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!

      

Two Cellists, One Departed

Had I been unfair? Had my adolescence so colored my judgment that I had completely misread her? Because the one time I attended a master class with the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova, I came away convinced: the woman was a dragon.

She was, certainly, a hell of a cellist. Everybody said the same thing: she played like a man. And she had a technique that few could match, the result of natural talent augmented by six hours of practice every day, starting at the age of six. And she attributed much of her success to what she called “long bowing.”

Professional secret—a string player’s success or failure is 90% due to the bow, and how much control the player has over it. And yes, the left hand flying over the fingerboard is important, but what actually makes the sound? The right hand, forearm, and arm.

So the game she had with her flutist father was to see—who could hold a note the longest? Was her bow longer—figuratively—than his breath? And could she maintain the sound absolutely unbroken? Later, the game got expanded: could she start out at the frog of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the heaviest, with the quietest sound possible, and increase it evenly as she moved to the tip of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the lightest? Then, of course, she reversed it—starting out at the tip playing loudly, and decrescendoing as she moved to the frog.

Right—a picture being worth more, certainly, than the words above, here’s an illustration:

Not quite sure what all that’s about? Well, whether you understood it or not, there was no mistaking it: Nelsova’s playing was titanic. Everybody, she owned one of the best pieces of the 20^th century repertoire, Bloch’s Schelomo; she had studied it with the composer, who invited her to premiere it and then record it.

So she was major, but she was also—to my young eyes—a thorough bitch. Because there are musicians who believe in the musical equivalent of the stress interview, which, if you don’t know it, goes something like this:

Boss (smoking largest cigar possible, ignores job candidate for two minutes, and then shouts): WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT!

Job seeker: Um, ah, well…I’m here to apply…

Boss: WHY THE HELL SHOULD I GIVE YOU A JOB IN MY COMPANY!

Nelsova started out light on the youngest students, and got progressively meaner on the more advanced. Finally she pounced on one hapless grad student, who was to play the Prokofiev Sonata.

“JASON!” she kept on crying, as he struggled to play for more than 10 seconds, only to be interrupted by…

“JASON!”

It went on and on, until it became the musical equivalent of dog training.

“You must listen, listen, listen!” she instructed, when she felt that he was playing too loudly, and that the pianist had the more interesting part. So it was fascinating to see her performance the next day, when she came sweeping in in a majestic gown bedecked by pink ribbon; trailing her was her accompanist from central casting, a small, thin, nervous man who appeared terrified of the figure with whom he shared the stage. He never played louder than a mezzo piano all evening, even when he had one of the most ravishing themes Brahms ever wrote. Nelsova, not to be outshone, plucked out the pizzicato accompaniment at full volume.

She had, in short, an ego on steroids, and she must have felt—and you get a hint of this in the last minutes of the clip below—that her job was to toughen ‘em up, throw a barrage of criticism at the kids, season them before they faced the annealing fire. It was the prevailing attitude of her generation: watch Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the famed soprano of the same era, and you’ll see much the same thing.

You were supposed to be tough, you were supposed to be able to take in the criticism, accept it, and believe in yourself enough to withstand what felt like the Nazis marching through Poland. Because when you left the conservatory? Well, there are very few people wearing kid gloves in the world of classical music.

It took me several decades before I got that, and began at last to face up to one of the particularly challenging tasks for a cellist: stepping in front of an audience with nothing and nobody backing you up, and playing solo; here’s what one critic has to say about it:

Four of the five works on his program were written for unaccompanied cello. It takes a lot of (ahem) pluck to play this kind of music. Every note is sorely exposed. There’s no piano accompaniment to hide behind. It’s the musical equivalent of walking a tightrope without a safety net.    

And who is the critic talking about?

Michael Samis, a wonderful young cellist who stumbled upon an unknown cello concerto by the German composer Carl Reinecke, performed it, and had the dream of recording it. So he started a Kickstarter campaign, got the $8500 that he needed, and embarked on the long process of recording the work on the Delos label.

I had pledged some money, and then had waited, checking in periodically on Michael via Facebook. Nor was I surprised when Michael’s dream took longer than—seemingly—expected, because dreams do. Mine had, and at last I had had my book in my hands; a couple weeks ago, I had Michael’s dream in my hands. A CD, you see, is sometimes something more than a piece of plastic enclosed in other pieces of plastic.

