Julia Child Steps Onto the Stage

OK—I could tell you that the buzz on the island is that the secretary of justice, a guy by the name of Luis Sánchez Betances, ran over to the police station last Friday night, since a buddy of his, Jaime Sifre Rodríguez, who is also a partner in Sánchez’s law firm, got picked up for drunk driving.

In fact, his blood alcohol was .215%, which is high indeed.

Sour minds on the island are wondering what Sánchez Betances was doing there, and some have even gone so far as to breathe aspersions. But relax, dear Reader, there was no impropriety involved—in fact, Sánchez Betances was there to make absolutely sure that the rules were being followed, and that no special treatment was given. He was just there for a friend! Something anyone would do!

And now, of course, warped and twisted minds are attempting to misconstrue a perfectly normal action—how dare they! Here, for example, is an ex district attorney, Osvaldo Carlo:

El exfiscal Osvaldo Carlo dijo en NotiUno que “la mera presencia del secretario de Justicia allí, sin decir una palabra, crea una presión indebida sobre estos agentes de la Policía. Porque, por qué un secretario de Justicia va a estar en el lugar de los hechos si no es para crear un ambiente negativo de la investigación. No tenía ni que decir una sola palabra. Él tenía otras maneras de trabajar con ese asunto que no fuese presentarse allí, porque al presentarse allí iban a sentir la presión del cargo”.

(The ex attorney Osvaldo Carlo said to NotiUno that “the mere presence of the secretary of justice there, without saying a word, creates undue pressure on those police agents. Why? Because why is a secretary of justice going to be there if not to create a negative environment for the investigation? He doesn’t have to say a word. He has other ways of working this affair without being there, because by being there they were going to feel the pressure.”)

Poppycock!

Turning away from such negativity, what’s the deal with Lee Hoiby?

Why, you may ask, am I worrying about Hoiby? Because over the weekend, I was watching Renée Fleming talk about Leontyne Price, who had championed Hoiby’s work. So what was up with Hoiby?

Well, I knew he had a Wisconsin connection, but I didn’t know that he was actually born in Madison in 1926, had studied with Gunnar Johansen, and had later attended Mills College. His compositions draw the attention of Gian Carlo Menotti, who showed them to Samuel Barber. Menotti also invited Hoiby to Curtis to study with him: no small thing, since Menotti was the leading opera composer of the time.

And Hoiby didn’t follow the fashion of the time—which was to compose highly dissonant music. Instead, his music is tuneful, lyrical, and sophisticated. And his specialty? Here’s what he told Zachary Woolfe:

“It was the singers, not the instrumentalists,” he said. “The instrumentalists didn’t know who the fuck I was. I didn’t have any instrumental music played. Singers, you can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”

Here’s what Woolfe has to say about the songs:

Indeed, it seems likely that his songs-whose brilliant and varied texts, chosen by Mr. Shulgasser, range from Bishop to Roethke to Stevens to Rilke-will be what last the longest of his work. Perfectly honed little worlds, they benefit most from his modesty. Small shifts, like the opening into ecstatic brightness of the third stanza of “The Message” (set to a John Donne poem), take on a kind of humble grandeur.

In the interview with Woolfe, Hoiby said the following: “All I did was compose. I never went anywhere, I didn’t know anybody. I never went to any parties. I never met anybody. I’m basically not interested in social life, I guess.”

Well, he must have watched television, because his spoof on Julia Child is bang on. In the words of Joseph Dalton:

All of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on undaunted. She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked one. Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a light and colorful orchestration.

And as light as the piece—and the cake—is, there’s also something tinged with melancholy about Hoiby’s work. Is it because I know that he must have been dealing with being gay in a decade—the fifties—that was perhaps the most homophobic of the century? Is it because he never quite attained the celebrity of Gian Carlo Menotti? I feel about him what I feel about Barber: at the end, he must have felt he had given too much, and gotten too little.

