Coming Soon--an Opera Cafe to your City!

“We absolutely have to do this, since if we don’t, Joyce DiDonato will be totally disappointed and that would be more than I could bear.”

That’s what I was telling Lady on the day that we set off to buy the largest television we could afford at Costco. And was Lady listening? Of course not, since we were all grumpy: the coffee hadn’t clicked in for me, Sunshine had spent twenty minutes looking for parking, and Lady had been getting increasingly irritated updates on guess-what from Sunshine.

“Dammit, doesn’t he know the law of attraction? He comes to San Juan with his mind made up—no parking. So what does he find? Of course, no parking. So he has a yeyo and gets it into his head that he has to pay for parking in the municipal lot. What is he—made of money?”

That’s when Sunshine, driving the car ahead of us, sailed right past an empty parking space. So then Lady is honking her horn and gesticulating “why” with one hand while pointing backward with the other. Which may have put Sunshine in the mood to greet the street porter as his long lost brother, which meant they instantly embraced, and then began trading insults.

And who might the street porters be? Well, these are resourceful men and women who adopt a block and then assist drivers in parallel parking. So for two years of bricking the street, I endured generators and jackhammers. Now, what do I get? A guy nearly as loud as the jackhammer shouting, “DALE DALE DALE DALE DALE!” Once the parking is done, the guy “offers” to look after your car, since you wouldn’t want anything to happen to you car, would you? WOULD YOU? So these gentlemen have very cleverly gotten the municipality to completely repave the street for them, and have now converted public property to private property. For make no mistake—any other street porter intruding on territory is looking for a fight.

So Sunshine at last parks the car, but is the porter satisfied? Of course not—he’s putting his two thumbs down and smacking his forehead and then he goes to verify the chasm between curb and car, and spreads his arms nearly as far as he can to show Sunshine. So that means that now he and Sunshine have shifted to mute mode—being that there’s a windowpane between them. But no matter, since hands are just as effective as voices, which we learn when the porter—at last satisfied with Sunshine’s parking—comes over to let us know. He points to Sunshine, then swirls both index fingers around his temples, and whistles through his two—and only—teeth. So we get the news: Sunshine’s crazy.

OK—no news there, since the last time we had gone anywhere with Sunshine, he had ended up covering his exposed male parts, after recklessly taking off his swimming trunks in the deep end of the pool, and spinning them like a lasso over his head, all the while shouting, “Whoopeee! I’m a cowboy!” Lady and I took one look at each other and who knows who said, “let’s go!” But I can report that Lady is a strong swimmer, or just more than usually curious…..

Nor was once enough for Sunshine, since he repeated the trick, with predictable results. But this time Lady and I shunned the male parts, and attempted to seize the swimming trunks. Rather inadvisably, Sunshine opted to throw them, which meant that while Lady and I couldn’t grab them, Rafael could. And did. And then got out of the pool, and made gestures to fling the trunks over the chain link fence.

Well, I’m pleased to report that Sunshine kept his pants reasonably well on for the drive to Costco, and a merry time it was. So then we had to find the television, since I had gotten it into my head: audience building. Because the average person doesn’t like opera—or so they say. But who could not like opera? Remember the famous Sull’aria from the movie The Shawshank Redemption? It turned droves of people onto opera.

So the plan is put the television in the Poet’s Passage, and have opera Saturdays, and since someone was good enough to put YouTube into the world, and since a million opera fans have uploaded full operas—well, why not start an opera café, at least for one day a week?

“Besides, it’ll be great for Ilia, Raf’s mother, since she loves opera but her husband…well, not so much. So we’ll be starting a major new trend, converting millions of people to opera, and giving pleasure to a little old lady who sorely needs it.”

So we bought a 70-inch set, and then wheeled it to the SUV we had borrowed to transport it.

“I’m lying under the TV,” said Lady, and both Sunshine and I fought it for as long as we could. But the thing about Lady? She always gets what she wants, and so there she was, lying on her back under a 70-inch TV and munching on blackberries. She couldn’t have been happier. That’s when I remember Joyce DiDonato, about whom I have gone through obsession and am now into stalking, if only electronically.

“She’s this totally cool, completely unaffected mezzo-soprano who started out wanting to be a music teacher, but then got drawn into opera. So when she was in Chicago last year, she spent an intermission at the Lyric Opera talking to a group of kids from Youth Opera Council. And the kids were totally into it.”

“Well, that’s how it happened for me,” said Lady, whose aunts used to take her to the opera.