The concerto was everything the excerpt had promised: lyrical, virtuosic, and lush. And then we came to a remarkable piece for solo cello: the Bloch Prelude Number One. Michael was treading on Nelsova’s turf, but why not? She had died a decade before, in New York City, where she had taught at Juilliard up until her death: somebody has to carry on the baton….

And curiously, Michael seems to be the guy to do it—the technique is there, but so is the big, beautiful, lush tone, and the temperament to be unabashedly romantic. It’s curiously refreshing, in an age of increasingly safe, correct performance practice, to hear somebody with a musical personality.

So the verdict is definitely in on Michael. But Nelsova?

…still not sure.

Monday Afternoon Pleasures

Well, it was a day that set off to be easy, since I woke up knowing what I was going to write about—no casting about, looking under stones, poking into the odd corners of the Internet (let’s see, any other metaphors here to mix?)

I was going to tell you, you see, about the weird fact that while Joseph Haydn had written some 400 songs based on Scottish folk songs, nobody had bothered to publish them until something like 2004. OK—my journalist father, grumbling down from his celestial newsroom, forced me to look up the citation:

The reason why the song arrangements have so far remained in the shadow of the other late works and only very few of them have been performed, is largely because only a very small number of them was available in new editions. Only since the year 2005 the song arrangements are available in the complete edition of Haydn’s works, Joseph Haydn Werke, edited by the Joseph Haydn Institut in Cologne and published by G. Henle in Munich.

What! Boys, boys—Haydn died in 1809, after busily having composed over a hundred symphonies, a zillion string quartets, umpteen masses, two MAJOR oratorios, as well as troubling himself to invent the symphony and champion the string quartet. In fact, in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, Haydn had composed something and gone off to compose something else. And then you guys take almost TWO centuries to get about publishing his stuff? There’s a word for this—criminal neglect!

Well, I had come upon these things because, in a self-satisfied moment on Monday (self-satisfied because I was getting through it), I had decided to listen to Jean Redpath, and whatever she cannot do for a Scottish song doesn’t need to be done. And since the news on the island is horrendous and rapidly getting worse (today’s headline in El Vocero is Bomba de Tiempo, and yes, that does mean “Time Bomb”), it was decidedly time to jump islands and centuries. And since I had met the Redpath briefly, and found her funny and self-deprecating—she recounted how she had met a fellow Scot at an intermission, and he had told her he was liking the concert, so far—it was time to wander off to Wikipedia, to get the dope on Jean. And that’s where I found: among all of the recordings, Redpath had recorded the Haydn Scottish Songs.

Hunh?

Wikipedia to YouTube, YouTube to Wikipedia: that’s my life these days. OK—so I clicked on the clip, and was treated to a minute or so of elegant, rococo Haydn. And then? Auld Lang Syne!

The worst thing?

Nobody, absolutely nobody pays the least attention anymore to Marc in his corner, giggling to himself.

Oh well, at least they know I’m harmless….

The cool thing about these arrangements is that they’re for piano, violin and cello—a piano trio—as well as voice, of course. And why was that?

There was a time, Dear Reader, before our degenerate age of Internet and television, when everybody—well, mostbody—could play an instrument. Oh, and read music. And so what did people do, of an evening, to whittle away the hours before bed? They sat down to the piano, and played an air or tune. Think Jane Austen!

So, from the sound of the arrangements, they’re not all that technically challenging, which means that, for a musician, they’d be totally fun to play. And an added benefit? The music comes from the first years of the 19^th century, when Haydn was in his prime.

Right—so that was interesting, as was the news that Beethoven had gotten into the act, and had written—well, back to the same source:

What is probably the most striking aspect of these folk song settings is that Beethoven wrote far more of these than any other type of composition, having composed an astounding 179 folk song arrangements spanning a period of eleven years from 1809 to 1820. 

1809 to 1820? Given the fact that Beethoven died in 1827, this puts these works respectably into the middle and late periods. And Beethoven follows the practice of using a piano trio as accompaniment. The cool thing? The violin and cello are optional—adding to the richness, but not necessary.

