How do you know it was a good performance?
Well, a good musician doing a good job can control his
instrument—in this case, her instrument, which is the human voice—but a
great musician stops playing the instrument or the music, and plays the room.
And the proof of that? The audience applauds on her cue, not on theirs.
That’s what the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, singing
Handel’s Piangero from Giulio Cesare,
does in the clip below, which I’m terribly sure was pirated off a cell phone
from a live performance in the Teatro Colón. But wherever the performance came from, DiDonato is riveting; nobody, nobody,
is going to clap until she relinquishes the experience, stops being
Cleopatra, stops bewailing her cruel fate, stops realizing that she—a queen—has
been vanquished and stripped of everything.
There’s no other aria that is quite as desolate, no other
aria that has stripped the flesh off the character and burned it in the desert
sun, until it is as beautiful and brittle as a Georgia O’Keefe skull. You
touch it, and it disintegrates—poof!—into the finest powder; the desert wind
takes it—the avenging angel—to its next state of existence.
This is not an aria. This is a person pulling an audience
through the birth channel of inner pain and psychic anguish. This is a person
who is drawn to a hideous flame, as is the moth, but who knows that the flame
will consume her, and knows that it is not just useless but sinful to refuse
the flame. The flame? That’s her destiny.
Is it sad music? No, of course not. We have left “sad” far
behind, nor is it any other emotion, unless it’s an emotion for which we have
still no word. For no one ventures back from this emotion, no one returns from
this voyage, when you have arrived here, there is no return. Death could no be
more final.
This morning, on my morning walk, I wanted to remember my
mother, who died almost five years ago. Fortunately, that’s easy, since there
is something about seeing—as I was—huge ocean swells crash against rocks until
they explode into jets of water, spray, droplets and salt air…well, all that
prompts thoughts of mortality. Each one of us is born somewhere deep in the
ocean, stirred by the twirling of the plant, whispered by the phases of the moon.
We travel through space and time, less a wave than the energy of one, the
potential of one, and then, the rock! And for one glorious moment, the wave
explodes into its potential, becomes the fusion of air and rock and time and
water and space and…death.
And so, did I turn to Piangero, when I wanted to remember my
mother?
Nope—rather, I turned to Bach’s Bist du bei Mir. And I was about to tell you that Bist du bei Mir
is simply sadness on a human scale, whereas Piangero?
Could it be that a man or woman can move through
personal suffering so acutely that he or she enters another realm: The
suffering of the world? Or perhaps suffering as Plato imagined it: a form, an
object as real as a rock. And as ephemeral as a droplet of wave water falling
onto the rock.
And yet, not matter—because matter has changed, as well as
time. It’s slower in this world, this world where we will meet the inevitable
that horrifies us, that repels us, that is inescapable and inevitable.
Slower, yes—but there is a muted drum, or a throb, or a
heartbeat heard through tissues and bones and amniotic fluid. Did I say heard?
No—felt, for to pause to hear it would destroy the moment, the moment that is
consuming you, the moment for which you have been born. The moment of dread and
liberation.
I have been through the death of love and the death of a
mother: This music is nothing of that. This music is about 3 AM, when I woke up
and prayed for help, since I knew, I absolutely knew, that there was a musician
inside me. And I knew the musician was good. So I sat in a darkened living room, and
listened to the message, or perhaps the drum, the muffled drum, which was
accompanying the coffin carrying the rotted, putrid corpse, stinking and oozing
and repelling. The corpse that was my dream, the corpse that I had killed,
since it was my doing, my choices, my temperament that had killed that dream.
Music would be important in my life; it would not be my life.
The death of a dream—it was curiously more personal and less
personal than the death of my mother. And it was cleaner and dirtier than my
mother’s death as well. Because when my mother died, I was a witness, somebody
who however dear I had been to her, was not experiencing death’s dark night. I
was peering on, stunned and amazed as we always are, when the shadow of the
sickle passes over a brow.
But that moment at three o’clock, when time had stood still
enough for me to see it, when the world had decided that yes, it would cease
its turning, stop in its track, stop the inane and senseless rotation, rest…
And then, the coffin had come, and I looked in, and the stench and the horror
and the burnt and charred flesh, the protruding bones, the visage of
unspeakable anguish wrench across what had been a face…all that happened.
I looked, I saw the person I had neglected and starved, and
poisoned and crushed into that state, all the while thinking that it hadn’t
been I, it hadn’t been anything but bad luck and bad timing and bad genetics
and maybe—just maybe—bad karma.
But no.
Piangero—I shall weep. But wrong—it is the only false thing
in the aria.
For weeping is has been left far, far behind. We have left
the world of feelings, where anyone might legitimately weep. Weeping is gone.
Wonder remains.
(For better sound quality, and an amazing interpretation, see the above….)
