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?

A Winter's Journey Re-journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.'".

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty? 

969,133,413

No, it’s not the amount of money that we as a nation go deeper into debt ever minute.

It’s the number of YouTube hits for a song called “Gangnam Style.”

Well, the computer has just red squiggled Gangnam, and for once I’m comforted. Someone, or something, is as unhip as I.

Well, if 969,133,413 people have watched, shouldn’t I? Am I missing something? Doesn’t a blogger have a responsibility to his international audience to keep himself up to date with modern culture?

I go roughly from Gregorian chant to Part / Lauridsen—is that enough? Shouldn’t I check out the latest trends in pop culture?

Well, I happened on the whole thing through CNN—a gentleman in England dropped dead of a coronary while dancing to the song. So I became curious—was there something particularly lethal about it?

The first indication that something was seriously bizarre was Wikipedia’s article. Guess, Gentle Reader, how many citations the article had!

Oh—and keep in mind that the song was released on 15 July 2012. That means it’s been around only five months.

I fear for you if you guessed too high. There are, in fact, 341 citations backing up what is one of the longest articles I’ve read—OK, skimmed—on Wikipedia.

This is the story that you—presumably—know and I didn’t. The song is by a South Korean performer named PSY. Gangnam is an exclusive area of Seoul.

Well, I took 4 minutes out of an otherwise productive life to watch it. And here, stripped of the hypnotic beat, the flashing lights (anybody prone to migraines should think twice about watching this), the blatant and annoying sexuality is the essence of the piece.

Yup—nothing. Zilch. Nada. It’s the musical equivalent of bubblegum, and it lasts about as long.

And what’s wrong with bubblegum?

Absolutely nothing.

I chew it, occasionally, and find it mildly pleasant. I don’t, however, expect it to be in any way nourishing. I wouldn’t replace with food as my steady diet.

Now, dear Reader, guess how many citations there are for the greatest song-cycle in the canon of Western Music (love that pomposity—wanted to use the word “canon” for years….)—Winterreise?

39.

So? Why should it matter? In fifty years time, no one will remember PSY, and no one will much care.

But I worry about kids that assume this is the only music there is. Or indeed, that it’s music. It worries me that people—adults, scholars, writers—encourage this belief. It bugs me that people assume that all music has equal value. Or worse, that there’s something condescending about a person who says, yeah—there’s a difference.

My other worry?

That kids’ view of the world is being shaped by this video. Nothing about it has any semblance of sense. It’s random, ridiculous, hypnotic and erotic.

It’s as far away from a narrative as it can get.

At age fourteen, with adolescence and a world looming ahead of me, would I have wanted a message like this?

To the edge once again

It’s the reason so many psychiatric patients eventually exhaust all but the most devoted of their support system.

Come clean—I stopped taking one of my meds.

But be fair—I told my doctor, my psychiatrist that is, and though skeptical, he agreed.

It’s called Remeron and it has two faces. The first is to lift the spirits. I looked it up on a great website—crazymeds.org. OK, maybe not the most reliable, but definitely more readable than the drug-sponsored sites.

This guy’s take (site is obviously written by a manic)?

Remeron is legalized marijuana.

Might be. Because it does exactly what dope did to me, those many years ago when I was young and experimental.

Remember the munchies?

“Coffee ice cream!” I shouted over my shoulder at Raf, who was puzzled—why was I going to CVS at 11PM? And why couldn’t I stop and answer, so urgent was the craving?

Oddly, I don’t actually like coffee ice cream—but four hours after taking Remeron 15mg PO at HS (that's for Ruthie, to remember her nursing days) I would commit armed robbery to get it.

Well, it wasn’t doing my blood sugar any good—to say nothing of my cholesterol. And my other antidepressant—Lexapro—had worked fine for two years, until Wal-Mart sacked me when I was working my way through the death of Franny. 

I convinced the psychiatrist. And I tapered off the drug, as instructed.

First days were fine. Actually, almost better than fine. I was in Culebra and had an exalted moment. I was on the morning trot, listening to The Creation, when it hit me, how uncannily apt the music of my journey had been. Starting with Winterreise as I went into the bottom of death and despair. Then Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang—as I moved through sickness to health. Lastly, The Creation, as I gave birth and set forth a Franny—a new Franny, my Franny—into the world again.

The Creation—get it? The gods aren’t subtle around here....

We came to a hill, Franny and I—she was trotting alongside of me—and the Haydn came to a long, achingly beautiful ascending—acsending, catch that word?—passage.

Right, so we were three: Franz Joseph, Franny and I.

So I had Franz Joseph in my ear. I reached out and grabbed Franny by the shoulders and hugged. And we sailed up the hill together.

Right—all was well for the next couple of days. But then I stopped writing. Got off my normal schedule. And two days ago, had a very strange thing happen.

