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…’

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?

About What We Do….

OK—we’ll start out with the comment on Facebook that Mr. Fernández made about the video:

I must admit that I have no clue what AC/DC is or was, but I do love this! And the guys are SOOOO good-looking!

Well, they start out good-looking; they later become bestial, as does the music. But I had seen the video two days before I read the comment, since I was one of nine million to view on YouTube, and Raf was one of twelve million. And my feeling?

Complete repulsion!

I think back to two classical singers, Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato. Ladies first, and here’s what she’s said:

“Stop apologising, stop trying to sell our music by dumbing it down. Sell opera on the basis that it is like nothing else on the planet, not on the basis that it’s superficially cool and hip – that is so phoney.”

“Recently I performed at the Grammy awards. I felt like a fish out of water surrounded by all these rock and jazz musicians in a huge conference hall environment. But I sang the second half of Cenerentola’s rondo, and it seemed to go down very well.”

“What really moved me was an African-American girl who might have been 15. She came running up to find me afterwards and said ‘I don’t know what you call that sort of singing, but it was the most wonderful thing I have ever heard. Where can I find more of it?’ If we do our job properly, people will listen and get it. You see, great music just works.”

Spot on, Madame DiDonato! And you know, we could make a whole new generation of opera fans in a couple of weeks, if we wanted to. Because on April 5, the Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting La bohème in movie theaters across the world. Raf and I will go, Kleenex box between us, and guess what? We will be one of about six people who are not using wheelchairs, walkers, or canes. In fact, if you piled up all the implements, it would look like that scene at Lourdes—the cured having thrown away all their crutches….

We will take—if she consents, and that’s a heavy “if”—Naïa, the twelve-year old daughter of the owner of the café. Why? Well, it seems like an appropriate uncle-like thing to do. As well, is there any adolescent girl who can resist La bohème? The music is ravishing, the story is wrenching, the setting is magical. Face it, the opera is one glorious, extended working-out of every adolescent girl’s most basic fantasy.

So in one afternoon—assuming that we could get every teenage girl into the movie theaters—we could have a vigorous, passionate new generation of opera lovers, who would desert Lady Gaga and flock to Joyce DiDonato, making her a mega-superstar earning gazillions of dollars per concert. And you know what? She’ll behave herself—because she’s a nice lady from Kansas who works hard, to the point of breaking her leg in a performance at Covent Garden, and continuing the rest of the performance on crutches. She later did the performances in a wheelchair. Brace yourselves for a shock, soon-to-be-astonished Readers…

…the British love her!

And speaking of the British, what did Ian Bostridge have to say about pop music? Well, here’s a copy / paste from The Guardian, which refers to his…:

"…somewhat bizarre animus" towards pop music and his objection to the "huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound."

Yeah? Somewhat bizarre? Bostridge, in the first place, has a PhD in History from Oxford. In the second place, he has spent years of his life perfecting an art that has been handed down scrupulously and lovingly for decades, if not centuries. In short, this guy is serious.  And guess what? He’s a second-class citizen, musically-speaking—nor is that bad enough. Because he now has to be a second-class citizen who also is a snob, and has to feel guilty about it. Oh, and look on as other performers—note the avoidance of the word “musicians”—with little talent or education are venerated as “cool.’ In short, he gets his face ground in the dirt and then has to apologize for it.

We classical musicians have a role in this, if we’re going to be honest. We need to move music out of the concert halls and back into the cafes, the bars, the street corners. We need to talk to our audiences, communicate our passion with them, all the while taking seriously what we do.

That would imply a respect for the people who hear our music. A respect, by the way, that I didn’t feel in the AC/DC clip. In fact, I was affronted:

“It was rank anti-intellectualism,” I told Naïa, the girl who may or may not be converted to opera.

“What does that mean,” asked Naïa. I forget sometimes that she’s just 12. So her tutor explained it: it’s the difference between a gourmet meal versus fast food.

That metaphor goes part of the way, but not all. And just now, I re-watched another video that has 12 million hits—The Piano Guys doing “The Cello Song.” Would I have the same reaction as I did to the AC/DC?

Yes, though to a lesser extent. I could have included it in this post, but why? Why not include a piece of music that is just as virtuosic, just as vibrant, just as beautiful—no, sorry…

…way more beautiful.

Thunderstruck or AC/DC or whatever it is will fade into the dust; Ginastera will last as long as anyone is around to listen….

On Failure—Or Not

Well, the work of this morning was supposed to be to tell you about failure, since Lady, Mr. Fernández and I had not so much been to the opera last night as we had been Igorred.