“And that’s what happened to Montalvo, who at age 21 could have been the great-grand child of most of the audience. But remember his characterization of Iago in Otello? It was along the lines of, ‘wow, that’s some badass Niggah,’ a sentiment he shared in full, almost operatic, voice. All of the ladies’ hair turned one shade bluer….”

So we plan it out: we’re starting with a Mozart Festival, since once you’ve seen Magic Flute, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi—well, you’re either hooked or deaf.

“I’ll definitely have to tweet this to Joyce, since she has to know, and spread the idea of the opera café throughout the major metropolises of the world. In fact, she should refuse to sing in any city without an opera café….”

“But she has to give us credit,” said Lady, always on the lookout for marketing.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “We’ll be world famous! We’ll be in Wikipedia! Kids will be whistling Un Bel Di as they walk down the street. Mothers will be threatening to take away their children’s opera privileges if they fail in school. Fathers will beg their sons to play baseball—but miss the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Met? No effing way….”

It’s pleasant to think about, and Lady keeps munching on blackberries, and Sunshine reaches for some. But just at that moment, the blackberry supply had been converted into the raw material for blackberry pie, so Lady gives him only one. He’s reasonably content and…

…at least he kept his pants on!

      

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.

Thirty Years in the Madhouse

Consider this photo:
 

They had worked in the same studio in Paris, when they were young, before life had carried them where they didn’t want to go. Or perhaps they did, who knows?

I sit in this café and peer at the photo. Notice, for example, that the lady on the right, has her hand on the lady on the left. But she? Her arms are akimbo.

“They’re trying to poison me,” sang Joyce DiDonato in the epilogue to Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. Well, she may have said it, but the lady on the right—Jessie Lipscomb—came away saying it wasn’t true the Claudel was insane, and a friend of Rodin’s echoed the statement. More tellingly, the doctors were never entirely convinced that Claudel needed to be in the madhouse—they once wrote to suggest that she be cared for at home.

Reading the account of her life in Wikipedia, her family seem to be the villains. The brother—who signed the form that committed her, managed to visit seven times in 30 years. To be fair, part of that time he was in China, part of the time war was ravaging Europe. In fact, she died in the middle of World War Two; was that why she was buried in a mass grave? And by the way, the brother managed to specify to the centimeter—practically—where he wanted to be planted.

Still, the brother managed to cross occupied France to see her before her death. But what about the sister—who dropped in just once?

Then we come to Mother—who had never fully accepted her daughter’s embrace of the arts. And Wikipedia seems to imply that Mother, acting through Brother Paul, was the driving force behind the commitment. Because Mother didn’t visit once—thus laying to rest the claims about those ferocious maternal instincts.

Then we come to her relationship with Rodin: Joshua Kosman had this to say in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Her relationship with Rodin, which was both artistic and erotic, caused her as much grief as any such romance between mentor and protégée, and came to an end after she aborted their child. 

Hmm—don’t know about that. Wikipedia states, “in the early years of the 20th Century, Claudel had patrons, dealers, and some commercial success,” and she had stopped seeing Rodin regularly in 1898. She exhibited in 1903, and produced this work in the same period:

Claudel destroyed most of her work; still, about 90 pieces remain. She’s been the subject of a few biographies, a few films, and a few exhibitions. Some people feel that she is a spin-off of the infinitely more famous Rodin—to me, their work looks nothing alike, but what do I know?

The question is whether she was mad, and if so, what if anything caused it. I look into the faces of the photo, and what do I see? Jessie—an English sculptor—peers at us, as if to say, “yes, world, remember us. Remember that we too were young, that we lived and loved, and went our separate ways. Yes, this is the last visit—we won’t see each other again.”

And Claudel?

She’s withdrawn. Nor had she wanted to see her old friend, but rancor? It’s a young person’s taste. The picture makes it clear: they are tied to each other by their history, by their fights, perhaps by their envy or jealousy. And they parted for many years. Jessie married, Claudel spent the final 30 years of her life in a madhouse: I see understanding in Jessie face. And in Claudel’s?

Resignation….

Let Us Now Praise Alfred Deller

What is it about them; why do have such an effect on people? Well, consider the words of one of the best countertenors singing today:

"There's always this fascination about the countertenor voice. But I've never really understood what that is, because I'm doing it every day – it's my voice. Yet when we sing, people cry and we get love letters. You get used to that." He turns to Jaroussky. "But I experienced, for the first time, what other people feel when I heard your recording Opium. I got goosebumps. For the first time in my life – I'm serious, Philippe – I thought, 'A-ha! This is why people are so fascinated by our voices.'"

