Not Your Average 11-Year Old....

I decided not to let it in. Yes, it’s totally stupid; yes, it’s destructive; yes, it’s unnecessary. But this pretty little head decided not to stress out about the government shutdown. And guess what? I also decided that if all the wise heads in Washington couldn’t avert a shutdown, then I might as well shut down too. So I went to the beach this morning, lolled in the water, and watched green palms float against an azure sky. Shutdown!

And yesterday? Well, I discovered the first opera that Mozart ever wrote—a 70-minute affair all in Latin on the story of Apollo and Hyacinth by Ovid. Mozart wrote it when he was eleven, but as the conductor, Ian Page, pointed out, you stop thinking about that. Why? Because, as you can hear in the clips below, the music is terrific. 

I came upon the opera because I had spent part of the afternoon with Philippe Jaroussky and Nuria Rial, two tremendous young singers who work remarkably well together. Jaroussky, at age 35, is in his prime as a counter tenor—and he’s thoroughly in charge of his voice, which is gorgeous. And he seems to be one of the golden boys for whom everything came easy: he started singing when he was 18, and by 20 he was a professional. And his career has soared. And just to prove how spectacularly unfair the gods can be, Philippe happens to look like this….

OK—full disclosure: all of this would be enough, ordinarily, to make me hate him. But I’m over it—I told you about that beach, didn’t I? And in many ways, not to have struggled and flopped—as I certainly did, and both—is to have missed out on some good lessons.

And yes, for anyone wondering—Jaroussky sings on my team….

And Nuria? Well, she’s Catalan, and is utterly expressive in renaissance and baroque music. And with that Jackian sense of fairness that increasingly is coming out, here she is:

At any rate, I spent yesterday afternoon busy with Rial / Jaroussky, listening to this really smashing concert. And why not? The world was spinning out of control, crisis was imminent, the wolves were howling at the door. Why not spend the afternoon with some extraordinary musicians playing some ravishing music?

In fact, I’m giving you, dear Reader, permission right now. Cancel your life for the next hour and a half, put your index finger on that arrow, and surrender to some of the most beautiful music I know. And no—don’t feel guilty! Call the boss and lie outrageously—invent an excuse. Consider all the time Victorian ladies spent having sick headaches—whole days prostate! You can take an hour and a half….

You know what? In the scope of things, not much matters except for art and music. In a hundred years, no one but a few scholars will know about the great shutdown of 2013—and very few will care. But people will still be listening to Mozart and Monteverdi, and reading, of course, Life, Death and Iguanas.

And you know what I like? These musicians just don’t force it—their playing is as free and effortless as it looks. It’s the best thing about baroque music; you don’t have to work that hard, you don’t have struggle to be heard over 100 musicians behind you, twenty or thirty of whom are blasting brass players, as you labor away at the Dvorak concerto.

Which is what I felt yesterday, as I toddled my way through a Bach suite. I remembered Joyce DiDonato working with a young singer, and telling him, “don’t worry about making a big sound, just think about creating the conditions to make a big sound….”

Right—as a very bad Buddhist, I got that. Which is why yesterday I was listening to the resonance of the instrument, and not trying to make any sound louder than that resonance. Why? Because as long as the instrument is resonating, the sound is free, and is just as loud as it needs to be. 

I played half an hour, and then put the instrument down. I’m halfway to where I was in my prime—in a couple of weeks I’ll be there. Let them buzz and do, as the poet said—I’m shutting down!
 

Fifth Shade of Grey—A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a chaconne?



The chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!

Wonderful Terrible Music

OK—you should probably hear it once in your life, if you want to consider yourself musically well traveled.

Welcome to the rarified world of composers seriously obscure like Porpora, Hasse, Broschi. How obscure? Well, my computer has just red squiggled the names, and I’ve spent a moment or two wondering if it was worth the time to add them to the dictionary. Would I ever write them, much less even remember them, again? Or would I be sufficiently annoyed by the squiggle appearing throughout the document that it would be worth it?

This ambivalent attitude towards these composers carries over into their music, which is absolutely wonderful—wow, the sheer number of notes they can pack in a score! These guys must have died of writer cramp; it’s music that tires me just to listen too, imagine writing the stuff…..

And do I care enough even to find out anything about even one of these guys? Luckily, I did—though more out of duty than interest. But I’m happy to tell you that his story is just as good as Farinelli’s, and it’s even true!

Now we back up. People have been cutting balls off boys for millennia, for varying reasons—humiliation, slavery, or just well, for a song. Quite literally—there were, according to Wikipedia, castrated males in the early Byzantine Empire. But the castrati first get into opera in the middle of the 16^th century—just as opera was being created. So it’s no surprise to find castrati in the operas of Monteverdi.

