Eight (Presumably) and One

It happens every morning: two guys arguing at the top of their lungs—as well as their vocal range—in the middle of our bedroom.

OK—there are times when it’s a man or a woman, but until Rubén Sánchez of radio station WKAQ gets a sex change, there will always be at least one guy. And today, as it so often is, it was Sánchez and another guy, arguing in good Puerto Rican fashion: the Spanish accelerates to about 333,000 words per minute, volume crescendos to about 110 decibels, neither one is listening to the other, and the voices are pitched at least an octave higher.

Oh, and did I mention the interruptions?

“So whom was Rubén arguing with today?” I asked Mr. Fernández, since being closer to the offending radio, as well as speaking Spanish as his cradle tongue, made him more likely to know what it was all about. I had heard the term “matrimonio gay” (gay marriage) screeched around, and was curious to know what today’s fuss was about…..

“With whom,” said Mr. Fernández, a stickler for such things, who went on to say that he had only the dimmest idea, since he was going in and out of the morning snooze. 

Well, I can tell you what the issue was about, since today’s topic flew in on the front page of El Nuevo Día, the local rag. So what’s up? Our governor, Alejandro García Padilla, has nominated Maite Oronoz, an openly gay woman, to be an associate judge on the Puerto Rico Supreme Court.

Oronoz looks pretty credentialed to me: a BA from Villanueva, law degree from the University of Puerto Rico, and a master’s in law from Columbia. She’s worked with the Supreme Court as “oficial jurídico”—my guess would be law clerk—as well as in private practice, and in the Justice Department in high-ranking positions. She’s currently the legal director for the city of San Juan. So she’ll sail through to the nomination, right?

Not so fast, because all the tired old voices we’ve had to endure all these years are saying all the tired—and tiring—things. Here—and you should hope you don’t know Spanish—is one:

Me preocupa el ejemplo que presenta al tener una relación con una persona de su mismo sexo. Lo segundo que me preocupa es que si es confirmada al Tribunal Supremo va a tener en sus manos el poder para tomar decisiones que alteren los valores del pueblo de Puerto Rico”, señaló Vázquez. 

What’s the beef, according to Vázquez? It sets a bad example, and if approved, Oronoz will have the power to make decisions that “alter” the values of the people of Puerto Rico.

In a recent interview, Larry Kramer, the gay activist and author of The Normal Heart, told gay people to stop patting themselves on the back, we haven’t come anywhere near where we should be in the struggle for rights. And oddly enough, Jessye Norman, the black opera singer, said much the same thing about the rights of black people.

She gives two examples: both involved being asked to prove that she was a guest when she was using a hotel’s facilities, or even walking on their grounds. Big deal, you may think, but here’s why I think it is.

For those of us who are white and men, it’s hard to understand how being black or a woman completely infuses your life. I go into a store and nobody follows me around, five feet away. Or here’s another—when was the last time I worried about getting raped? And I see the point of a lot of black people: a gay person has some shelter—hint, it’s called a closet—but the black dude? He’s out there….

And in a certain way, it may be true that even the most out gay people consciously or not use the closet. I learned that by trailing a transgender woman in the last gay pride march: I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt; she was wearing a tight dress and three-inch heels.

And walking, for much of the way, on irregularly surfaces, iridescently blue cobblestones, for which the old city is famous. Lovely, especially when wet—the stones, not the woman—but three-inch heels? It was proof of how deeply important her sexuality was to her; it was also a testament to personal bravery. Because although she carried it off well, she was still taller than I, with my height of six foot three. No wonder that it was the drag queens that fought back at Stonewall.

The computer, by the way, has not red-squiggled that word, “Stonewall;” did I teach it to the computer or is it now in the lexicon? Or consider this anecdote, about a US Supreme Court justice who had just upheld—years ago—a state law criminalizing homosexuality. According to Jeffrey Toobin, the justice remarked to his clerk that he had never met a gay person. His clerk, who was gay, said nothing. Twenty years later? Sandra Day O’Connor was sticking her head into her office and directing her staff to send a congratulatory tee shirt to a gay couple on her staff who had adopted a child. (It said, “Supreme Court Kid,” or something….)

So how far have we come? Well, today’s front page has “Abogada Gay al Supremo” as the lead. But when will we have “Abogada Straight al Supremo?”

Oh, and by the way, are there openly straight people? I didn’t know, so I asked Sunshine, the guy who makes me the espresso.