So Monday had passed happily, listening to music I had never imagined existed! Every musician’s dream!

Tuesday?

Stay tuned!

And for a seriously beautiful, almost haunting, song, click below:

Sunday Paranoia, Resolved

It was too much, I decided. After all, if everybody on the west coast of North America will have to be evacuated, and they’re not worrying, why should I? Shouldn’t they be writing intemperate, fiery screeds to the Japanese government, demanding that an international team of scientists / experts be given complete control of stabilizing the failed—and melted-down—reactors at Fukushima?

Warning to any readers out there—Fukushima, the nuclear power plant that sustained major damage from the tsunami following the earthquake in April of 2011, seems to evoke two reactions, the first being indifference. And the second? Complete, rampaging paranoia, as you can see in the clip below.

OK, I admit it—I fall into the second camp, since no, I don’t trust the Japanese government in the least to come out and say to the world, “Ooops, sorry, but the situation is completely out of control and we have absolutely no clue about what to do, and so everybody on the West Coast? You’re fucked.”

Well, I justify this by the fact that at least two respected scientists feel the same way: Dr. Helen Caldicott, who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility; and David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, activist, and broadcaster. 

And what do they say?

That we are not just on the edge of the precipice but hanging over the void, with gale winds behind us.

Anything, you see, can happen. The cleanup will take decades to complete—they just covered Chernobyl a month or two ago, and the meltdown occurred in 1986. So Suzuki points out that if there is an earthquake of 7.0 or more, reactor four will collapse, and the amount of radiation released? Here’s one writer:

According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, there are 1,533 spent and unused fuel rod bundles in the cooling pool that contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

Right—an earthquake is just one unfortunate event. There’s also the fact that the ground around the reactor is saturated, and the building is unstable, and may collapse even without an earthquake.

Then there’s the possibility that the fuel rods, which TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and raise your hands anyone out there who believes those guys know what they’re doing….) is trying to remove, will get dropped, will be jammed into position, will lose their cooling system, will jostle one another and all of that? 14,000 Hiroshimas!

Or maybe a little less, because we also know radioactive water from the plant is spewing into the ocean, so maybe it’s only 13, 999 Hiroshimas! Whew, what a relief.

Oh, and who’s doing all this work? Well, from the same source cited above:

The shortage of qualified workers has been an opportunity for the yakuza. Gangsters have stepped in to supply labor to subcontract to TEPCO's contractors. The yakuza's labor pool is the most desperate men in Japan. They are poorly trained, suffer from wage theft, and are over-worked and demoralized. TEPCO is enabling the yakuza because management is unwilling to cut profits to pay competitive wages.

Guys?

‘It’s too much,’ I think, ‘ so I’ll do what I always do, when I can’t cope anymore and it’s too early to start drinking.’ So I went over to bother Lady, which is permissible since she has been painting houses from the days dinosaurs roamed the earth, and can easily chat and paint.

So we recreate what Harry, my friend who grew up half a century ago in Old San Juan, told me was a typical Sunday afternoon.

“People would sit for hours at a time in each other’s houses, talking, chatting, sometimes just sitting. You would pass by, and they’d just be sitting there in silence. And time seemed to stretch out—the afternoons were infinities. No worries, no anxieties, no rushing around or doing errands. Just sitting with family and old friends….”

Well, yesterday it was a new friend, since Mary Anne, a neighbor of Lady’s and a woman of a certain age, strolled in, bearing frozen yogurt. We smile at each other.

“How can two really important people in my life not know each other,” asks Lady; to a gringo, this is plausible. To a Puerto Rican? Completely crazy.

So now we shake hands, and discover: Mary Anne is a music lover, a painter, a professor.

“Marc is a cellist, and a writer. He plays Bach every day at five in the Poet’s Passage, and gives whatever money people throw into the case to charity.”

“You gotta do it,” I tell Mary Anne, “all cellists have to play an hour of Bach every day.”

“Yeah?” says Lady. You can tell she’s not buying in….

“Absolutely,” I tell her. “It’s like the Spaniards: they have to read a chapter of Don Quixote every day.”

Now she’s really not buying in….

“Well, run over to Spain when you go off to France in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see: all the Spaniards are sitting around reading Don Quixote.

I get a look….