Paid Too Much (reposted)

I wrote this exactly one year ago today. Here it is, once again. Enjoy!
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Samuel Barber, 1910 to 1981. Well, those are the official dates. But Barber poses a question. What happened to him from the fiasco of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1967 and his death in 1981?

“His last years were beset with depression and alcoholism,” says WikiPedia.

Right, the last fifteen years of his life—and what should have been the culmination of his creative life.

My impression was that he had created most of his work early, and then burned out. But in fact, it’s not true. Up until the early 60’s, Barber composes steadily, slowly, and richly.

Richly being the operative word in at least two senses. The guy didn’t seem to need money. Yeah, he taught for a couple of years at Curtis, where he had studied. But he hated it, so he quit!

Why doesn’t that sound familiar?

He was what used to be called comfortable—an amorphous term that might mean anything from loaded to able to slide by to the end without having to worry. Parents were from West Chester, and Gian Carlo Menotti, with Latin volubility, described it as a cesspool covered with a thin but unbreakable layer of gentility. Drinking, incest—the old story.

At age 9 or so, he writes a letter to his parents, saying “don’t tell me to go play football.” He’s already sure that he’s a composer.

Or was he? At Curtis, where his parents sent him as a high school student (guess they got that message…), he also excelled as a pianist AND a baritone. But composition won out.

He also was good with languages, which is why Curtis asked him to befriend Menotti, who knew Italian and French, but no English. So they spoke French together.

Well, I wonder about all of this because Eric, a Facebook friend, posted a clip of Leonard Slatkin conducting the famous Adagio for Strings. If you have a quarter of a century to spare, I recommend it; it’s about as slow as evolution.

Still, it was a thing to hear, this morning at four AM, when I arose with the violent urge to eat…yes, coffee ice cream. 

Later in the day, I began to worry myself about Barber. The Adagio is the most famous by a light year of his work. It’s the only piece most people will ever know. Yet it’s comparatively early. What would it be, to be known for this single piece, and have the rest of your work ignored?

Well, I was forgetting Vanessa, his first opera, which was a spectacular hit. Right—not on the order of Les Miz, but the operatic equivalent. The piano concerto was well received, the violin concerto as well.

And then came the fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra. The production was terrible; parts of the score were written almost hours before the performance; the orchestra and chorus was unprepared. Apparently, the performance, which was to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, was filled with hotshots (Imelda Marcos was there!) who couldn’t have cared less. It was broadcast on radio live, and you could hear stage hands shouting “go” or “move it.”.

Here’s Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, on the ordeal:

“Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).

Savvy readers of this blog will pick up a little fact more important—sorry, Leontyne!—than Price being trapped in a pyramid. Go back, and check that little fact thrown away in a relative clause.

Zeffirelli wrote the libretto.

What?!

Franco Zeffirelli?

Why did Barber permit it? His reputation was secure, and his finances as well. Why did he accept this commission when he knew that Vanessa had taken him five years to write, and he needed to produce Antony in two? What was he thinking of—the sharp, gifted man who was, by the way, acutely sensitive to text?

It almost seems a death wish, in fact, it all but literally was. He ended his decade-long relationship with Menotti, he drank heavily, he fell into depression. A friend who was in musical circles in the 70’s in New York told me that his parties were, well, both famous and infamous.

As I read about the Adagio, I came across a perceptive article entitled “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.” The author disputes the common theory that Barber’s homosexuality had anything to do with his deep melancholy. Menotti was welcomed by Barber’s parents, friends, associates. They lived together for many years. Why should it matter, then?

But I wonder. A highly sensitive man, who has fought and suffered and lived a quiet, seemly life—a life worthy of West Chester, Pennsylvania—hits the 60’s and what happens? His world, for which he has paid dearly, collapses. Women are burning bras, not taking Valium washed down with vodka. Blacks are demanding jobs other than porters on the railroad.

Gay men are holding hands on the street.

He had paid too much, gotten too little.

Wouldn’t you reach for the bottle?

