Anything but Bland

Well, in the clip below robbed from YouTube, there’s a little note: “comments are disabled for this video.”

‘Gee, I wonder why,’ I thought, as I imagined the comments. Half would be shrieks of vitriol, the other half would be raving panegyrics, and, in between? A void only slightly smaller that the Milky Way.

Which is how it should be, I think, and also how—someone tell me if I’m wrong, here—it increasingly isn’t. And I’m thinking this after bumping into my older Puerto Rican brother, Pablo, at the opera yesterday.

We had decided to take Montalvo to the opera, or rather to the rebroadcast of the Metropolitan’s Otello, Guiseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera. So there Pablo was: the man who had morphed over time from a landlord into a brother, who had provided more than a shoulder for me to cry on after lost auditions and the occasional marital spat. He’d been a constant source of encouragement, as well as the source of some amusement; once, during a session of extremely vocal sex coming from the second floor, Raf and I had played the last movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, turning up the volume at the climax, all the better to spur them on. Pablo had loved it; his anonymous young companion fled the house.

“I’m getting tired of Renée Fleming and that damned smile,” said Pablo, last night at the opera. “She’s perfect, but she’s bland….”

I knew what he meant. I had felt it myself, but had also changed in my feelings about Fleming: after seeing an interview with her, I had been impressed with how remarkably candid she had been, how much she had paid for her career, and how she had been afflicted with extreme stage fright. And is it her fault that she had done the Herculean job of becoming technically and musically perfect, as well has polishing her image to a diamond shine? Have we all done as much? Now she has to listen to us call her bland?

Pablo’s words, however, had stuck, and in the middle of the “Willow Song,” which has the word salice—Italian for willow—I could help thinking: couldn’t she do more with it? Each time she repeated the word, it was all exactly the same—lush, ravishingly beautiful, poised. What would Callas have done?

“She ruined us all,” said Pablo, giving us a ride home, and referring to Maria Callas, the great American-born Greek soprano whom you loved or whom you hated. Did she always deliver? By no means, and when it was bad, it wasn’t bad: it was awful, terrible, wincingly embarrassing. You wanted to crawl under your seat, or out of the opera house.

But when she was good, equally, she wasn’t good, she was glorious, magnificent, stupendous—you know, all those adjectives that oddly tend not be applied to you and me. Presuming, of course, you could stomach the voice. Here is the critic Rodolfo Celletti’s assessment:

The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thick sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable.

Well, my take is shorter: the voice is otherworldly. If a will-o-the-wisp could sing, it might sound like Callas. Hearing her voice, I think of the sound of geese flying overhead: it’s a sound that encapsulates the chill of autumn, the cold marsh water soaking you feet, the reeds rustling and the smell of burning leaves.

Well, it was all something to think about, and we may have to, since, Montalvo’s reaction? Well, he dozed off a bit for the first part of the opera, but it was hardly surprising, since in the time it took for Raf and me to arrange the napkins in our laps, raise the glass to toast, and glance over at Montalvo, the lad had polished off a large salad, a large mofongo and a large plate of rice and beans. So there were three empty plates—had he licked them?—and there was Montalvo, waiting with dog-at-the-table patience for me to feed him French fries. Such a repast requires a little nap.

But who cannot like Otello? It has, after all, Iago (hah! That my computer should be such a Philistine!): a man so evil you could smell the sulfur in the theater. And Montalvo, having learned that we’ve just joined the 21^st century by subscribing to Netflix, asked afterward if the service had operas.

“Think so,” I said.

“I’m gonna watch ‘em all,” he said.

Well he may, because in addition to hearing opera? He’s written a villanelle, and it’s good, though lacking the—as he called it, he was angry at the time—“motherfucking iamb thing.” So it’s occasionally-iambic pentameter; here it is:

Summoning Strength

Power comes from a need not a desire,

Protect and save yourself from certain death.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

My fists will turn into earth as hard iron

Exerting all my energy with breath.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

My feelings of love will never expire,

And until I die my soul will express.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

I will always find the need to require

Strength that is needed at moment’s request.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Risking your life for another to aspire

Love and sacrifice— erupting through flesh.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

Why has hate and fury lead this to transpire?

Break free from the chains and let your soul dance.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

Of Dix and Spontini

OK—it’s not really a day when you want to look at island news. The New Day couldn’t be clearer: 53% think things are going muy mal (very badly) and 40% think things are bastante mal (fairly badly). Oh—and bad news for the governor, who promised everybody that he would create 50,000 new jobs in the first 18 months of his…err, reign. Because 73% say that there are few jobs, and only 2% believe that there are many (hard to believe that the governor’s family is so big….)