Knew that, but what I didn’t know is that castration does more than preserve the voice of a boy before puberty. The lack of testosterone also weakens and lengthens the bones—among which are the bones of the rib cage. So these guys developed huge chests, and phenomenal breathing capacity. As well, they had more agility than the female singer, and produced a distinct sound. All of this meant that composers could write music of phenomenal vocal difficulty, inversely related to any musical worth.

If you’ve seen the movie Farinelli, you’ll know—they were the Michael Jacksons and Beatles of their day. People went wild for them, they became hugely rich, they died young (generally). At the height of the craze for castrati, 4,000 boys a year were castrated.

Times changed, fashion changed. The last role for a castrato was written by Meyerbeer in 1828, but the tradition lingered on until quite late in—guess where—the Catholic Church. Yes, popes as far back as Benedict XIV in 1748 had tried to ban castrati, but their popularity was such that people might leave the church had Benedict done so. So as late as 1913, there was a castrato in the Sistine Chapel Choir. There has been talk, by the way, of urging the church to make an official apology.

There is, in fact, a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, which you can hear below. Be warned, though, that styles in singing have changed in the last hundred years, and Moreschi may not have been that great a singer (sorry—it seems really mean to pan a guy who lost his balls….). But it’s a thing to hear.

It’s a rather forlorn sound, and it must have been a difficult life, living as the last relic of a dying tradition. Moreschi stands in contrast to his colleague three hundred years earlier, Siface, who was acclaimed as the best singer in the world by a critic in London (never an easy accolade to attain), and had a crazy love life. 

You’re asking—at least I think you’re asking—how can a castrato have a love life? My answer: I don’t know, nor am I willing to find out. This isn’t that kind of blog, dammit.

All right, getting over my fit of pique and moving right along, I give you in Spanish what happened since it’s more complete and somehow sounds better:

Estuvo al servicio del el Duque de Módena y se enamoró perdidamente de Elena Marsili, viuda del conde Gaspari-Forni y hermana del Marqués Giorgio Marsili de Bolonia, quien se opuso tenazmente a la relación amorosa entre Siface y su hermana, por considerar a los castrati como un engendro (sic, or should it be asi?) de la naturaleza y una afrenta a la memoria y la sangre de la casa de los Marsili. El asunto fue llevado ante el Duque de Módena, quien tenía alta estima por el castrato y decidió alejar a Elena de Siface, enviándola al monasterio de San Lorenzo.

OK—loose translation. Siface falls head over heels with Elena Marsili, a dame who’s the widow of the Count of Gaspari-Forni (definitely sounds like comic opera) and the sister of the Marquis Georgio Marsili, who absolutely weirds out that his sister could be getting it on with a freak of nature. So everybody runs over to the Duke of Modena, who was wild about the castrato, and who decides to stick Elena into a monastery—always a good solution, right?—in San Lorenzo.

And is Siface beaten? Nope—not he!

Aun así Siface no renunció a Elena y cuando le fue dado el rol de Perseo en la ópera de Martelli, el cantante pudo frecuentar más Bolonia e inmediatamente pidió salvoconductos para visitar a Elena en el monasterio. El escándalo público y la ira del Marqués Marsili llegaron a su punto más álgido. En hechos no esclarecidos del todo, el cantante fue asaltado en su carruaje que lo conducía a Bolonia por 4 hombres enmascarados que le dieron muerte, primero con bayonetas en su espalda y le remataron destrozándole el cráneo. El juicio iniciado no pudo inculpar al Marqués pero el Papa en persona se decidió a intervenir y desterró al Marqués de Bolonia y los Estados Papales. Elena Marsili desapareció del monasterio meses más tarde y se dice que coleccionó un gran número de aventuras amorosas, según muchos por venganza contra su hermano.

Siface doesn’t give up but rather, when he gets a role in Bologna, he begins begging permission to visit the monastery. Now the Marquis gets really pissed, and guess what happens? Four masked guys hop into the carriage that Siface is riding in; they kill him and then rekill (well, what else is rematar, computer?) by destroying his cranium. Well, they can’t pin it on the Marquis, so the pope steps in—I’ll send a sworn official translation to any of you scoffers out there—and exiles the Marquis from the Papal States and Bologna. The pope could do stuff like that in those days. Now then, what does the fiery Elena do? Wonderfully, she sticks out her tongue at her brother, escapes the monastery, and goes off screwing half the men in Italy!

I think, Dear Reader, that you really should send me a good bottle of scotch for digging up that story!

Beatus Vir

A question for you, Gentle Reader.

Sleep in a bed last night?

I know now—if the question surprises you, you’re lucky.

I’m happy to say that last night I did. And this morning I chatted briefly with someone who did not.