As in Prince Igor, the opera by Borodin that the Metropolitan Opera is putting on for the first time in nearly 100 years. So we went, all of us, to the broadcast at the Metro Theater. The broadcast (or rebroadcast, in this case) is absolutely better than actually going to the Met, since try eating popcorn at the Met! Oh, and another small advantage—you can see the singers, without having to shell out 300 bucks…..

“How long will this last,” asked Lady, who was attending for the first time. Four hours, I told her, wildly over-exaggerating, or so I thought—it actually clocked in at 4 and a half hours, and that was without the curtain calls (we scrambled out of the theater to grab the last bus home).

Well, it was a thing to have done to one—the first act alone came in at an hour and forty five minutes, and half of that was spent in a long hallucinatory scene set in a blaze of poppies (12,500 artificial, spring-loaded poppies—so loaded since the dancers were energetically crashing their way through the famous Polovtsian Dances {well, famous to all but the computer, my little red-squiggling friend….})

You see, Prince Igor, a twelfth-century figure, has made the fatal mistake of going off to fight the Cuman / Polovtsian tribes, despite having received a blazingly clear message from the heavens that it was a damn fool thing to do. OK—not so blazing, since the celestial tidings came in the form of a solar eclipse. But what sort of operatic moron goes off to war right after an eclipse? Hellooo!

Well, the predictable happens, but does Igor pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back to the world of the living—which in this case is to be a prisoner? Although not, since his captor seems to be a perfectly splendid man—and a khan, no less—who insists on treating him as a guest, even to the point of offering him one of the Polovtsian maidens. Oh, and he suggests that they go off and conquer all Russia together. Quite a reasonable offer, given that look—Igor isn’t bringing to the table much clout in the way of bargaining.

Right—so while Igor is moping around refusing to escape (since he’s a prince, get it?  And escaping, you see, is for the less exalted than he—therefore he’ll just sit around being operatically moody, which will draw out the opera…)

Now where was I?

Right—Igor is moping, but his wife’s brother? He’s having a great old time, stealing maidens from their havens by night and plotting to overthrow his brother-in-law by day. While all of this is going on, the khan attacks and—guess what!—the city falls. So now it’s one chicken salad wrap, two large coffees, one bag of popcorn with some illicit-but-oh-so-good Coca-Cola (suck it up, Bloomberg! Hah!) later, and now we’re in the fourth act / fourth hour—which is a scene of utter devastation!

Well, let’s go further—utter devastation, social ruin, economic collapse, and a profound, vast, bleak spiritual wasteland, from which no one will escape.

The Russians just love this stuff….

Igor, it seems, has now decided to escape, presumably so that he can come back when it’s entirely pointless (except, of course, to be in the final act). Obviously, being treated as the honored guest of the khan is insufficiently hair-shirted, especially when there is now the devastated city which he once ruled to mope about in. So there he is, Russianly catatonic, contemplating his and his city’s ruin, when two old souses come upon him, and decide to ring the bell, and get the citizenry (in this case the Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera—handy, hunh?)

Well, the wife is happy to see him, but Igor? Unlike all the operatic characters who are told not to speak to their loved ones but cannot, Igor ignores his beloved, so steeped in grief is he. So now it’s the crowd’s turn—very useful, since the chorus is now on overtime, and you might as well use ‘em—and soon they’re dancing about and tossing Igor in the air like a fraternity prank.

At last—and I do hope nobody in the audience last night was afflicted with hemorrhoids—Igor spins off, and lurches around for a minute or so in what appears to be a near-psychotic break. Then he takes hold of himself, goes to a crate and begins to lug it to the side. Gradually, the others join in—moving the rubble to the side, beginning the process of cleaning up.

“That was it?” asked Mr. Fernández, puzzled about how he had passed the last five hours of his life. The steppes of Russian, you see, are slightly chillier than Hollywood.

So I thought about it all this morning, over coffee. And it’s a curious thing, the need of my country—despite having experienced it several times—never to have admitted defeat.

Let’s face it—we lost Vietnam. And Iraq? Afghanistan? Even our war on drugs? The American dream?

Yes—we’ve been attacked. But have we ever experienced the devastation of a ruined landscape / countryscape, coupled with the bitter taste of knowing that another nation has invaded and conquered? Have we gone through what so many nations around the world have endured?

‘I know about defeat,’ I thought, remembering four or five auditions that I completely choked. Each time it was the same—the disbelief of being gob sacked in the psychic solar plexus, the wailing of despair and frustration, the shame of calling friends and family and announcing that, yes, once again, I had failed. Reader—some things repetition does not make easier.

“We thoroughly enjoyed it,” said the tourist yesterday, handing me ten bucks for the organizations I support by playing Bach suites in the café. The story, you see, has a happy ending—I’m playing better than I ever have. More importantly, I’m playing in public, enjoying it, and tackling the solo suites without having the aid of another musician (often a pianist) to bolster me. It’s just the instrument and I.