Prices? 90% think they’ve risen in the past three months. Oh, and what about the threatened degradation of our credit into junk status? Well, 61% of us don’t understand at all or only a little the whole thing, but 67% think it would affect them personally. 41% rate the quality of life in Puerto Rico as bad or very bad, and guess what? Fully 33% think it likely to some extent that they will leave the island in the next four years.

Right—take that razor blade away from your wrist, Dear Reader!

(Note—all of these data appear in the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 4 November 2013, which I bought for 75 cents yesterday at the grocery store. Unfortunately, the survey is available only through the “paper” paper or a “digital” (read “for sale”) paper. Two choices, Readers! Trust me, or send me a comment, and I’ll scan the paper….)

Into this grim situation steps the governor, who electronically is reported as admitting that the situation, the mood on the island is “pesimismo.” He then wonderfully retreats to his delusional world by stating the following:

“El crimen se ha reducido, el desempleo se ha reducido, la luz se ha reducido, el agua hay que reducirla”, expuso sobre las metas que se ha propuesto o cumplido para acabar con la imagen negativa.

Here it is: “Crime has been reduced, unemployment has been reduced, electricity has been reduced, and water has been reduced,” he stated about the goals that he had proposed or achieved to put a finish to the negative image.

Well, well—time to check up on the gov, which I can now do, since I am one of the 22% of the population without a job. So let’s google “costo de agua Puerto Rico.” Right, and halfway down the first page is this, from El Nuevo Día of 31 August 2013:

Sube la tarifa del agua en los condominios en Puerto Rico

Subir—to rise, go up, increase, mount.

Electricity?

La electricidad de la Isla es la segunda más cara en EE.UU.

OK—that’s from two years ago, but according to WAPA television, as of 1 October 2013, the price may rise.

Look, do I need to go on? Is there any good news, anywhere?

In fact, there is: the world just got 1500 pieces of art back; here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The trove includes works by Picasso, Marc Chagall, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the German artists Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Carl Spitzweg, said Siegfried Klöble, the head of the Munich customs office, which oversaw the operation to recover the art.

Hey, great news—though it does come with an opportunity, as I used to say in my corporate days. And that is? Well, most of this stuff was either looted or bought at rock bottom price from Jews wanting out of Nazi Germany. So how do you figure out who owned what, and who sold what for what? Here, according to the Times, is what art historian Meike Hoffmann had to say:

She stressed that it is extremely difficult to nail down the origin and the ownership history of some of the works and that she has only begun initial research on some 500 of the works. Further research, she said, could take years.

Among other things found, by the way, was an unknown self-portrait of Otto Dix, about whom I knew nothing: here’s another self-portrait:

Right—so now we have two!

Oh—and good news in the world of opera: the Times is reporting renewed appreciation of the works of Spontini.

Spontini?

Damn—it’s one thing after another, the stuff I don’t know. So who was the guy?

Wikipedia to the rescue!

Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor, extremely celebrated in his time, though largely forgotten after his death.

Right—that made me feel better. And if our governor can live in his own private Puerto Rico, can’t I create a nice delusional cocoon myself. Why not listen to a 1954 recording of Maria Callas singing Spontini? So I ambled over to YouTube and dug her up.

Verdict?

Not sure—but why does the term “justly forgotten” spring to mind?

Ritorna, Ritorna

It hit yesterday, not Tuesday. On Tuesday, I had been remarkably buoyant about the government shutdown; yesterday, I was completely in the dumps.

Nor has it been a particularly good week for anyone who cares about the arts, especially music. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra lost its conductor, who had taken the orchestra to Europe in his first season, and where they were received with raves. Carnegie Hall shut down, due to a strike by stagehands, one of whom makes more than $140,000. Lastly—and this one really hurts— New York City Opera closed down. No—not temporarily, for good.

I lived only briefly in New York City—perhaps two months—and I don’t recall ever going to City Opera. But I knew the story, here told in Slate magazine:

Many of my friends were culture vultures, and culture, high culture, nosebleed high, was being made here. … The Metropolitan Opera, across Lincoln Center's plaza, was stupid. It was stodgy. It was fat, old people with fat, old money. At the New York State Theater you saw hot guys in full leather gabbing about Bev's Violetta in La traviata, or Samuel Ramey's naked chest in Boito's Mefistofeles. You met your friends there at intermission, sometimes a dozen of them. There were no cellphones, so you talked to people. Opera was high art that sometimes dickered with the dirt, but it had to remain high. It was where kings and the common people mixed, under the eyes of Phoebus Apollo, god of light and music.

