Coming Soon--an Opera Cafe to your City!

“We absolutely have to do this, since if we don’t, Joyce DiDonato will be totally disappointed and that would be more than I could bear.”

That’s what I was telling Lady on the day that we set off to buy the largest television we could afford at Costco. And was Lady listening? Of course not, since we were all grumpy: the coffee hadn’t clicked in for me, Sunshine had spent twenty minutes looking for parking, and Lady had been getting increasingly irritated updates on guess-what from Sunshine.

“Dammit, doesn’t he know the law of attraction? He comes to San Juan with his mind made up—no parking. So what does he find? Of course, no parking. So he has a yeyo and gets it into his head that he has to pay for parking in the municipal lot. What is he—made of money?”

That’s when Sunshine, driving the car ahead of us, sailed right past an empty parking space. So then Lady is honking her horn and gesticulating “why” with one hand while pointing backward with the other. Which may have put Sunshine in the mood to greet the street porter as his long lost brother, which meant they instantly embraced, and then began trading insults.

And who might the street porters be? Well, these are resourceful men and women who adopt a block and then assist drivers in parallel parking. So for two years of bricking the street, I endured generators and jackhammers. Now, what do I get? A guy nearly as loud as the jackhammer shouting, “DALE DALE DALE DALE DALE!” Once the parking is done, the guy “offers” to look after your car, since you wouldn’t want anything to happen to you car, would you? WOULD YOU? So these gentlemen have very cleverly gotten the municipality to completely repave the street for them, and have now converted public property to private property. For make no mistake—any other street porter intruding on territory is looking for a fight.

So Sunshine at last parks the car, but is the porter satisfied? Of course not—he’s putting his two thumbs down and smacking his forehead and then he goes to verify the chasm between curb and car, and spreads his arms nearly as far as he can to show Sunshine. So that means that now he and Sunshine have shifted to mute mode—being that there’s a windowpane between them. But no matter, since hands are just as effective as voices, which we learn when the porter—at last satisfied with Sunshine’s parking—comes over to let us know. He points to Sunshine, then swirls both index fingers around his temples, and whistles through his two—and only—teeth. So we get the news: Sunshine’s crazy.

OK—no news there, since the last time we had gone anywhere with Sunshine, he had ended up covering his exposed male parts, after recklessly taking off his swimming trunks in the deep end of the pool, and spinning them like a lasso over his head, all the while shouting, “Whoopeee! I’m a cowboy!” Lady and I took one look at each other and who knows who said, “let’s go!” But I can report that Lady is a strong swimmer, or just more than usually curious…..

Nor was once enough for Sunshine, since he repeated the trick, with predictable results. But this time Lady and I shunned the male parts, and attempted to seize the swimming trunks. Rather inadvisably, Sunshine opted to throw them, which meant that while Lady and I couldn’t grab them, Rafael could. And did. And then got out of the pool, and made gestures to fling the trunks over the chain link fence.

Well, I’m pleased to report that Sunshine kept his pants reasonably well on for the drive to Costco, and a merry time it was. So then we had to find the television, since I had gotten it into my head: audience building. Because the average person doesn’t like opera—or so they say. But who could not like opera? Remember the famous Sull’aria from the movie The Shawshank Redemption? It turned droves of people onto opera.

So the plan is put the television in the Poet’s Passage, and have opera Saturdays, and since someone was good enough to put YouTube into the world, and since a million opera fans have uploaded full operas—well, why not start an opera café, at least for one day a week?

“Besides, it’ll be great for Ilia, Raf’s mother, since she loves opera but her husband…well, not so much. So we’ll be starting a major new trend, converting millions of people to opera, and giving pleasure to a little old lady who sorely needs it.”

So we bought a 70-inch set, and then wheeled it to the SUV we had borrowed to transport it.

“I’m lying under the TV,” said Lady, and both Sunshine and I fought it for as long as we could. But the thing about Lady? She always gets what she wants, and so there she was, lying on her back under a 70-inch TV and munching on blackberries. She couldn’t have been happier. That’s when I remember Joyce DiDonato, about whom I have gone through obsession and am now into stalking, if only electronically.