“Anyway, if you don’t play your hour of Bach every day, they don’t let you call yourself a cellist….”

“Yeah?”

“Yup, they take away your license…”

“You got a license?”

“Of course I have a license! Good Lord, Lady, do you know what damage could be done, having a lot of unlicensed cellists buzzing around out there! I’m a board certified cellist, licensed by the American Society of Cellists!”

Nobody believes me, of course, but is that the point? I am waving my mouth as ladies waved their decorative fans a century or so ago: not to much effect but prettily. So a beautiful man strolls in with his four-month old baby—named Abel, and no, I didn’t ask and neither should you—and I have to go talk to him, because who doesn’t like new fathers, especially beautiful ones? And then Naïa strolls in, with her hair looking like one half of a giant dandelion, very much gone to seed.

So Lady goes to deal with that, and I kiss everyone except the one I really, really, want to, and then it’s time to go home.

Oh, and by the way? It’s true about the Spaniards reading a chapter of Don Quixote and how do I know…?

Harry told me!

Two Villains and a Goddess

All right, I’ll give you Wikipedia’s assessment of Jessye Norman:

Jessye Mae Norman (born September 15, 1945) is an American Grammy award-winning contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is a successful performer of classical music.

Yeah? Here’s mine:

The lady is a goddess.

A goddess who, in my case, manifested herself through the radio one day, when I was perhaps 21 and she was in her mid-thirties. She had been living in London and, in that period of her life, she was not singing opera. In fact, between 1975 to 1980 she didn’t sing opera. Born in 1945, she would have been 30 at the beginning of this—I’m sure—self-imposed exile. Thus, these were her prime years.

Norman is a singer who had the luck to have a strong education, as well as a strong will. After going to the Marian Anderson Competition in Philadelphia at age 16, she met her future teacher, Carolyn Grant, at Howard University. Grant was so impressed that she took Norman to the dean, who arranged for a full tuition scholarship.

“I know, it sounds like a fairy tale,” Norman says in one part of the interview below. But the point is that it’s not. Because consider this fact, again drawn from Wikipedia:

Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia, to Silas Norman, an insurance salesman, and Janie King-Norman, a schoolteacher.

An insurance salesman and a teacher? What that tells me is that the family wasn’t poor, but that it wasn’t rolling in riches, either. And with five children in the house, there probably wasn’t much money to spare. At one point, Norman tells the story of being given her own private radio—no sharing with her brothers!—so that she could listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Oh, and she had to clean her room, so on days when it was Wagner, wow, the room really got clean!

What else did she have? She had teachers in her racially segregated school who knew that she was listening to opera, and who let her talk on Monday mornings for 15 minutes about what she had heard. She remembers the names of those teachers, who must have been extraordinary, and also remembers the principal of the high school. That guy decided that the whole school should donate their lunch money to Norman for one day, so she’d have something to spend on her trip to Philadelphia. So the kids donated the money, and the Board of Education gave lunch free that day.

Why do it? Well, if you’ve chipped in your 75 cents that day, you own a piece of Jessye Norman—or at least a part of her trip. And it was on that trip that her teacher, who was accompanying her (in both senses, since she was at the piano for the competition) decided to see if there was anyone at Howard who might her Norman sing.

To say that Norman had a glittering career is somewhat like saying that Warren Buffet is getting by, financially. True, I don’t think she ever conquered the Opera House in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin (every town, no matter how small, had one…) but everywhere else? She came, she conquered.

And she’s a wonderful example of someone who is intelligent and articulate: two increasingly receding qualities. And why are they receding? Because, more and more, we’re slashing arts education.

I hate to say this…no wait, that’s the problem: we’re always apologizing, feeling bad for suggesting that the chorus and the band are just as important as the football team. Anybody out there seen the TV series Glee? Then you’ll know what neck is first put under the guillotine, when it’s time to start cutting.

I worked in corporate America—improbable, I know, but there it is. And I can tell you: most musicians can think circles around businessmen. Why? Because spending hours at a keyboard gives you discipline, for one thing. But there’s something else: it’s not just me saying that musicians have an edge. Google “cognitive effects music” and you get this, from Boston College and Harvard Medical School:

ABSTRACT: Research has revealed structural and functional differences in the brains of adult instrumental musicians compared to those of matched non- musician controls, with intensity/duration of instrumental training and practice being important predictors of these differences.