"Strange, but the Adagio in the string quartet version becomes both more personal and almost redemptive at the end...."

A Voice of Incomparable Price

One of my favorite authors once wrote a line to the effect of “the person you have become, through sheer hard work and adversity, is just as much if not more the true self than the person you started out as.”

Robertson Davies wrote the line referring to a young soprano, but the person who brought the line to my mind was an old soprano: Leontyne Price. And what an amazing soprano! Take a listen to a relatively unknown aria—Song to the Moon, from Dvorak’s Rusalka.



OK—now you can hear why BBC’s Music Magazine in 2007 listed her among the 20 best sopranos. (She came in number four, after Callas, Sutherland, and de los Ángeles.)

And she has an interesting story—she was born in Laurel, Mississippi to parents of limited means. Which, oddly, may have been a break; the schools were strictly segregated, but she has fond memories of the teachers, all of whom were devoted to their students. (In one anecdote, Price admits that the Home Economics teacher had told her, “Leontyne, you’ll never be a great housekeeper.” Somehow, Price manages to make this remark self-deprecating and funny—as she is all throughout the interview.)

So Price, as an older teenager, worked cleaning for a prominent white couple—who were sufficiently impressed to ask Price’s parents if they couldn’t send her off to Juilliard. With their help—as well as a benefit concert from Paul Robeson—she got there.

Like Marian Anderson, born thirty years earlier, Price made her career in Europe before attacking the United States. And when she got there, as she tells New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, she had faced some of the toughest critics and audiences in the world. So when she was to make her Metropolitan Opera debut—was she fazed? Yes but mostly no. However, she did have a little prayer: Jesus, you got me into this; now, get me out!

Well, Jesus came through—she got a 42-minute ovation; it was one of the longest ovations at the Met.

Asked to describe her voice, Price admits to being a spinto—a rare breed of soprano who has a flexible, lyric voice that can be pushed to a more dramatic, powerful voice. Here’s Price singing Vissi d’Arte, from Puccini’s Tosca.

And just to hear a dramatic soprano perform the same aria—here’s the incredible Birgit Nilsson, a dramatic soprano who could single-handedly take on an orchestra of 120 furiously playing instrumentalists, plus a chorus of dozens, and still make herself very much heard. Oh, and do it for five hours, and repeat the whole thing the next day.



She had thought, initially, to be a recitalist, and she had a close friendship with the composer Samuel Barber, who wrote his Hermit Songs for her. And though another one of Barber’s masterpieces, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, was premiered by another soprano—Eleanor Steber—Price has a special affinity for the piece. Like both Barber and the lyricist James Agee, Price’s father had just died. And so this piece—a nostalgic look at parents on porches, small-town life, kids playing amid the sounds of crickets—had special meaning for Price.



And it was for Price that Barber composed his second opera—an opera that still attracts controversy: Antony and Cleopatra, which the Metropolitan Opera commissioned to open the new hall in 1966. It was a fiasco—Franco Zeffirelli created a ghastly stage setting, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the stage machinery was acting up. At one point, Price got stuck in a pyramid and couldn’t get out. But there she was—still singing away!

Barber never quite got over it—he drank more and more, and wrote less and less. Price shook it off and went on with her career—she sang her last performance in 1997—and she was seventy at the time. That, for a singer, is extraordinary.

I’ve no idea how old she was when she did the interview below with Tommasini, but she’s clearly no spring chicken. Yet she sings in the shower every morning, and gets up to the F above high C. Then she tells herself two things—if she can do that F, her high C will be right there. Oh, and also that yes, she has the energy to go downstairs and eat breakfast.

She is, after all, an extraordinary artist—noble, funny, self-deprecating, and yet keenly aware that she has had both a great gift and has worked mightily to use it well. W. Somerset Maugham, in a short story, portrayed a great singer as a kind of monster of egotism and ruthlessness.

Price is the absolute opposite.