“She’s this totally cool, completely unaffected mezzo-soprano who started out wanting to be a music teacher, but then got drawn into opera. So when she was in Chicago last year, she spent an intermission at the Lyric Opera talking to a group of kids from Youth Opera Council. And the kids were totally into it.”

“Well, that’s how it happened for me,” said Lady, whose aunts used to take her to the opera.

“And that’s what happened to Montalvo, who at age 21 could have been the great-grand child of most of the audience. But remember his characterization of Iago in Otello? It was along the lines of, ‘wow, that’s some badass Niggah,’ a sentiment he shared in full, almost operatic, voice. All of the ladies’ hair turned one shade bluer….”

So we plan it out: we’re starting with a Mozart Festival, since once you’ve seen Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi—well, you’re either hooked or deaf.

“I’ll definitely have to tweet this to Joyce, since she has to know, and spread the idea of the opera café throughout the major metropolises of the world. In fact, she should refuse to sing in any city without an opera café….”

“But she has to give us credit,” said Lady, always on the lookout for marketing.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “We’ll be world famous! We’ll be in Wikipedia! Kids will be whistling Un Bel Di as they walk down the street. Mothers will be threatening to take away their children’s opera privileges if they fail in school. Fathers will beg their sons to play baseball—but miss the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Met? No effing way….”

It’s pleasant to think about, and Lady keeps munching on blackberries, and Sunshine reaches for some. But just at that moment, the blackberry supply had been converted into the raw material for blackberry pie, so Lady gives him only one. He’s reasonably content and…

…at least he kept his pants on!

      

Thirty Years in the Madhouse

Consider this photo:
 

They had worked in the same studio in Paris, when they were young, before life had carried them where they didn’t want to go. Or perhaps they did, who knows?

I sit in this café and peer at the photo. Notice, for example, that the lady on the right, has her hand on the lady on the left. But she? Her arms are akimbo.

“They’re trying to poison me,” sang Joyce DiDonato in the epilogue to Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. Well, she may have said it, but the lady on the right—Jessie Lipscomb—came away saying it wasn’t true the Claudel was insane, and a friend of Rodin’s echoed the statement. More tellingly, the doctors were never entirely convinced that Claudel needed to be in the madhouse—they once wrote to suggest that she be cared for at home.

Reading the account of her life in Wikipedia, her family seem to be the villains. The brother—who signed the form that committed her, managed to visit seven times in 30 years. To be fair, part of that time he was in China, part of the time war was ravaging Europe. In fact, she died in the middle of World War Two; was that why she was buried in a mass grave? And by the way, the brother managed to specify to the centimeter—practically—where he wanted to be planted.

Still, the brother managed to cross occupied France to see her before her death. But what about the sister—who dropped in just once?

Then we come to Mother—who had never fully accepted her daughter’s embrace of the arts. And Wikipedia seems to imply that Mother, acting through Brother Paul, was the driving force behind the commitment. Because Mother didn’t visit once—thus laying to rest the claims about those ferocious maternal instincts.

Then we come to her relationship with Rodin: Joshua Kosman had this to say in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Her relationship with Rodin, which was both artistic and erotic, caused her as much grief as any such romance between mentor and protégée, and came to an end after she aborted their child. 

Hmm—don’t know about that. Wikipedia states, “in the early years of the 20th Century, Claudel had patrons, dealers, and some commercial success,” and she had stopped seeing Rodin regularly in 1898. She exhibited in 1903, and produced this work in the same period:

Claudel destroyed most of her work; still, about 90 pieces remain. She’s been the subject of a few biographies, a few films, and a few exhibitions. Some people feel that she is a spin-off of the infinitely more famous Rodin—to me, their work looks nothing alike, but what do I know?

The question is whether she was mad, and if so, what if anything caused it. I look into the faces of the photo, and what do I see? Jessie—an English sculptor—peers at us, as if to say, “yes, world, remember us. Remember that we too were young, that we lived and loved, and went our separate ways. Yes, this is the last visit—we won’t see each other again.”

And Claudel?

She’s withdrawn. Nor had she wanted to see her old friend, but rancor? It’s a young person’s taste. The picture makes it clear: they are tied to each other by their history, by their fights, perhaps by their envy or jealousy. And they parted for many years. Jessie married, Claudel spent the final 30 years of her life in a madhouse: I see understanding in Jessie face. And in Claudel’s?

