eating popcorn at the Met! Oh, and another small advantage—you can
see the singers, without having to shell out 300 bucks…..
“How long
will this last,” asked Lady, who was attending for the first time. Four hours,
I told her, wildly over-exaggerating, or so I thought—it actually clocked in at
4 and a half hours, and that was without the curtain calls (we scrambled out of
the theater to grab the last bus home).
Well, it
was a thing to have done to one—the first act alone came in at an hour and
forty five minutes, and half of that was spent in a long hallucinatory scene
set in a blaze of poppies (12,500 artificial, spring-loaded poppies—so loaded
since the dancers were energetically crashing their way through the famous Polovtsian Dances
{well, famous to all but the computer, my little red-squiggling friend….})
You see,
Prince Igor, a twelfth-century figure, has made the fatal mistake of going off
to fight the Cuman / Polovtsian
tribes, despite having received a blazingly clear message from the heavens
that it was a damn fool thing to do. OK—not so blazing, since the celestial
tidings came in the form of a solar eclipse. But what sort of operatic moron
goes off to war right after an eclipse? Hellooo!
Well, the
predictable happens, but does Igor pick himself up, dust himself off, and get
back to the world of the living—which in this case is to be a prisoner?
Although not, since his captor seems to be a perfectly splendid man—and a khan, no less—who
insists on treating him as a guest, even to the point of offering him one of
the Polovtsian maidens. Oh, and he suggests that they go off and conquer all
Russia together. Quite a reasonable offer, given that look—Igor isn’t bringing
to the table much clout in the way of bargaining.
Right—so
while Igor is moping around refusing to escape (since he’s a prince, get
it? And escaping, you see, is for
the less exalted than he—therefore he’ll just sit around being operatically
moody, which will draw out the opera…)
Now where
was I?
Right—Igor
is moping, but his wife’s brother? He’s having a great old time, stealing
maidens from their havens by night and plotting to overthrow his brother-in-law
by day. While all of this is going on, the khan attacks and—guess what!—the
city falls. So now it’s one chicken salad wrap, two large coffees, one bag of
popcorn with some illicit-but-oh-so-good Coca-Cola (suck it up, Bloomberg!
Hah!) later, and now we’re in the fourth act / fourth hour—which is a scene of
utter devastation!
Well, let’s
go further—utter devastation, social ruin, economic collapse, and a profound,
vast, bleak spiritual wasteland, from which no one will escape.
The
Russians just love this stuff….
Igor, it
seems, has now decided to escape, presumably so that he can come back
when it’s entirely pointless (except, of course, to be in the final act).
Obviously, being treated as the honored guest of the khan is insufficiently
hair-shirted, especially when there is now the devastated city which he once
ruled to mope about in. So there he is, Russianly catatonic, contemplating his
and his city’s ruin, when two old souses come upon him, and decide to ring the
bell, and get the citizenry (in this case the Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—handy,
hunh?)
Well, the
wife is happy to see him, but Igor? Unlike all the operatic characters who are
told not to speak to their loved ones but cannot, Igor ignores his beloved, so
steeped in grief is he. So now it’s the crowd’s turn—very useful, since the
chorus is now on overtime, and you might as well use ‘em—and soon they’re
dancing about and tossing Igor in the air like a fraternity prank.
At last—and
I do hope nobody in the audience last night was afflicted with
hemorrhoids—Igor spins off, and lurches around for a minute or so in what
appears to be a near-psychotic break. Then he takes hold of himself, goes to a
crate and begins to lug it to the side. Gradually, the others join in—moving
the rubble to the side, beginning the process of cleaning up.
“That
was it?” asked Mr. Fernández, puzzled about how he had passed the last five hours
of his life. The steppes of Russian, you see, are slightly chillier than
Hollywood.
So I
thought about it all this morning, over coffee. And it’s a curious thing, the
need of my country—despite having experienced it several times—never to have
admitted defeat.
Let’s face
it—we lost Vietnam. And Iraq? Afghanistan? Even our war on drugs? The American
dream?
Yes—we’ve
been attacked. But have we ever experienced the devastation of a ruined
landscape / countryscape, coupled with the bitter taste of knowing that another
nation has invaded and conquered? Have we gone through what so many nations
around the world have endured?
‘I know
about defeat,’ I thought, remembering four or five auditions that I completely
choked. Each time it was the same—the disbelief of being gob sacked in the
psychic solar plexus, the wailing of despair and frustration, the shame of
calling friends and family and announcing that, yes, once again, I had failed.
Reader—some things repetition does not make easier.
“We
thoroughly enjoyed it,” said the tourist yesterday, handing me ten bucks for the
organizations I support by playing Bach suites in the café. The story, you
see, has a happy ending—I’m playing better than I ever have. More importantly,
I’m playing in public, enjoying it, and tackling the solo suites without having
the aid of another musician (often a pianist) to bolster me. It’s just the
instrument and I.
People
drift past, off to the bathroom. Often, I shift to another point in the bow, to
allow them to pass. The parrot squawks. People take photos—shooting a red flash
of light into the middle of a sarabande. Casals was right—a café is excellent
practice for a developing musician, whatever his or her age….
Did it come
easily? No. But if it came at all, it came from the devastated landscape of
failure. And if I had denied that I had failed? If I had fallen for the
rationale—perhaps real but not true—that no gringo could land a job with a Puerto Rican
orchestra?
There are
times, I decided, when you need devastation, failure, dirt in the mouth. That’s
the only landscape from which to travel to other, better places.
Enter
Susan, who wrote a comment on yesterday’s post, saying that she’d not heard of
the French countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. ‘Hmm,’
I thought, ‘how can that be?’ So I turned to YouTube, and came by chance on the clip below.
However
many decades it took this bear of little brain to figure out his instrument, it
took Jaroussky only a couple of years to go from starting to sing to conquering
the world of song. And why shouldn’t he? He’s young, mouth-wateringly cute, and
the voice?
But as you
can see below, it’s the completely natural—and funny—way he approaches his
music that carries the day. He has not, it looks, travelled the same paths that
I have trod, at least not in music.
I rejoice
for him, as I rejoice for the failures that—bitter as they were—led me onward
to a world of such joy….