The speaker is Andreas Scholl, and the Jaroussky he is talking to is Philippe Jaroussky, eleven years his junior and an absolute knockout as a singer.

And the countertenor voice? Well, it’s something of a mystery: most people believe that it’s produced as a kind of falsetto, but it turns out that, in the lower register, some notes can be produced naturally in what’s known as “chest voice.” (Full disclosure—I have only the dimmest idea of what this is, and a better blogger would look it up and report it to you. And why don’t I know more than the fact that singers feel that, when singing in “head voice,” they’re using their heads as resonance chambers? Mainly because there’s still a lot we don’t know, though apparently the whole physiology of singing has increased a lot over the last twenty years. So singers, while the rest of us are busy getting off to work and raising the children, spend lots of hours debating whether countertenors are male sopranos, male altos, or falsettoists. Oh, and by the way, you really, really, don’t want to get into the debate, so if you meet a high-voiced male singer at a party—rare, but it might happen—don’t call him a countertenor, or anything else. Otherwise, you’ll be lectured to for the rest of the night about vocal production.)

At any rate, there’s no question that the countertenor is a particularly lovely voice. But the mystery is that we have it at all, since but for one man, Alfred Deller, we might not have it at all.

Deller, born in 1912, championed the countertenor voice, and was instrumental in championing what has come to be called “historically informed performance” practice. And that would be? Well, it goes from using the “correct” instrument of the time (a harpsichord, not a piano; a theorbo, not a guitar) to correct tuning (our modern tuning is much higher than early music, and anybody who has played a cello tuned half a step lower—I think you can guess whom I mean—knows that the instrument responds wonderfully) to proper articulation and performance technique. Supposedly, all this leads to hearing music the way that the composer would have wanted / would have heard it.

So Deller was out there when nobody else was, and at a time when men were singing like women? I’ve always wondered about the beard that Deller wore all his life, even at that point when facial hair was tantamount to declaring yourself a Communist. And there’s that famous quote of the French woman who said: "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque"—to which Deller replied, "I think you mean 'unique,' madam."

So Deller took what was once a dying tradition, and kept it going. But he did more—he knew an amazing number of the best composers in Britain at the time; Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for him.

But the best thing? Deller was also instrumental in championing Baroque opera, which previously nobody had done much about. So everybody knew a Handel aria or two—think of the famous Largo that you learned on the piano, also known as “Ombra mai fu”—but nobody had heard the full opera (in this case, Serse, of 1738). But soon, we were hearing them again, as well as a lot of other music. And so, more and more male singers began to consider becoming countertenors, instead of tenors.

That’s what happened to Jaroussky—he started out life as a tenor, and then, out of curiosity, his voice teacher asked him what his falsetto (damn, what did I just say?) sounded like. And he turned out to be nimbler and more beautiful in that range of his voice.

It may be simple numbers, but I suspect not. Because as you can hear in the two clips below, the countertenor voice has really…well, improved. With Deller, and his son Mark, also a countertenor, the tone is a bit thin, reedy, and forced. But with Jaroussky and Scholl? Well, here’s what one person had to say, in the comment section of the Purcell clip below:

As a countertenor myself, I have a deep respect and appreciation for Deller. That being said, I'm glad that we've moved to a fuller, richer tone. I've never been all that enamoured of his singing. Still, we've got so many good countertenors today, and we couldn't have done it without pioneers like Deller.

I think that’s just. But I’ll say, as well, that Deller’s recordings of English folksongs have a magical quality that other singers—such as Scholl—may not have. It may simply be the long, long tradition that Deller inherited. Or it may be that the listener knows—that’s Deller, not a superb but still German modern countertenor. My vote?

There’s something about the sparseness, the simplicity of Deller’s voice that makes it ideal for folksong. Short of being, very late at night, on the English moors and hearing the song sung though the windows of a candlelit cottage—you couldn’t hear it better!

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?

Honey, Pass the Kleenex

Well, I heard the statement that 90% of people surveyed had been moved to tears by a piece of music, but only 5% or so reported having wept at the sight of a painting or cathedral. For poetry, interestingly, it appears to go up to about 50 or 60%. So then I wondered—what about me? Have I ever wept on seeing a painting?

I’d like to say yes, but then, what would I say when asked, “what painting?” So it’s better to tell the truth, even if it makes me a Philistine. In my defense, however, I can say that some places have a history and a grandeur that almost spurs the lachrymal glands into action. There’s St. John the Divine in New York City, and there—for entirely different reasons, was the battlefield of Gettysburg. And a month or two ago, I felt something akin to awe by just being in Carnegie Hall.