Resignation….

No Wisdom Here

Well, well—so here it is, the end of May and, astonishingly, nobody has asked me to give a commencement address. Isn’t that weird? Surely, surely, there has to be some school out there—for dental hygienists or nail technicians, anything, really, will do—that needs to hear my words of wisdom!

Of course, I tell you this since I have just watched Joyce DiDonato address the 109^th graduating class of Juilliard (video below). So that made me think: do I have any wisdom—wanted  or not—to give the world? Could I do as well as Joyce did, which, in a word, was excellent? After all, she covers a lot of territory in her four points, which are (and sorry to be a spoiler):

1.     You’ll never make it (that is, perfection in the arts is unattainable, so do what you do for the journey, not the destination….)

2.     The work will never end

3.      It’s not about you

4.     The world needs you

Point four, in fact, was something that I had just learned from Lucía, the lady who serves me great coffee in exchange for two dollar bills: a trade I’m always willing to make.

“You made me feel so much better last week,” said Lucía. “It was finals at the university and I was totally stressed out. So I just came and hear you play Bach suites, and I totally chilled out.”

OK—I play every day, and guess what? It’s no big thing for me, the sound of my cello is a familiar to me as the sound of my voice. So I don’t have the experience of someone never expecting to find a cellist in a darkened corner of a shop playing Bach from memory. But I frequently get comments like, “hey, that was fantastic,” or, in the case of the high school kid who drifted in and listened for twenty minutes, “hey, you play really well.”

My reaction?

Damned right I do!

There’s no vanity in it, as there would be if I had anything to do with it. Well, OK—I do have to show up, the cello does have to get stuck somewhere in front of me, and yes, I put in the famous 10,000 hours of practice that pretty much will take you where you need to go. But here’s the thing: I have had complete conversations with Lady while playing the cello and not missing a note. So somebody out there tell me: who’s playing?

(Note to Joyce—Hah! Bet YOU can’t do that!)

That, in fact, is another element of point number 2: it’s not about you. Joyce meant, I think, that we’re servants, of the listener, the play-goer, the opera fan, whoever has chosen to reward us with their time and, in some cases, their money. But I think there’s something that every one of us knows: when you’re in a flow—that magical, mystical moment when everything is happening just right—the paradoxical feeling (at least for me) is that I’m not doing anything. And I have had the feeling, by the way, while writing, as well as while playing the cello.

Today, no—flow isn’t something that I can turn on and off. Although it has to be said, it can be courted, lured, coaxed almost. The first thing to do is to decide, it’s OK to have a Piatigorsky day:

Let me explain: The famous Russian cellist played once for Casals, and how did it go?

Terrible.

And how did Casals react?

Extravagant praise and hugs.

So Piatigorsky left, thinking ‘hypocrite.’ And then, a couple of years later, the two met, and Piatigorsky asked the maestro why he had praised the terrible performance he had given.

“You played the triplets in measure 371 of the Dvorak in a way that I had never heard, never even imagined. And as an artist, I have to be grateful for and value every beautiful note or phrase. Let the others count up the mistakes, our job is to count the successes.”

(Note—the above is my, perhaps faulty, paraphrase of Casals’ actual words….)

The point? Having a day when it’s just average, whatever it is you’re doing, is perfectly OK. And that, by the way, is the open door through which flow, well, flows in.

“It’s about showing up,” I tell Montalvo, who has explained that he’s blocked, he can’t write, the muse isn’t speaking. So I tell him: this is what writing is. Then what do I do? Pound an imaginary keyboard on the table.

Montalvo is almost fatally 21 years old, which is by definition “high-risk” time. And Montalvo, having stolen a 3,000 dollar blue macaw, needs to get his act together fast, since he’s on probation, and in a drug rehabilitation program. So I’m doing adventures in paternity, which is a new one for me. So what did I tell him, what were my points of wisdom? What, in short, was my commencement address?

