“OK—this isn’t starting so well,” I told my friend Lady. “As
always, it sounded easy, when I first thought about it. 31 days, 31 pieces of
music—simple, right?”
“Well, it should be,” said Lady. “You do know more than 31
pieces of music, don’t you?”
“Yeah, and that’s the problem. I don’t just want to do an
electronic version of ‘Classical Music for Sunday Mornings.’ And God knows I
don’t want to do ‘Mozart for Baby.’”
“What’s the matter with Mozart for babies?”
“You know, Mozart is not a vitamin pill. And there are at
least 30,000 better reasons to listen to Mozart than the alleged boost to
cognition, or whatever it is. I’m so tired of all this business of justifying
classical music education based on the supposed neurological benefits. Do we
study literature because of its effect on the brain? Or art? Of course not. Oh,
and notice that the football coach never has to jump through those
hoops….”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, in the first place, what to do with the war-horses?”
“War-horses?”
“You know,” I told her, “Beethoven’s Fifth, the William Tell
Overture, Carmina Burana, and that damn Bolero. The problem is that some of
them are wonderful pieces, but who can hear William Tell without thinking of
the Lone Ranger? Anyway, I’m not going to waste one of my 31 days on Rossini….”
“We have a grudge against Rossini?”
“Not as seriously as I have a grudge against a lot of
people,” I told her, “and Beethoven said Rossini’s opera buffa…”
“Ah, opera buffa,” said Lady, “not a great favorite of
mine….”
“It’s just comic opera,” I told her, “unlike opera seria, which is….”
She just gave me a look.
“Anyway, Beethoven liked the opera buffa, but told Rossini
he couldn’t write the serious stuff. Oh, and then there’s his reputed comment;
Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough
on the backside….”
“OK, so no Rossini. So now what’s the problem?”
“Well, should I simply devote each day to a different
composer? Sort of, ‘if today is Tuesday, it must be Fauré?’ But there’s a
problem, there….”
“And that is?”
“Oh come on, does that mean that Bach and Beethoven only get
the same attention as Reynaldo Hahn? I mean, I love Hahn, and I wouldn’t be
without Hahn, but still….”
“I see the point,” said Lady. “So spend a week on Bach, if
you’re so inclined….”
“And then, of course, there are all the composers I should
like, and don’t. Which means, of course, that I’m the complete Philistine.
Sorry, but almost everything I’ve ever heard of Debussy make me want to jump
off the balcony, if not the nearest bridge. So though he’s important
compositionally….”
“Compositionally?”
“Sorry—anyway, it’s my book, and if I don’t want to invite
Debussy into it, well, so what? Mr. Fernández loves Debussy, so he can write a
rebuttal, or his own damn book. Anyway, Debussy is out, and very likely so is
Wagner, as well as most of the 20th century. I might make an
exception for Samuel Barber….”
“All of this,” said Lady, “is nothing more than an excuse to
get down to work. You’re throwing up objections simply to avoid getting the
nose anywhere near the grindstone….”
“Easy enough for you to say,” I told her. “But what about
chronology? Shouldn’t we progress in orderly fashion from Monteverdi, say, to
Barber? That seems like the serious thing to do…”
Lady yawned.
“Aren’t you forgetting,” she said, “that this is supposed to
be fun? As in ‘not a chore?’ Anyway, how did you begin to listen to classical
music? Surely your mother didn’t sit you down with a study guide….”
“Absolutely the opposite,” I told her, “my mother, by the
time I came around, was considerably worn down. She had a sort idea that it
didn’t matter much what you did, your child was either going to turn into a
mass murderer or not. Well, she may not have been quite that loose, but still…”
“Well, so what did you listen to, early on?”
“Oddly enough, quite a lot of The Weavers, as well as Burl
Ives. I think my father was into that; it was when she was alone, and very
often when she was editing, that she played classical music. Mostly, of course,
because it’s hard to edit if you’re distracted by the lyrics of ‘itsy bitsy
teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini…’”
“Surely you jest….”
“The fifties brought us many things,” I told her.
“Including, I’m sorry to say, the infamous witch hunts, led by Joe McCarthy from
Appleton, Wisconsin. And oddly, The Weavers and Burl Ives—who I always thought
were hopelessly square and old-fashioned—suffered greatly under McCarthy.
Nothing as seditious as a folksong, is there?”
“Folksongs? Seditious?”
“Surprisingly. After all, when you sing, ‘this land is my
land, this land is your land,’ well…has anyone ever sung ‘this land is
Monsanto’s land?’”
“That actually might not be a bad idea….”
“Well,” said Lady, “since you obviously are turning just a
bit chicken-livered about this whole project, why don’t you simply invite
whatever composer is hanging around, over there in the dining room of Fortaleza
Street? You know, if you really can’t decide, well, let it be open mic. What’s
wrong with that? After all, I do it every Tuesday night at the café….”
“Well,” I said, “if it got me off the hook of deciding on
one masterpiece and throwing out the other, it would be worth it. And it is,
after all, how I came to so much music….”
“So, folksongs?”
“Hmm…folksongs. Wonder what Alfred Deller is doing, at the
moment.”
“I’m right here,” said the disembodied voice. “nor did I
think anybody at all remembered me. It happens, you know. They tell you that
you are immortal, that you’ll never be forgotten, and now, who remembers
Deller? Or my son? Or both of us together, since we often sang together….”
“Oh dear,” said Lady, “is it really starting? And who might
these dellers be?”
“Not dellers, Dellers. And they have every reason to be a
bit miffed. Alfred was the father, and Mark was the son…but they both were
countertenors, which at the time was a bit of an eye opener.”
“Countertenor?”
“It’s a man who is singing in the traditional female vocal
range. And please, don’t get me started on whether it’s falsetto or not. You
never, ever want to get into vocal production, because singers have the
weirdest ideas about what it is, or what it isn’t. Somebody or other—Renée
Fleming, I think, but anyway, somebody famous—seriously thinks that to produce
a beautiful, pianissimo high note, you have to pitch the note through the tiny
little indentation of the nose as it curves towards the cheek. Physiologically
impossible, of course, but who cares? However she does it, or thinks she does
it, well it’s glorious. And of course, could I do it?”
“Am I, or am I not, to be allowed to speak?” Said the
querulous Deller. “I have been, after all, dragged from the dead. Though I must
say, I was hardly the only male alto around: in fact, it was often said that if
they had allowed women in the cathedral choirs, there would have been no male
altos. But as it was, there were many of us….”
“So there were,” I said. “But you were one of the
trailblazers, weren’t you? And now, we have people like David Daniels and
Philippe Jaroussky, but you were standing out there, quite alone, and doing
your thing….”
“The Deller Consort,” said Deller, “we were pioneers in the
early music field.”
“You were,” I said, and thought, but did not say, that his
voice had been sadly surpassed by our current generation of countertenors.
“Well, shall we listen to something? How about ‘She Moved Through the Fair?’ It
has to be one of the most haunting songs in the world. And then, what about
some Vaughan-Williams? It doesn’t seem right to slight poor Vaughan-Williams,
who did so much to save and preserve English folksong. Though really, I think
I’d do ‘Silent Noon,’ since it’s so beautiful, and such a good interpretation
of the text of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And then, of course, we’d have to do
“Orpheus with his Lute…”
“What? I thought it was just five minutes a day! Three
songs? That’s already 15 minutes!”
“Bother,” I said, “I knew this project was unfeasible from
the start. Well, have another glass of wine. Oh, and I suppose I should pour
another two for you?”
There was no response, as the music soared, but at the end,
Deller and Vaughan Williams had finished their cups.