But then I stopped to wonder—have I truly been moved to tears by a piece of music? And if so, was it really the music, or was it the circumstances around myself at the time, or the memory of particularly emotional moments with which I had associated the music?

Because, let’s face it: there are times of great pain and loss—deaths, divorces, job loss—when you are crying at anything. When my father died, just looking at the garlic press hanging next to the little wire that he used to clean it (it was perhaps his least imaginative invention, but who else keeps a little wire next to their garlic press? Everybody else just scrubs harder….) was enough to trigger wails. And if I had taken the press and the wire to my brother? We would have been wailing in each other’s arms.

The problem? There’s nothing intrinsically sad about a garlic press.

Then there’s music that somehow has gotten associated, either in your or in everyone’s mind, with a particular event. For a lot of people, Barber’s Adagio for Strings is 9 / 11, punto. And that, of course, makes sense, because the music exactly defines the wrenching sorrow of the event. That’s—news flash, here—why they chose it.

All right, but what about the music that is genuinely sad, gut-wrenchingly sad, music that makes you reach for the razor blades? Has anyone ever compiled a list? Surely the Internet could fly in some pieces, since at the moment I can only think of five or six that I would absolutely include.

Fortunately, the Internet came through, and with some surprising choices. Oh, and I must say at the outset that two of the three lists I consulted had ten selections, the other one had only six.

OK—time to guess: what was the piece—and the only piece—that made all three lists?

“Dido’s Lament,” from the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell.

In fact, it made my list as well, among other reasons because I cannot get through the piece, even if I’m manic, without sobbing.

Curiously, Dido is on all three lists, but not one piece of music is on any two lists, which is to say that there are no duplicates. And here, starting more or less from earliest to latest, is what there is:

Miserere, by Allegri—hmmm, absolutely beautiful, to be sure, but sad? Sad enough to move me to tears? In this period, I can think of wrenching music—an Amen, for example, from the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin by Monteverdi, or some of the William Byrd sacred music.

Bach, predictably, makes the lists, but different pieces. “Come, Sweet Death” is on one site—but the piece is for organ, and guess what? I neither like nor dislike organ music, it just doesn’t get in. So I skipped it, after a minute of listening. Then there was “Cum sancto spiritu” from the B Minor Mass, which posed an interesting question: are we to include music that is so joyful that it makes you weep? That’s what the site says, and I’m willing to buy in. But following that argument, I’d vote for “Et in terra pax,” also from the B Minor.

The rest were, if I may say so, outliers. OK—there was Albinoni’s Adagio, which is pretty sad. There was Mozart’s Requiem, as it was depicted in the movie Amadeus. Then, there was Adagio for Strings.

The rest was all over the map, from the lento movement of Shostakovich Fifth, to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Oh, and speaking of Tchaikovsky, his violin concerto—or at least the second movement—lands on another list. An interesting pick was Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for strings; confession—I didn’t know it, I tried three minutes of it, and decided that not knowing was the preferred option.

Orchestrally, what’s not there? What piece would you expect that is strangely out behind the building, taking a cigarette break? Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony.—I just started to listen to it, in order to make sure it was what I thought it was, and yes, there are tears on the keyboard.

And what about opera, surely good for a cry or two? Well, La bohème makes it on two of the lists, but on one it’s the first aria of Rudolfo, and on the other list it’s the last aria of Mimi. On another list, Verdi’s V’ho Ingannato from Rigoletto appears; Wagner turns up with the funeral music from Siegfried on the third list.

Chamber music? Well, there’s the second movement of the string quintet of Schubert, which yes, definitely would be on my list. Besides that, there surprisingly little chamber music.

There were pieces I didn’t know—most particularly “Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,” from an astonishing poem by Neruda. Here, it’s sung by the composer’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died less than eight months after the recording.

Lastly, there was a song by George Butterworth based on the text of A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad.”  The song did nothing for me, but it did lead me to Vaughan Williams’s treatment of an old folksong, “Whither Must I Wander” And if you are dry-eyed at the end of it?

Check for a pulse!!

(P.S.—here are the links:

http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/10-classical-music-tear-jerkers/

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/07/10-best-classical-tear-jerkers-fiona-maddocks

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2010/09/27/130157375/the-saddest-music-in-the-world-7-tunes-to-make-you-tear-up  )