1.     You don’t have to fight every fight

2.     You should think before you speak

3.     You should get a schedule and stick to it, especially if you’re not working

4.     You should do something that enriches you (listening to music, exercise, whatever) the first thing in the morning

5.     If two or more people are telling you something, they’re probably right

6.     “Slow and steady” wins the race

7.     Everybody is the hero of their own life

8.     Nobody, on their deathbed, has ever said, “I wished I had worked harder:” it’s always about love and relationships

9.     That said, what you achieve and what you have are relatively unimportant

10.  If it’s a choice between doing what you “should” do and having fun, seriously think about having fun….

OK—confession: I really had to stretch for ten points. Hmm—could it be that it’s just, as well, this curious lack of invitations to give a commencement address?

When Perfection is not Enough

It’s unfair, damned unfair, and I won’t have it.

Everybody knows that I’m totally hooked on Joyce DiDonato, but then again, who isn’t? It could be that such simplicity is the highest art, but she gives you the impression that, yes, she really is your long-lost sister. And so she’s not easy to like: she’s impossible not to like.

But Renée Fleming?

She’s certainly at the top of her game as well; in fact, both women are. Fleming is a lyric soprano about whom one writer—in a blog called RenéeFlemingAdmirers.net, and the fact that there is such a thing speaks libraries, not volumes—said….

The New York Times writes about her as The Beautiful Voice. In France she is presented as La Cantatrice Rayonnante, when in England she is bearing the name Double Creame. Die German leading newspaper has given her the tittle Schaumgeborene Sopran-Venus. To aloud (sic, very sic) to address to her as Celeste Renée was my proposition. She confirmed it favoring me with her incredible, charming smile. 

OK—be fair: I have the sense that English may not be the writer’s first language, or cradle tongue, as we say down here in Puerto Rico. The point is that Fleming has a gorgeous voice.

Ooops, sorry, but it’s not.

I read somewhere that Jascha Heifetz, when people told him, “oh, your violin sounds so beautiful,” would put his ear to the instrument and say, “funny, I don’t hear anything….” So yes, it’s true that Fleming’s voice is beautiful, gorgeous, polished, and all the other adjectives writers like to heap up. But—surprise—there are lots and lots of gorgeous voices out: it’s not that rare a thing. What is rare is the incredible amount of discipline, work, thought, stamina, and luck that went into getting that gorgeous voice to do what Fleming can do with it.

Is there anything more difficult than singing opera? Because really, there’s the sheer athletics; one tight muscle will very likely produce a tense sound. Then there’s the attention to text, and how many actors, by the way, have to master German, French, Italian, English, and—increasingly—Russian and Czech? And speaking of actors, it’s no longer enough to haul yourself onstage, open your mouth and blow everybody away. Remember Joan Sutherland, whom the opera buffs at La Fenice dubbed La Stupenda? Well, stupendous she was, but in her early days, she had one gesture; a gesture her drama coach called “generally pained expression,” or some such thing. (Every time he saw it, he would shout “GPE, Joan,” and she struggled to change it.) And as if all this weren’t enough, you are called upon—if you’re crazy enough to do it—to spend up to six hours, in the case of Wagner, screeching over 100 musicians who have the advantage—besides numbers—of sitting between you and the audience. Thanks, guys!

Oh, and have I mentioned a final detail? Yes, generally speaking, the polite British and the friendly Americans will look the other way—with perhaps a generally pained expression—as you have your off night. Because look, part of the work you’ve put in is to assure that, by and large, you have a consistent product, one you can roll out even after fighting with your husband on the phone for two hours right before the performance. But that may mean that you’re delivering “good,” but not “great.” But the Italians?

Good, you see, is not good enough in Milan. And there is a group called the loggionisti, who are about as fierce—and certainly as loud—as alley cats in heat. And here’s what happened to Fleming when she sang there:

Quite what Fleming's offence was is unclear, but certainly her opening night as Lucrezia was not the luckiest of performances. The tenor had dropped out and been replaced at the last minute. Then the conductor fainted with a thud at the end of Fleming's first aria. Finally, at the end of her final cadenza, which deviated somewhat from La Scala convention, the gods erupted and Fleming was booed to the goldfretted rafters. It lasted for the whole of her closing scene and afterwards, she wrote, "I began to shake and I shook for days."

Right—you want nice? Stay in Minnesota….

