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.

Bless'd be the Name of the Lord

“Can you believe this shit? Look at this—unnecessary line breaks, no punctuation, and what does it mean?” Montalvo, my young son, read me the poem, or rather, showed it to me, since poetry, Gentle Reader, now comes through the phone. Then we got to the comments, after first noting that the offending phone-poem had had over 100 likes.

Well, Montalvo had certainly fomented a firestorm: was it the reference to “illiterate morons,” that had so deeply troubled the unduly sensitive? Or maybe it was the reference to the careful writer—which he, following my lead, abbreviated TCW—that had so riled the paper-thin skinned. Whatever it was, the social networks were not burning, not blazing, but exploding in flames. Think fire in a rum plant.

“Can you believe what morons my generation are?” asked Montalvo, and I took a moment off to contemplate subject / verb agreement. So I barely registered when he said, “Christ, my fucking generation will fucking kill poetry, the way we’re massacring it….”

Right, so now it’s time to swing into paternity—a land I’m traversing frequently, these days.

“You know, there’s a lot of bad poetry out there, and sometimes the worse it is, the more it sells.”

“Is that what you meant when you said some people won the Nobel Prize who shouldn’t have?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is obsessed with the Nobel Prize, to the point of reading the list, just to see who’s there and who’s not?

“Shit, I haven’t fucking heard of most of these guys—I gotta start reading these dudes, figure out how they did it….”

I suggest that he might print out the list, add a few blank years, and then write in his own name. This idea he ponders seriously.

“How can people be such morons!” he explodes, and goes on to tell me about Raju, an elephant in India, and a prisoner for 50 years, who was recently freed. So the elephant freaked and started crying, and now the “experts” are wondering: were those tears real?

“Fifty fucking years, those bastards have kept the elephant, and for twenty-five of them, at least, he’s had shackles with spikes on them digging into his flesh! And those morons are asking if the tears are real? Don’t they know animals have feelings? Fuck!”

“More feelings than some humans do,” I tell him, but guess what? One of the amazing things about the Millennials is that they appear and disappear, or maybe it’s just that they’ve mastered shifting instantaneously time and space, since Montalvo is now cadging coffee from Carly, and asking him and Amil if they believe that we’re alone in the universe. Such questions vex the young….

And now I have to tell him that we people are committing exactly the same atrocities on our own kind as we perpetrate on the elephants. Look at all the prisoners we lock up for years, if not decades, and then release onto the streets. And then I think of the famous scene from The Shawshank Redemption—you know, the one where the prisoner blasts Mozart’s Sull’aria out through the speakers in the prison courtyard. It’s a knockout—and we decide to watch it simultaneously, each at his own computer. It’s a totally Millennial thing.

So I watch as the music soars over the prison courtyard, and is it because Montalvo has some experience of prison courtyards, having liberated—though slightly less legally than they did Raju the elephant—a blue Macaw held captive by its “owner?” Or could it be that the music, some of the most celestial that Mozart ever wrote, is itself getting in? Anyway, my young son’s eyes are widening, and he’s murmuring, “fuck,” under his breath. Tennyson one day, Mozart the next!

Well, that’s a nice introduction to opera, and probably necessary, since Montalvo is joining us tomorrow for the Met broadcast of Otello, and has graciously accepted the invitation by announcing that he’ll go, since there’s no dress code.

“I hate dress codes, don’t you?” he says, as I’m writing away.

“Of course not, I love them,” I tell him; who says only kids get to be contrarian?

“Why,” he asks.

So we have a little discussion about the benefits of decorum, of how having a social map often, surprisingly, gets you to the destination much faster and easier than not. Then you can go home and have a drink, see?

So he sort of gets that, and I go back to writing, and then it’s time to read a poem that he wrote yesterday, when he was felled into the abyss of despair and depression. What was wrong? He couldn’t even tell me, so miserable was he when I had called him yesterday. That, of course, immediately made me start worrying—not for nothing am I my father’s son: had Montalvo formed another mystical relationship with an avian? And if so, had it led to the same result? I worried for five hours until I called him before bed; “I’m much better,” he reported.

Right, so what was the problem?

“Matters of the heart,” he said.

Remember that? You’re 21-years old, and love is an emotion that they just came out with yesterday, and they haven’t got the formula quite right, or they’re mixing it all up too strong because, damn! Think martinis on an empty stomach after a night of no sleep!

So I read the poem, and we talk about it, and Montalvo decides: it’s going first, the first poem in his book!

“BAM! It’ll hit those motherfuckers like a twenty-ton weight! Man, those dudes won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about! I mean, they’re gonna be saying, ‘what the fuh???’”

Would the careful writer—sorry, that’s TCW—allow that to pass? Of course not, so now it’s time to suggest that readers generally have a lot to do, and if they’re doing you the honor of reading your work, shouldn’t you put in the work to make it as clear as possible?

Does the point get through? Probably not, but I’m getting it, now. The best a parent can hope for is not a pressure hose, but erosion. You’ll see the effect in a couple of centuries.

So back to the writing, and then Carly comes by, and Montalvo has to have him read the poem—the gist of which is that love is all encompassing—out loud to us. Carly does, and likes it well enough to go recite it to his girlfriend, currently bearing their child. I go back to writing.

“Father!” explodes Montalvo, “this is a major moment in my life! A man is reciting my love poem to his lady! This is momentous! They should just give me the Nobel right now!”

Carly comes back, and reports—the girlfriend loved it!

“YES!” cries Montalvo, “PANTIES OFF!!”

Carly agrees: it’s a PANTIES OFF poem…”

Back to writing.

“Hey, Marc, how’s your writing going?” asks Montalvo.

“Interruptedly,” I tell him: if you haven’t guessed it, this post is being written in real time.

“Hunh?”

But now Carly is back, reciting his own poem, and Montalvo is liking it so much he’s sharing it over Twitter.

‘Nine more years,’ I think. Age thirty is the currently accepted age for when the adolescent brain at last, finally, after-having-driven-everybody-nuts-for-years, cedes to adulthood.

Nine years…

Think I’ll make it?

Then I remember a line from the Bible—Job, maybe?—that went something like “…and the Lord sent the locusts, bless’d be the name of the Lord.” I could tell you, but apparently Google hasn’t read the Bible.

‘Aha,’ I think, ‘I totally get it now…’

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.