An Achingly Beautiful Voice

All it took was one phrase, one utterly beautiful and musically criminal phrase that absolutely took my breath away. In that one moment, there was no other singer possible than Arleen Auger; there was no other music than that suspect but achingly beautiful Bach.

And I was hooked, as I have been ever since. Her voice is perhaps the cleanest I’ve ever heard, her intonation was impeccable, and her control was spectacular. And on stage, she projected a regal simplicity: she had started out as an elementary teacher, drifted in singing, and started her career subbing for Lucia Popp. Here’s The New York Times on the subject:

As it turned out, the soprano Lucia Popp had just withdrawn from a production of "Zauberflote" at the Vienna State Opera. That company's director, Josef Krips, heard Miss Auger's audition at the smaller Volksoper, and offered her a contract. When she joined the company, she later said, she knew only the one role, had no stage experience and did not speak German. She made her debut without a rehearsal, and had to ask other singers where to go as she was pushed out on stage.

Right—you’d remember that night!

And so, like so many other young American singers, Auger formed her career in  Europe, and though she later became known in the States, it was her nearly 200 recordings that were her introduction.

Obviously, those 200 recordings included a lot of music, and Auger’s repertoire went from Monteverdi to two song cycles by women composers that Auger had commissioned. And the only time I saw Auger in concert, she had made the slightly unusual choice of championing Ned Rorem in her recital. 

She was singing on the cusp, and what a glorious cusp it was. We now have amazing musicians singing impeccably in what is  called “historically informed perfortmance practice,” which means, if a whole group of musicologists are to believed, that the sounds that come out of Philippe Jaroussky’s voice today are utterly the same that Monteverdi—four hundred years ago—would have heard.

There are days I feel that—and I know this is heresy—arguing with the early-music guys is like arguing with a cat, and guess who always wins? But Auger in her peak was before the peak of historically informed blah-blah-blah. So what did that mean? Well, there was a harpsichord yes—we were that far along—but the cellist playing the continuo? As you can hear below, he’s (I’m presuming “he”) using the most gorgeous vibrato, which h creates a golden tone that is ravishing, ravishing…but in Bach? In Handel?

And what about those tempi? Modern singers have their foot quite firmly on the gas, and there are times you feel you’re on a sort of musical autobahn, but Auger? She’s out there floating across azure skies and above golden fields in some lovely balloon, being held aloft by her own gorgeous voice. Is it correct, that lovely voice? Probably not. But it’s achingly beautiful.

“Achingly,” by the way, being the adjective of choice for Auger—check out the comments by all the YouTube commentators, and you’ll see that it’s the frontrunner.

It’s the voice, yes, but also what we know: this luminous, luscious artist contracted brain cancer in her early fifties, and died cruelly young at age 53. Today, she would be 75—no longer singing, but very probably teaching, and very likely contributing a lot to younger singers.

A friend, a fine male alto who, yes, toed the musical line of our times once confessed: however difficult vibrato is for a string player, it’s utterly natural for the human voice. So yes, he used vibrato sparingly in baroque music, but he was never altogether convinced.   

And for Auger? However wrong she is, she’s absolutely right!

Anyone seen Lorca?

It was an improbable thing to do, which may have made it probable, since who can predict what a poet named Lady will do? She disappeared for a month in France—OK, it wasn’t really a disappearance, since she appeared from time to time via Facebook sitting in front of châteaux, or drinking wine, or contemplating courtyards: you get to do stuff like that if you marry French guys. But whatever possessed Lady to put her child in a regular school?

The point was that the 12-year old Naïa, was homeschooled—home being in this case the café / gift shop owned by her parents. And though her tutor was a pillar of ordinary, her adopted uncle, who sat writing nearby? Definitely less than a steadying influence.

“She won’t last a week,” said Montalvo, as we were reading—as an exercise in use of punctuation—a letter of recommendation I had written for Naïa. “She’ll take one look at the playground, hate it, and retreat into a corner, never speaking to anybody.”

This had to be protested—there are limits to disloyalty that even I have to respect. We did, however, briefly discuss whether we could start a little pool, with everybody chipping in a buck or two and betting on the likely day of balking.