I told you—it was not a fairy tale, the glittering life that Norman has lead. It’s a tale of a community who had no idea that there wasn’t money for the band or the chorus, of teachers that gave up their time and money to take a 16-year old to Philadelphia, to a principal who knows that there’s a talent in his or her school, and knows that he has to get the school behind her.

And how many lives did Norman change or affect? What was the return on the investment that all those people poured into her, those people poorer, mostly, than we are, but who could still afford to give what we cannot?

Well, in my life, Norman started what would be a lifelong love of the human voice. I was in my twenties, and I didn’t—like many instrumentalists—like singers. They were artificial, I thought—all high C’s, no musicianship.

What do I listen to, now? Almost all vocal or choral music—I can’t remember the last time I heard a cello concerto. And here it has to be said, I have learned much more from the singers I have heard than the cello teachers I have paid. And when I hear most instrumentalists play, I can almost always tell who has listened to singers, and who has not. Singers, you see, have this problem or gift—they have to breathe. Cellists don’t, but should.

But that’s hardly the most important thing. I discovered a world of music that did more than give me pleasure. I lost my mother, my job, and my mind in a two-year period a couple of years ago. And what music accompanied me, as I lived through those days? Schubert’s great song cycle: Die Winterreise.

I said it accompanied me, but it was more than that. In some ways, the work was informing my journey, and I was spiraling down, down, down—being pulled by that music, but ultimately being saved by it as well. I took the winter’s journey, as some of us must, and got through the village and met the hurdy-gurdy man and started off. Schubert both defined and clarified that process.

I got to Jessye Norman two nights ago, after the opera, since I had seen the encore performance of the Met’s performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. The performance was a four-hour, bottomless bottle of champagne, so I came home and wondered: could I buy a DVD of the opera, in order to play it for Ilia, my mother-in-law who’s caring for an ailing husband, and who often cannot get away? So I checked the Met’s gift shop, online, and yes, there it was. And what else was there? Jessye Norman’s autobiography, which came out days ago.

And so I spent the morning looking at the clip below, and doing a bit of compare and contrast—remember that from high school? Because I had been seeing on Thursday—before the opera—a documentary about the Koch brothers, those guys who have found the way to buy the government, and who are also finding ways to buy the educational system. It’s breathtaking, in fact, the scope of their ambition.

Both clips are long—who but a blogger has the time to listen? So I’ll paraphrase—with considerably less eloquence than Norman’s unscripted remarks—what Norman says about the American dream. She said—and I have tears in my eyes as I write this—that it’s the knowledge and acknowledgment that government has the obligation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to live and, especially, to thrive. And don’t trot out that dusty line about the bootstraps, because you know what? Some people don’t have boots.

Norman was one of those people—a black girl in the Jim Crow South whose parents were struggling. Her parents, could they afford to go to the opera, much less sip champagne afterwards? Or put it this way—could they afford to go hear their child sing? I don’t know: but my strong feeling is no.

I wish that the people who are decimating public education and cutting off aid programs and perpetrating this myth of the undeserving poor would get it: it’s terrible fiscal policy. Nobody gave Norman the career she had—she worked and struggled and took risks and succeeded, gloriously.

But she also had resources that—increasingly—people want to take away. She didn’t want and never needed a “handout.”

She needed a foundation.

What kid doesn’t?

Honey, Pass the Kleenex

Well, I heard the statement that 90% of people surveyed had been moved to tears by a piece of music, but only 5% or so reported having wept at the sight of a painting or cathedral. For poetry, interestingly, it appears to go up to about 50 or 60%. So then I wondered—what about me? Have I ever wept on seeing a painting?

I’d like to say yes, but then, what would I say when asked, “what painting?” So it’s better to tell the truth, even if it makes me a Philistine. In my defense, however, I can say that some places have a history and a grandeur that almost spurs the lachrymal glands into action. There’s St. John the Divine in New York City, and there—for entirely different reasons, was the battlefield of Gettysburg. And a month or two ago, I felt something akin to awe by just being in Carnegie Hall.