“Yeah, I’m straight, but I have a lot of gay friends,” he says. Then he goes back to polishing one of the windows.

Jessye Norman grew up in a world where there were signs over the two water coolers: “Whites Only,” “Colored Only.” I grew up in a world of Boys Beware, a lurid educational film—à la Reefer Madness—that advised against taking a ride from strange men. Why?

“He paid for the ride with his life,” intones the voice from the sixties (curious how different decades have different voices—anybody looked into that?). The driver, you see, was a known homosexual.

Wait—I didn’t get a gasp out of you!

It may be, in fact, that society’s coming out is just like our own coming out. It’s layer after layer, this peeling of the onion, until all that’s left is taste, aroma, zest. All the acridness, everything that made you cry has vanished, or rather, been commuted, transformed, and transmogrified into something wonderful, tasty and…

…delicious.

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?

Four Last Songs

Well, maybe Toscanini said it best: “For Strauss the composer, I take off my hat; for Strauss the man, I put it back on.”

Ouch. But there may have been some good reasons for Richard Strauss to be unpleasant. He was born in 1864 into a musical family; his father was a horn player in the Court Opera of Munich, and Richard Strauss grew up attending rehearsals of the Munich Court Orchestra.

He began composing young, and also conducting; he became the protégé of Hans von Bülow, who determined that Strauss would succeed him as conductor of the Meiningen orchestra.

His early compositions are in the tradition of Schumann and Mendelssohn; his work later became progressively more modern. And whatever else he was, he was a master of composing for the human voice, specifically the female voice. That’s not surprising, his wife—whom Wikipedia charitably describes as “irascible, garrulous, eccentric and outspoken”—was a famous soprano.

The couple had a son, who married a Jewish woman, Alice von Grab. In the Second World War, Strauss initially cooperates with Hitler, of whom he had a low opinion. In fact, Strauss became the president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the State Music Bureau. Later, he interceded several times to protect his daughter-in-law, even going to the Theresienstadt concentration camp to plead for the release of Alice’s mother. And he makes it clear in his diary of his contempt for the Nazis, writing, “I consider the Streicher-Goebbels Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honour, as evidence of incompetence—the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.”

It tarnished him, this association with the Nazis, and may have been the reason for Toscanini’s remark above. But there’s no question, Straus looked at horror at what had become of his country, and wrote, “the most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”

In 1945, he was liberated by the Americans; he was also 81. He wrote his last works, of which the Four Last Songs are perhaps the most famous. He never lived to hear them performed; he died in 1949, the songs were first performed by Kirsten Flagstad in 1950.

There’s some question if Strauss meant the four song to be a unified set; the first three might be, since they are all based on poems by Hermann Hesse, the last is by Joseph von Eichendorff. In fact, it was the publisher who put them together and called them the Four Last Songs.

Whatever he meant, they’re some of the most beautiful, most haunting, most autumnal works around. By the end, Strauss seems beyond sorrow, even beyond acceptance; he seems transfigured.

Song 1: Spring

In shadowy crypts


I dreamt long


of your trees and blue skies,


of your fragrance and birdsong.



Now you appear


in all your finery,


drenched in light


like a miracle before me.



You recognize me,


you entice me tenderly.


All my limbs tremble

at
your blessed presence!


Song 2: September

The garden is in mourning.


Cool rain seeps into the flowers.


Summertime shudders,


quietly awaiting his end.



Golden leaf after leaf

falls
from the tall acacia tree.


Summer smiles, astonished and feeble,


at his dying dream of a garden.



For just a while he tarries


beside the roses,

yearning for repose.


Slowly he closes
his weary eyes.


Song 3: Going To Sleep

Now that I am wearied of the day,


my ardent desire shall happily receive


the starry night


like a sleepy child.



Hands, stop all your work.


Brow, forget all your thinking.


All my senses now
yearn

to sink into slumber.



And my unfettered soul


wishes to soar up freely


into night's magic sphere


to live there deeply and thousandfold.


Song 4: At Sunset

We have gone through sorrow and joy


hand in hand;

Now we can rest from our wandering


above the quiet land.



Around us, the valleys bow;


the air is growing darker.


Just two skylarks soar upwards


dreamily into the fragrant air.



Come close to me, and let them flutter.


Soon it will be time for sleep.


Let us not lose our way

in this solitude.



O vast, tranquil peace,


so deep at sunset!


How weary we are of wandering--


Is this perhaps death?