Because how could it not happen? For one thing, Naïa has never been seen to sit—her one mode of repose is a flop. From this vantage, whatever education had to be poured into her was done so like a dowager duchess dispensing tea. It stayed there long enough to be dribbled off onto a test, and then the space was given off to more interesting affairs like dinosaurs and dragons.

From time to time, questions arose to which—mistakenly—I was thought to have the answers. What was the predicate of a sentence? And what then was a predicate nominative?

“It is that,” I said, “which follows a copulative verb….”

The tutor sputtered, the tutee twittered, I maintained a haughty silence.

I know, I know—the very same English teachers who draped the lascivious legs of the grand piano (you know men and their lustful ways….) came up with the term “linking verb,” but so? Could you resist using the word “copulative” to a twelve-year old?

“I don’t know what that means,” said the tutor.

“Easy,” I tell him. “Birds do it, bees do it, and baby, verbs can REALLY do it.”

So we got that sorted out, and then proceeded to the next question, which is why would anybody care?

Answer—because it’ll be on the test.

“I greatly fear,” I tell them, ”that one day some horrid educator will make an enormous blunder and put something you’ll actually want to know on the test. And since your habit of forgetting everything on the test—for which I salute you, by the way—has now gone through ‘instinctual’ and is well into the territory of ‘congenital,’ what will you do?”

Twelve-year olds? They know when to ignore you.

Which Naïa did yesterday, after I told her she had blown her chances of paying her way into Yale or Harvard: she’ll have to rely on a dragon scholarship. Why? Because she told me she had fallen at school

“Excellent,” I told her, “though it may have been a bit more subtle to have waited for the third week. As it is, it could seem just a bit mercenary.”

“I don’t know what that is….”

“The point is whether you filed an incident report?”

“Marc, I just got up. Some kid helped me….”

I’m appalled.

“You allowed a non-medically trained person to attend you? You should have stayed in place, groaning loudly, speed-dialing your mother’s lawyer, and clamoring for a neurologist to see you immediately! Naïa, how can you not know that?”

“It was just a little fall, and it doesn’t hurt as much know as it did an hour ago.”

“That’s a terrible sign,” I tell her, “since it’s very clear that your nerve cell are necrolysing.” She doesn’t know the word, nor does the computer, but that hardly matters.

“It means that your nerve cells are slowly dying, as a result of this trauma, and that at any minute they will explode, releasing the deadliest toxins into your bloodstream. It’s actually quite improbable that by tomorrow you’ll be able to walk. Amputation, even here with a kitchen knife, is probably the only solution.”

Lady comes by to kiss Naïa.

“Remember this moment,” I tell Lady, “since this will be the last moment, in life, in which you’ll kiss your daughter! Ah, there’ll you’ll be, in the cemetery, flung down on the raised ground of your daughter’s grave, wailing and showering the tombstone with your tears. Hah! See what you’ve done?”

“No it won’t,” says Lady, and to prove it kisses Naïa again. 

“You’ve no one to blame but yourself,” I tell her. “And don’t look to me for support! No, I’ll be right there in the cemetery, raking you to coals. ‘You cast your daughter to certain death, woman, and see now how you pay! Wail, wail, but to no avail! Ne’er more will she flop on the red sofa, fiddling with her iPad, and animalizing her imaginary zoos! Nay, she is gone, gone—killed by the mother who rashly thrust her into that deathtrap of a school! Weep, wench, weep—no tears will bring her back!’”

Mothers of 12-year old girls? They know how to ignore you too….

“It’s completely not right,” I tell Jorge a moment ago. “I keep looking over to where she should be, and then I realize, she’s in some dumb school.”

“I know,” says Jorge, “I miss her too….”

“You know what worries me? Where will this end? What if she decides to put Lorca, the pet Chihuahua, in school? Will we just have to put up with that? And what if Neruda, the green Dominican parrot, gets it into his head to stop screaming?”

“That bird can die,” says Jorge so quickly that we both know: it’s true.

So forget the bird, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re dognapping Lorca until Naïa returns.

Oh, and can we start a pool on that?