People drift past, off to the bathroom. Often, I shift to another point in the bow, to allow them to pass. The parrot squawks. People take photos—shooting a red flash of light into the middle of a sarabande. Casals was right—a café is excellent practice for a developing musician, whatever his or her age….

Did it come easily? No. But if it came at all, it came from the devastated landscape of failure. And if I had denied that I had failed? If I had fallen for the rationale—perhaps real but not true—that no gringo could land a job with a Puerto Rican orchestra?

There are times, I decided, when you need devastation, failure, dirt in the mouth. That’s the only landscape from which to travel to other, better places.

Enter Susan, who wrote a comment on yesterday’s post, saying that she’d not heard of the French countertenor, Philippe Jaroussky. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, ‘how can that be?’ So I turned to YouTube, and came by chance on the clip below.

However many decades it took this bear of little brain to figure out his instrument, it took Jaroussky only a couple of years to go from starting to sing to conquering the world of song. And why shouldn’t he? He’s young, mouth-wateringly cute, and the voice?

But as you can see below, it’s the completely natural—and funny—way he approaches his music that carries the day. He has not, it looks, travelled the same paths that I have trod, at least not in music.

I rejoice for him, as I rejoice for the failures that—bitter as they were—led me onward to a world of such joy….

Ilia Conquers Mass Transportation

The good news—opera is alive and well in Puerto Rico. The bad news? One flu epidemic could kill it.

I tell you this because I saw one Met transmission last year—it was Giulio Cesare with David Daniels, and it was fantastic—and I got hooked. So Mr. Fernández and I hit on the idea taking his mother, the redoubtable Ilia, to the opera.

“We can take the bus,” said Ilia, when I told her a week ago about the plan.

“We’re taking a cab,” I told her—and firmly. It’s the only way to be with Ilia.

Well, we went last week to the opera, and the audience was there, and the theater was there, but the opera? Not there, since a storm had knocked out the power, and the generator wasn’t working. So we waited for a bit in the hot and humid dark movie lobby, until it occurred to us—grab a drink next door.

“A bus just passed,” Ilia informed us, “Aha, and the bus stop is right over there….”

Ilia either learned her technique from erosion or nature imitated Ilia. Anyway, it’s the same—drip, drip, drip!

“You’re 83 years, you have chronic and crippling arthritis, and one bump in the road could lead to a broken hip. No, Ilia.”

“They seem to come by very frequently….”

Right, so we hit on the idea of going to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which happens to be located in an old school that Ilia’s husband had attended as a boy. It was when Ilia was busy communicating this on her cell phone that disaster struck.

It was a sort of maze comprised of hanging paper panels, and we were drifting around looking out of the holes that had been punched into it. Ilia, head down, walked into one of the panels, dislodging one end.

“Well, there we see why you shouldn’t text and drive,” said Ilia. Having raised six children, she hasn’t lost the habit of finding the moral of the story.

No great damage done, we then went down to the gift shop, since Ilia is also a great one for little gifts—or regalitos. In fact, Ilia could send the whole family to London for a week with the money she spends on regalitos, but what fun would that be?

“Another bus,” Ilia was quick to note, as we left the museum.

“Ilia, what’s the problem with a cab?”

“Cabs are no fun. Buses are what kids do. I want to take the bus….”

There’s no use for it—you might as well give in early in the game because guess what? If you wait, you’ll give in and be exhausted.

“Now I want to take the trolley,” said Ilia, as she stepped off the bus.

“Ilia, the way you’re going, you’re going to want a martini and a cigarette….”

“Oh, no….”

“Wonderful,” she said, climbing down from the trolley.

Well, the opera was yesterday, instead—and guess how we got there?

Ilia parted the crowd with her walker—rather the way trains get cattle off the rails. But it has to be said, she was by no means the only person in the assisted-walking department. In fact, Mr. Fernández and I were almost the only people not with cane / walker / wheelchair.

Oh, except for Ivelisse, the woman sitting next to us, who happened to be an old student from Wal-Mart.

“Why don’t more people come to the opera,” said Ivelisse, as we sat chatting.

And why indeed? The opera was Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s best opera—the singing was glorious, the story is good, and the sets and costumes were terrific. And for three hours, the rest of the world can spin around without you.

Others—including The New York Times—disagreed. Anthony Tommasini, the critic for the Times, called the production drab and muddled, as well as an “also ran.” That’s an ouch….

But what did I care? I had heard some beautiful music, I had reconnected with an old friend, and I had taken an 83-year old lady out of her apartment, where she had been cooped up all week watching bad television with her ailing husband.

“Maravillosa,” said Ilia, as she stood up after the end of the opera.

And then we headed for the damn bus.