But then I stopped to wonder—have I truly been moved to tears by a piece of music? And if so, was it really the music, or was it the circumstances around myself at the time, or the memory of particularly emotional moments with which I had associated the music?

Because, let’s face it: there are times of great pain and loss—deaths, divorces, job loss—when you are crying at anything. When my father died, just looking at the garlic press hanging next to the little wire that he used to clean it (it was perhaps his least imaginative invention, but who else keeps a little wire next to their garlic press? Everybody else just scrubs harder….) was enough to trigger wails. And if I had taken the press and the wire to my brother? We would have been wailing in each other’s arms.

The problem? There’s nothing intrinsically sad about a garlic press.

Then there’s music that somehow has gotten associated, either in your or in everyone’s mind, with a particular event. For a lot of people, Barber’s Adagio for Strings is 9 / 11, punto. And that, of course, makes sense, because the music exactly defines the wrenching sorrow of the event. That’s—news flash, here—why they chose it.

All right, but what about the music that is genuinely sad, gut-wrenchingly sad, music that makes you reach for the razor blades? Has anyone ever compiled a list? Surely the Internet could fly in some pieces, since at the moment I can only think of five or six that I would absolutely include.

Fortunately, the Internet came through, and with some surprising choices. Oh, and I must say at the outset that two of the three lists I consulted had ten selections, the other one had only six.

OK—time to guess: what was the piece—and the only piece—that made all three lists?

“Dido’s Lament,” from the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell.

In fact, it made my list as well, among other reasons because I cannot get through the piece, even if I’m manic, without sobbing.

Curiously, Dido is on all three lists, but not one piece of music is on any two lists, which is to say that there are no duplicates. And here, starting more or less from earliest to latest, is what there is:

Miserere, by Allegri—hmmm, absolutely beautiful, to be sure, but sad? Sad enough to move me to tears? In this period, I can think of wrenching music—an Amen, for example, from the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin by Monteverdi, or some of the William Byrd sacred music.

Bach, predictably, makes the lists, but different pieces. “Come, Sweet Death” is on one site—but the piece is for organ, and guess what? I neither like nor dislike organ music, it just doesn’t get in. So I skipped it, after a minute of listening. Then there was “Cum sancto spiritu” from the B Minor Mass, which posed an interesting question: are we to include music that is so joyful that it makes you weep? That’s what the site says, and I’m willing to buy in. But following that argument, I’d vote for “Et in terra pax,” also from the B Minor.

The rest were, if I may say so, outliers. OK—there was Albinoni’s Adagio, which is pretty sad. There was Mozart’s Requiem, as it was depicted in the movie Amadeus. Then, there was Adagio for Strings.

The rest was all over the map, from the lento movement of Shostakovich Fifth, to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Oh, and speaking of Tchaikovsky, his violin concerto—or at least the second movement—lands on another list. An interesting pick was Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for strings; confession—I didn’t know it, I tried three minutes of it, and decided that not knowing was the preferred option.

Orchestrally, what’s not there? What piece would you expect that is strangely out behind the building, taking a cigarette break? Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony.—I just started to listen to it, in order to make sure it was what I thought it was, and yes, there are tears on the keyboard.

And what about opera, surely good for a cry or two? Well, La bohème makes it on two of the lists, but on one it’s the first aria of Rudolfo, and on the other list it’s the last aria of Mimi. On another list, Verdi’s V’ho Ingannato from Rigoletto appears; Wagner turns up with the funeral music from Siegfried on the third list.

Chamber music? Well, there’s the second movement of the string quintet of Schubert, which yes, definitely would be on my list. Besides that, there surprisingly little chamber music.

There were pieces I didn’t know—most particularly “Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,” from an astonishing poem by Neruda. Here, it’s sung by the composer’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died less than eight months after the recording.

Lastly, there was a song by George Butterworth based on the text of A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad.”  The song did nothing for me, but it did lead me to Vaughan Williams’s treatment of an old folksong, “Whither Must I Wander” And if you are dry-eyed at the end of it?

Check for a pulse!!

(P.S.—here are the links:

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/10-classical-music-tear-jerkers/

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/07/10-best-classical-tear-jerkers-fiona-maddocks

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2010/09/27/130157375/the-saddest-music-in-the-world-7-tunes-to-make-you-tear-up  )