I had a hankering, starting off on the trot, for a bit of Monteverdi. Perfect music for a Monday morning, and it had been years since I had heard the Selva morale e spirituale.

Well, it’s exalted music, and a fine performance. Beach was good too—the water surprisingly smooth after a week of rough seas. Then it was time to get back home and start the rest of the day.

Of course, I had to clean my feet first, because walking with sand pressed by the sock into your feet is annoying. Fortunately, though the showers installed by the government no longer work, the surfers have rigged up a little hose that provides no-doubt-bootlegged water.

So that’s where I saw the guy, my beatus vir. 

The first rule of the day is to say hello to everyone. It’s something that was constantly adjured on us (to us?) at Wal-Mart, and though few people did it, I did. It brings you into contact with people you’d never interact with otherwise.

He had an El Greco face with one of those marvelous noses: thin, elongated, curved inward and then outward. Salt-and-pepper hair, thin, brown eyes. And sunken cheeks.

Oh, and he had a bar of soap and was busy applying it to his blue jeans.

The jeans he was wearing.

Right—no washing machine.

Did the greetings, and he asked where I was from.

“Wisconsin…You?”

“Nowhere, really. I’m on the streets.”

“How long?”

“Two weeks and five days.”

OK—he’s never been homeless before, but now, yeah. And he’d been living with his mother, but she was in a project, and they have rules, see? Anybody living with her, and they kick her out. And she’s 86, and he’d die of shame if they kicked her out….

So he left.

Pretty hard, he says, to be on the streets. Went to Salvation Army this morning, but they couldn’t give him breakfast.

They only feed four people breakfast a day.

What about the place in Santurce.

“Yeah, La Fondita de Jesús? They told me to go there….”

I pass the hose back to him—feet are washed now. He wets his shirt, and starts rubbing the soap all over it. Logically, he pays special attention to the armpits.

“You know, I couldn’t get into City Hall to ask for help. They told me if I was homeless I couldn’t get into the building. Politicians—they come and kiss you when they’re campaigning, then they kick you the rest of the time….”

I put on my socks, and empty change and keys from one of the shoes. Put the keys in my pocket.

“If I can get out to Bayamón, I can stay at a place there. I’ve seen it. It’s real nice. They give you your own room. Like a hotel….”

Costs $1.25 to get to Bayamón.

I’m ready for the trot back home. He’s soaping his neck, now. I offer my hand, which he bumps with his elbow. It’s a Puerto Rican thing.

“Good luck,” I say.

“Hey, you left your change,” he says.

Duh….

“Take it,” I say.

“Sorry to bother you and all,” he says.

“You didn’t bother me, not at all.”

Nor did he. In fact, I felt honored. Honored to meet someone with the nobility to point out the dimes and quarters and pennies that had such terrible value to him and were almost worthless to me. A guy who moves to the streets so his mother doesn’t get kicked out. A guy who cleans himself painstakingly—I wouldn’t—and chats with a stranger and exposes his pain matter-of-factly and then apologizes.

I’m calling him a guy. Wrong—beatus vir.

Beatus vir

Beatus vir, qui timet Dominum:

In mandatis eius rolet nimis.

Potens in terra erit semen eius;

Generatio rectorum benedicetur.

Gloria et divitiae in domo eius;

Et justitia eius manet in saeculum saeculi.

Exortum est in tenebris lumen rectis:

Misericors, et miserator et justus.

Jucundus homo qui miseretur et commodat.

Disponet sermones suos in judicio:

Quia in aeternum non commovebitur.

In memoria aeterna erit justus.

Ab auditione mala non timebit.

Paratum cor eius sperare in Domino;

Confirmatum est, cor eius:

Non commovebitur,

Donec despiciat inimicos suos.

Dispersit, dedit pauperibus:

Justitia eius manct in saeculum saeculi,

Cornu eius exaltabitur in gloria.

Peccator videbit, et irascetur;

Dentibus suis fremet et tabescet.

Desiderium peccatorum peribit.

Translation

Blessed is the man who fears the lord:

He delights greatly in his commandments.

His seed will be mighty on earth;

The generation of the upright will be blessed.

Wealth and riches are in his house;

And his righteousness endures forever and ever.

Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness:

He is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.

Good is the man who is full of compassion and lends.

He will guide his affairs with discretion:

Because he will not be moved forever.

The righteous will be in everlasting remembrance.

He will not be afraid of evil tidings.

His heart is fixed, trusting in the lord;

His heart is established:

He will not be moved,

Until he gazes at his enemies.

He has dispersed, he has given to the poor:

His righteousness endures for ever and ever,

The strength of his soul will be exalted with honour.

The sinner will see it, and will be grieved;

He will gnash with his teeth, and melt away.