Fleming has, you see, stage fright, and what happened after that experience very nearly derailed her career. Because she knew: if she “took some time off,” she would never go back on a stage. So she had her voice coach walk her to the stage and figuratively push her off the branch and onto the stage. And then, while onstage, she relaxed and could perform. It was the days and hours before the performance during which the anxiety rose to near panic.

It’s surprising, the number of performers who are afflicted, and who nonetheless go on to make great careers, in spite of it. And though it got better for Fleming, it never entirely went away: she was petrified about having to sign the national anthem at the Super Bowl. And why not? She fluffs one line—she would wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “oh shit, who manned the ramparts?—and that will be in the first sentence of her obituary:

Renée Fleming, the brilliant lyric soprano whose career was marred by an unfortunate lapse of memory while singing the Stars and Stripes…..

Oh, and just to increase the pressure, she was singing to football fans, for God’s sake, who are almost worse than the loggionisti. I mean, at least those guys love opera….

There are things you can do to reduce stage fright. First, of course, you can be sure you’re really prepared, that you’ve studied the score, that you’ve put in the work. Then—especially in the case of singers—you got to be sure you’re in physically good shape: hydrated, rested, warmed up. But a surprising amount of it is mental.

It involves a curious paradox—but it’s not about you. Yes, they’re coming to see Renée Fleming, but Renée Fleming as Rusalka. And if you’re singing a song recital? Well, it’s the music, or it’s the character in the song. But it’s not you.

Mostly, it’s the inner critic that somehow, in some way, has to be, not banished, but gently told to back off. Because what will happen if the critic is screaming, “DON’T GET TIGHT! DON’T TENSE THOSE NECK MUSCLES!”

Guess what—your neck is probably tight right now….

And paradoxically, even positive comments derail you, because it’s like what the Buddhists, trying to attain pure consciousness, call the “I’m doing great, wasn’t I!” moment. Which is all to say that it’s not just tennis that has an inner game; opera has a huge one as well.

And sadly, Fleming has paid twice, if not three times. First, there’s all that work she put it in to get that voice where she—and all of us—want it. Then she had to pay again with nearly immobilizing stage fright. And the third slug to the emotional solar plexus?

“She seems so fake,” said one friend.

“Her smile could give you a suntan,” wrote one reviewer.

Guys? That’s what I meant, a thousand words back there, when I said it wasn’t fair. Because as you can see in the master class below, Fleming is both professionally very helpful and wonderfully kind and supportive. Perhaps she learned what not to do from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who reportedly terrorized her. (If so, Fleming is not alone—seeing her on YouTube was like opening the freezer door).

DiDonato has been blessed with a kind of candor, openness that—on the face of it—Fleming doesn’t have. And yet, in comments and interviews, Fleming is remarkably candid about what her career has cost her; at one point, she muses about how much ego strength a man has to have to be “Mr. Renée Fleming.”

In one of his novels, Robertson Davies remarks that the person one has struggled to become is much more the “real” person that one started out as. Why can’t we accept that this extraordinary singer has polished her persona as much as her voice?

The View From the Fence

Right—time to get straight down to work and settle once and for all the vexing question of the death penalty.

I’ve never particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can take a life.”

Guys? Can we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?

I felt, for most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:

In addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert Lee Willie who, with his friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May 28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking[4] and then stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to a tree paralyzed from the waist down.

You’ll have guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions priestly celibacy.

Here’s my problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be there. 

I know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing something?

Am I arguing for the return of the chain gang?

Look, it makes more sense than what we’re doing now….

OK—let’s back this car up.

One of the things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman who had driven everyone away.

It was a problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was dying.

One daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was.  Could she wish her well? Could she—if not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back. You hurt me and I’m outta here….

So the daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”

Levine’s point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.

As you’ll see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.

I might as well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich, and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.

Oh—another fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s see, I graduated from High School in ’74….

So there I was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.

OK—be fair, I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.

But here’s where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.

I hope—like the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?

Damn, still haven’t figured it out….

About What We Do….

OK—we’ll start out with the comment on Facebook that Mr. Fernández made about the video:

I must admit that I have no clue what AC/DC is or was, but I do love this! And the guys are SOOOO good-looking!