It was also where young singers got their break; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

During its nearly 70 year history, the NYCO has helped launch the careers of many great opera singers including Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Plácido Domingo, Maralin Niska, Carol Vaness, José Carreras, Shirley Verrett, Tatiana Troyanos, Jerry Hadley, Catherine Malfitano, Samuel Ramey, and Gianna Rolandi. Sills later served as the company's director from 1979–1989.[4] More recent acclaimed American singers who have called NYCO home include David Daniels, Mark Delavan, Mary Dunleavy, Lauren Flanigan, Elizabeth Futral, Bejun Mehta, Robert Brubaker and Carl Tanner.

It was also a company that took risks. Let the Met put on as many La Bohemes as they needed to make rich bored businessmen remember their first loves at Yale—City Opera caused talk and suspicion, championed new and American works, wasn’t afraid to get scrappy. In 1991, in the very worst of the plague years, how did Violetta die in La traviata? How else—of AIDS, of course.

Or consider the last opera that City Opera put on—typically, it was a new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage, a British composer about Anna Nicole Smith. Take a look—it’s about as far away from traditional opera as you can get….

It was always an opera house that was just getting by—but it was also an opera house for people who were just getting by. Which meant that a guy who was working in a record store, and living in a cockroach-infested studio apartment as he dreamed of making it on Broadway or writing the great American novel could go and watch stuff like this. (Warning, it starts off boring, but wow—does it heat up!)

OK—time to come clean: opera is an art form that, like ballet, inherently appeals to gay men. Is it the theatricality, or the artificiality, or the long and arcane history? Who knows, but if you hear two men arguing about who was better, Callas or Tebaldi—you can be sure. There’s probably a boa along with the jeans in their closet.

So what happened? That old devil—mismanagement. The old City Opera was in City Center. Then they moved to Lincoln Center, which was too expensive, and didn’t feel right. The Met—after all—was 60 feet away. And then the management decided they wouldn’t have a home, but use varying stages around the city.

It didn’t seem to work. As well, the opera had run deficits for years, as their new manager, George Steel, eventually realized. And then, they needed to raise 7 million bucks, and only got to one or two million, improbably through a Kickstarter campaign.

“Vienna spends more on its opera house than the US does on ALL of its arts funding,” went a line that was often repeated forty years ago when I was in high school. If it wasn’t literally true, it was metaphorically true. And when we do spend on the arts, we want to get something back, to make it pay. Mozart is good for the brain—all right, we’ll plunk down 18 bucks for a Mozart CD to play to baby.

But I think other cultures do it better, and smarter. I think of a story that—I believe—Frances Mayes wrote about. It was of an American soldier just after World War II had concluded. He thought he really should go to the opera, just to experience a taste of Italy before he returned home. He had, after all, spent the war seeing death, torture, carnage, deprivation, ruins, bombed-out buildings and shell-shocked, homeless civilians walking like zombies through the devastated cities. So he went to the opera…

…and had never seen anything so beautiful, or heard anything so magical. At the end of three hours of magic, he sat in his chair and wept.

And the Italians?

They quietly walked past him, each one of them stopping to place a hand gently on top of the young man’s head.

City Opera, ritorna, ritorna!

Cara sposa, amante cara,

Dove sei?

Deh! Ritorna a' pianti miei!

Del vostro Erebo sull'ara,

Colla face dello sdegno

Io vi sfido, o spiriti rei

Beloved spouse, dearest heart,

Where art thou?

Woe! Return to him who weeps!

O guilty spirits from thy Erebus beneath the furrows,

My face one of complete contempt,

I defy thee!

Two Singers, One Unhappy

Well, the first thing to understand about this singer is that even she didn’t like the sound of her own voice.

If you know anything about opera, you’ve probably guessed that the singer is Maria Callas. And though she sobbed when she first heard a tape recording of her voice, she made it distinctive, expressive, and utterly recognizable—“Callas,” people will say, within five seconds of hearing her sing.

Well, she’s a fascinating character, this Greek girl who had no childhood, but had iron discipline and a steely will. Her mother, recognizing her talent, pushes and pushes, and Maria at age five is singing, not playing. Later, her discipline drives her to spend hours at the conservatory, regularly opening and closing the building. And she succeeds—by the time she leaves Greece at age 22 to visit her father in the United States, she had given 20 recitals, and sung in 56 performances of seven operas.