Paid too much

Samuel Barber,1910 to 1981. Well, those are the official dates. But Barber poses a question. What happened to him from the fiasco of his opera Antony and Cleopatra in 1967 and his death in 1981?

“His last years were beset with depression and alcoholism,” says WikiPedia.

Right, the last fifteen years of his life—and what should have been the culmination of his creative life.

My impression was that he had created most of his work early, and then burned out. But in fact, it’s not true. Up until the early 60’s, Barber composes steadily, slowly, and richly.

Richly being the operative word in at least two senses. The guy didn’t seem to need money. Yeah, he taught for a couple of years at Curtis, where he had studied. But he hated it, so he quit!

Why doesn’t that sound familiar?

He was what used to be called comfortable—an amorphous term that might mean anything from loaded to able to slide by to the end without having to worry. Parents were from West Chester, and Gian Carlo Menotti, with Latin volubility, described it as a cesspool covered with a thin but unbreakable layer of gentility. Drinking, incest—the old story.

At age 9 or so, he writes a letter to his parents, saying “don’t tell me to go play football.” He’s already sure that he’s a composer.

Or was he? At Curtis, where his parents sent him as a high school student (guess they got that message…), he also excelled as a pianist AND a baritone. But composition won out.

He also was good with languages, which is why Curtis asked him to befriend Menotti, who knew Italian and French, but no English. So they spoke French together.

Well, I wonder about all of this because Eric, a Facebook friend, posted a clip of Leonard Slatkin conducting the famous Adagio for Strings. If you have a quarter of a century to spare, I recommend it; it’s about as slow as evolution.

Still, it was a thing to hear, this morning at four AM, when I arose with the violent urge to eat…yes, coffee ice cream. 

Later in the day, I began to worry myself about Barber. The Adagio is the most famous by a light year of his work. It’s the only piece most people will ever know. Yet it’s comparatively early. What would it be, to be known for this single piece, and have the rest of your work ignored?

Well, I was forgetting Vanessa, his first opera, which was a spectacular hit. Right—not on the order of Les Miz, but the operatic equivalent. The piano concerto was well received, the violin concerto as well.

And then came the fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra. The production was terrible; parts of the score were written almost hours before the performance; the orchestra and chorus was unprepared. Apparently, the performance, which was to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, was filled with hotshots (Imelda Marcos was there!) who couldn’t have cared less. It was broadcast on radio live, and you could hear stage hands shouting “go” or “move it.”.

Here’s Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, on the ordeal:

“Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).

Savvy readers of this blog will pick up a little fact more important—sorry, Leontyne!—than Price being trapped in a pyramid. Go back, and check that little fact thrown away in a relative clause.

Zeffirelli wrote the libretto.

What?!

Franco Zeffirelli?

Why did Barber permit it? His reputation was secure, and his finances as well. Why did he accept this commission when he knew that Vanessa had taken him five years to write, and he needed to produce Antony in two? What was he thinking of—the sharp, gifted man who was, by the way, acutely sensitive to text?

It almost seems a death wish, in fact, it all but literally was. He ended his decade-long relationship with Menotti, he drank heavily, he fell into depression. A friend who was in musical circles in the 70’s in New York told me that his parties were, well, both famous and infamous.

As I read about the Adagio, I came across a perceptive article entitled “The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.” The author disputes the common theory that Barber’s homosexuality had anything to do with his deep melancholy. Menotti was welcomed by Barber’s parents, friends, associates. They lived together for many years. Why should it matter, then?

But I wonder. A highly sensitive man, who has fought and suffered and lived a quiet, seemly life—a life worthy of West Chester, Pennsylvania—hits the 60’s and what happens? His world, for which he has paid dearly, collapses. Women are burning bras, not taking Valium washed down with vodka. Blacks are demanding jobs other than porters on the railroad.

Gay men are holding hands on the street.

He had paid too much, gotten too little.

Wouldn’t you reach for the bottle?

"Strange, but the Adagio in the string quartet version becomes both more personal and almost redemptive at the end...."