A Time to Heal

It lasted a week or it lasted a couple of weeks, or it came and then it went, only to come back stronger or weaker. But the point isn’t really how long it lasted, because one thing about disease is that it distorts time. Or perhaps it has its own time, one in which the watches and the clocks and the places you have to go and the people you have to see get replaced by the joints, which are being broken by torturers who could have taught tricks to the Chinese, or the wet bedclothes at three in the morning, since the fever has burned all the fluids out of you. And where are you now? In suspended time, freezing, sopping wet, and too tired and too afraid to get out of bed into the tropical night, since 75 degrees with a gentle night breeze will feel like Wisconsin, February, at seven AM standing on Park Street, as the wind courses off Lake Mendota.

It was, when I was able to think about it at all, somewhat like the anteroom to AIDS. There were the fevers of about 105 degrees, which coupled with being alone, produced a fear and a disorientation that was as divorced from reality…wait, it WAS reality. Because the Marc who was essentially driven by his mind—the body being completely happy to be steered and sped along as needed—had become his body, which at this point was falling apart at the speed of a nuclear fission.

In moments like, people are likely to come home—people whose body has been doing what the body should be doing, which is carry the brain / mind around effortlessly—these people tend to come home and bring wisdom from a land once inhabited but now deserted, sere, converted into a lunar landscape. And what do these people say?

“You have to eat,” they say. And wouldn’t that be logical, if any food tasted anything like it used to, or even if it didn’t, if it tasted something like how you remembered food to taste? Then there’s the question—lifting the fork to the mouth is something that Schwarzenegger could have done in his heavy-training days, but Marc? Whose total energy is being consumed by shivering, since the difference between the 98 degrees outside my body and the 105 degrees inside my body has produced copious sweating and shivering.

“Just eat that side of beef,” says Mr. Fernández, “and then you can start in on the four or five industrial sized pots of soup I’ve made you. And what did you have for lunch?”

What did I have for lunch? OK—ask me an easy one, for starters, such as ‘what is the Max Planck Constant and what is its role in the history of modern physics?’

Fortunately, Mr. Fernández is among the oldest of several siblings, which means he has years of reasoning with the less robust minded. So he’s well equipped to say things for which there are no good answers. How’s this: “well, how do you expect to get better if you don’t eat?” Or this, a personal favorite: “well, you have to go the doctor, you know….”

And why do I have to go the doctor? Because the doctor will say hugely important words, which are to go home, rest, take Tylenol for pain. And then wait until the virus decide to go somewhere else and mess with them.

Oh—and further crucial advice: drink lots of fluids.

All of this, min d you, started because a mosquito who presented a particularly vicious and venomous visage decided to bite me, knowing full well that he was harboring the Chikungunya virus: Chikungunya in this case being a Malaysian world meaning (Wikipedia’s definition) “bent doubled over” or (my version) “you’re completely fucked.”

And so the world staggered on for about two weeks and guess what? However much I berate myself for doing a singularly bad job of keep the world in some reasonable order, it now appears that things really do mess up when I stray from the job. That little situation in Gaza—it certainly didn’t get any better. Oh, and it turns out that we’re back to bombing Iraq. Even worse, we have a white cop in a predominantly black community of Missouri, and what does the cop do? Take the kid out better than any of Capone’s boys ever did in Chicago a century ago. Oh, and when the community—rather thin-skinned of them, but whoever said working with the public was any picnic—protested, what was the reaction?

“It made the dear 60’s seem kind of quaint,” I remarked to Mr. Fernández last night, since we’ve graduated back from statements-reasoning-with-a-three-year-old to something like normal adult discourse. Because in the old days, the cops had Billy clubs, yes, and canisters of tear gas. Right—there wasn’t much to be done about the Billy clubs, but everybody knew that a handkerchief soaked in vinegar would get you through the worst of the tear gas. But now?

What happened, at least what I saw on YouTube this morning, was an army mobilizing against an enemy, which in this case was the community it was supposed to serve. I’m what passes for white, getting to the age where a cane will become my third leg, and speak the language of respect—as in how to get people to give it to you. But if I were young, poor, and black?

I’d be terrified.

It seemed that a week or two in bed with breaking bones might have been the better alternative than a week or two seeing Ferguson Missouri burn. I shuddered, scowled, and turned to Monteverdi.

At least it was better than Taking Tylenol, getting lots of rest, and drinking lots of fluid…..