Well, they start out good-looking; they later become bestial, as does the music. But I had seen the video two days before I read the comment, since I was one of nine million to view on YouTube, and Raf was one of twelve million. And my feeling?

Complete repulsion!

I think back to two classical singers, Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato. Ladies first, and here’s what she’s said:

“Stop apologising, stop trying to sell our music by dumbing it down. Sell opera on the basis that it is like nothing else on the planet, not on the basis that it’s superficially cool and hip – that is so phoney.”

“Recently I performed at the Grammy awards. I felt like a fish out of water surrounded by all these rock and jazz musicians in a huge conference hall environment. But I sang the second half of Cenerentola’s rondo, and it seemed to go down very well.”

“What really moved me was an African-American girl who might have been 15. She came running up to find me afterwards and said ‘I don’t know what you call that sort of singing, but it was the most wonderful thing I have ever heard. Where can I find more of it?’ If we do our job properly, people will listen and get it. You see, great music just works.”

Spot on, Madame DiDonato! And you know, we could make a whole new generation of opera fans in a couple of weeks, if we wanted to. Because on April 5, the Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting La bohème in movie theaters across the world. Raf and I will go, Kleenex box between us, and guess what? We will be one of about six people who are not using wheelchairs, walkers, or canes. In fact, if you piled up all the implements, it would look like that scene at Lourdes—the cured having thrown away all their crutches….

We will take—if she consents, and that’s a heavy “if”—Naïa, the twelve-year old daughter of the owner of the café. Why? Well, it seems like an appropriate uncle-like thing to do. As well, is there any adolescent girl who can resist La bohème? The music is ravishing, the story is wrenching, the setting is magical. Face it, the opera is one glorious, extended working-out of every adolescent girl’s most basic fantasy.

So in one afternoon—assuming that we could get every teenage girl into the movie theaters—we could have a vigorous, passionate new generation of opera lovers, who would desert Lady Gaga and flock to Joyce DiDonato, making her a mega-superstar earning gazillions of dollars per concert. And you know what? She’ll behave herself—because she’s a nice lady from Kansas who works hard, to the point of breaking her leg in a performance at Covent Garden, and continuing the rest of the performance on crutches. She later did the performances in a wheelchair. Brace yourselves for a shock, soon-to-be-astonished Readers…

…the British love her!

And speaking of the British, what did Ian Bostridge have to say about pop music? Well, here’s a copy / paste from The Guardian, which refers to his…:

"…somewhat bizarre animus" towards pop music and his objection to the "huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound."

Yeah? Somewhat bizarre? Bostridge, in the first place, has a PhD in History from Oxford. In the second place, he has spent years of his life perfecting an art that has been handed down scrupulously and lovingly for decades, if not centuries. In short, this guy is serious.  And guess what? He’s a second-class citizen, musically-speaking—nor is that bad enough. Because he now has to be a second-class citizen who also is a snob, and has to feel guilty about it. Oh, and look on as other performers—note the avoidance of the word “musicians”—with little talent or education are venerated as “cool.’ In short, he gets his face ground in the dirt and then has to apologize for it.

We classical musicians have a role in this, if we’re going to be honest. We need to move music out of the concert halls and back into the cafes, the bars, the street corners. We need to talk to our audiences, communicate our passion with them, all the while taking seriously what we do.

That would imply a respect for the people who hear our music. A respect, by the way, that I didn’t feel in the AC/DC clip. In fact, I was affronted:

“It was rank anti-intellectualism,” I told Naïa, the girl who may or may not be converted to opera.

“What does that mean,” asked Naïa. I forget sometimes that she’s just 12. So her tutor explained it: it’s the difference between a gourmet meal versus fast food.

That metaphor goes part of the way, but not all. And just now, I re-watched another video that has 12 million hits—The Piano Guys doing “The Cello Song.” Would I have the same reaction as I did to the AC/DC?

Yes, though to a lesser extent. I could have included it in this post, but why? Why not include a piece of music that is just as virtuosic, just as vibrant, just as beautiful—no, sorry…

…way more beautiful.

Thunderstruck or AC/DC or whatever it is will fade into the dust; Ginastera will last as long as anyone is around to listen….