She’s almost blind, and she is—well, pudgy plump or just plain fat. That, from a vocal point of view, is not a problem. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says that all that weight supports the breath. While that may be true, it can also create problems—Callas said that she felt that her voice itself was becoming heavy. And there was the other little problem—she felt the irony of playing slim, dainty heroine when she herself was, in Sir Rudolf Bing’s words, “monstrously fat.”

At any rate, in her early career she had a huge voice that was capable both of heavy, dramatic parts but also lighter, coloratura parts. OK—plain English. There are some voices that are vocally tanks—they can blast through an orchestra blaring at full volume; they tend, however, not to maneuver very well. There are other voices that are mopeds—they can zip around anything. What’s rare is to have the vocal ability to do both. 

Callas could, and astounded. Yes, even from the beginning, there were detractors—largely the old school who demanded a beautiful, clean voice, not an ugly voice with a huge expressive range and wonderful colors. And yes, she wasn’t always having her best night. True also that the voice came with a temperament—there are no recorded instances of anyone describing Callas as “placid.”

So it was a chance, when you plunked down the cash for a performance of Callas. The first question—would she show? The second—would she be any good?

So why did anyone do it? Because if she did come through in both departments, you would have an experience you’d remember for the rest of your life.

She was a phenomenal actress; here’s one director’s view:

For me, she was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time, human—but humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime. Realism was foreign to her, and that is why she was the greatest of opera singers. After all, opera is the least realistic of theater forms... She was wasted in verismo roles, even Tosca, no matter how brilliantly she could act such roles.

Speaking of Tosca, it’s often said that she never, ever checked to see whether the stage hands had placed material to cushion her leap from the window. Other singers rush up the ladder, take—well—just a little peek. Callas scorned the idea.

In mid career—the 1950’s, Callas decides to lose weight, which she does not by swallowing a tapeworm, as critics whispered, but by eating salad and chicken. And though it may have been great for her health and for her psyche, it didn’t help, perhaps, her singing. Here’s Renée Fleming on the subject:

I have a theory about what caused her vocal decline, but it's more from watching her sing than from listening. I really think it was her weight loss that was so dramatic and so quick. It's not the weight loss per se... But if one uses the weight for support, and then it's suddenly gone and one doesn't develop another musculature for support, it can be very hard on the voice. And you can't estimate the toll that emotional turmoil will take as well. I was told, by somebody who knew her well, that the way Callas held her arms to her solar plexus [allowed her] to push and create some kind of support. If she were a Soubrette, it would never have been an issue. But she was singing the most difficult repertoire, the stuff that requires the most stamina, the most strength.

Another singer, Deborah Voigt, had a gastric bypass operation and essentially mimicked the weight loss that Callas had undergone. Here’s what she has to say:

When I took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra Whhoomf! Now it doesn't do that. If I don't remember to get rid of the old air and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that's when you can't get your phrase, you crack high notes.

Callas would end her career in about a decade after her weight loss in 1954, and really, the last years are painful. She was a tempestuous woman, a fiery personality, a high-strung race horse in a profession where a plow horse might be better. But how the public loved it—when Bing fired her from the Met, or her rage-contorted face on being served a summons in Chicago.

And, of course, the rivalry—alleged or real—between Tebaldi and Callas. The two greatest divas of the fifties were traveling South America together, and had a falling out. Callas said in an interview that, “comparing her voice to mine is comparing Champagne to Cognac.” Someone else in the room said, “No, to Coca-Cola,” but the words are attributed to Callas. Tebaldi shot back, “I have something Callas does not have: a heart.”

What Tebaldi had was enviable. She had a very long career—twice as long as Callas’s. She had the more beautiful voice. She also lived long—Tebaldi died at 83, Callas at 53. And though there’s no way to measure the happiness quotient of a human life, much less to compare two lives, nothing can stop me from thinking that Tebaldi had the better deal. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

During a 1978 interview, upon being asked "Was it worth it to Maria Callas? She was a lonely, unhappy, often difficult woman," music critic and Callas's friend John Ardoin replied,

That is such a difficult question. There are times when certain people are blessed—and cursed—with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. Callas was one of these people. It was as if her own wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us things about music that we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities. I think that is why singers admire her so. I think that's why conductors admire her so. I know it's why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career. I don't think she always understood what she did or why she did it. She usually had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something she could always live with gracefully or happily. I once said to her "It must be a very enviable thing to be Maria Callas." And she said, "No, it's a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it's a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand." She couldn't really explain what she did. It was all done by instinct. It was something embedded deep within her.