Hypoglycemia.

Well, it’s happened before. And somehow, it was 2PM and I hadn’t eaten anything. So I went to the café, and they made me a very good, very large tuna sandwich.

Oddly, the sensations didn’t go away. For me, hypoglycemia is about anxiety. I get desperate / frantic to eat.

You do, and it goes away.

Why wasn’t it?

Right—went to CVS and bought orange juice. Drank the full container. 

Still felt hungry.

Then Miss Taí calls—she’s sensing a rat, or maybe something fishy. I tell her about the hypoglemia. Call tomorrow.

By the time Raf arrives, I’m pretty much a wreck. Now I’m having muscle cramps, and I decide I need magnesium. And oddly, the muscles cramping are ones that never cramp—my fingers and the top of my ankle. Then I notice that I can’t really breath. Well I can, but not easily. And damn, what’s going on with my blood sugar?

Why am I so anxious?

And why was I still feeling strange the next day?

And feeling dammit it’s not fair why has my life been so fucking hard I’ve had to STRUGGLE FUCKING STRUGGLE for fucking years now and I’ve never had it easy and fuc kingf can fuqeiufam l;alcqm09rinf             p’

Phone rings. Miss Taí, wondering how my mood is? 

Can’t talk, I need to eat, call me tomorrow.

But she made me think. This couldn’t be hypoglycemia. Come on, Marc—you’re an old nurse. Think it through. What’s different?

I go into the kitchen. Why am I here? Why is a banana in my hand? Am I supposed to eat it…..

You can eat it if you want. Now go back into the kitchen.

Why am I standing in front of the sink?

Water—you need water.

And now the pill.

I see the pill in my palm. I take it and swallow it. It is four fifteen.

At five, I am doing dishes. I am telling myself, ‘you’ve also been given stuff many people have not. You are way talented in ways many others are not. You see things others don’t. You had wonderful parents, and have a long stable marriage. Yes, it’s been hard. But others have had it harder….’

OK—so Taí?  Call me at four—let’s figure out how to sell this book.

And thanks!

The Dead Finger

Readers of this blog know about it. Last May, as we were celebrating the second anniversary of Franny’s death, someone put her finger on the test button of the smoke alarm.

Recap—the Zanas had come out and brought food. The talk turned to mystical matters—how Bess always associates her mother with deer, and how, in speaking with her sister about this, she went to the window, to pull up the shades. “Wouldn’t it be weird,” said Bess, “if there were a deer…”

Don’t have to tell you. There wasn’t one.

There were fourteen.

And that’s when, in the Acres, the smoke alarm went off. And of course, there was no smoke in the house.

I took the damn thing outside, where there was a strong breeze.

Wouldn’t stop….

I finally took the battery out. And apparently unwilling to violate too many natural laws, Franny relented. Then the Morning Glories held their affair, to which they graciously invited us! Well, no Newhouse cannot NOT have the last word.

In this case, it was 17 minutes of Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang. It, like Winterreise six months previously, had been haunting me. 

Well, that put an end to THAT party. Not much you can do after that. So I took a walk with Cheryl, our hosts cleaned up Franny’s house, and they departed. “Wow,” said  Eric, “wonder what an outsider would have thought of that.”

And then, an outsider turned the porch light off.

Wondering why I bothered, I went out to examine the empty porch.

(For a fuller account of the whole affair, as well as a wonderful performance of the Dankgesang, click here….)

Well, well—I knew about the dead hand (or thought I did), but the dead finger?  Because this morning, the Schumann I had decided on for the daily trot wasn’t to Franny’s liking.

She changed it to the Brahms’ Piano Concerto number two. 

Well, it was either the stupid shuffle button or the dead finger. But here’s the deal.

She wants Brahms? She gets Brahms.

And it was curiously appropriate. Because the second pregnancy began with another Brahms’ piano concerto. The first, of course—there are only two.

The first pregnancy ended with her death, which spawned a book. The second pregnancy ended with my death, and set off the writer. And now, in the curiously jumbled way things happen, Franny is born again, for the ten or ten thousand people who may read about her.

She’s out there stirring around—no more jangling for her!

I wrote, some paragraphs up (can’t be back…), that I knew about the dead hand. Seems I didn’t—thefreedictionary.com defines it thus:

dead hand

n.

1. The ever-present, oppressive influence of past events: "Psychotherapy explores the ways in which the past has shaped people, and how its dead hand continues to deform their lives" (James S. Gordon).

2. Mortmain

[Middle English dede hond, translation of Old French mortemain or Medieval Latin manus mortua, mortmain.]

Well, I knew the first definition, but what’s the skinny on the “mortmain?”

mortmain [ˈmɔːtˌmeɪn]

n

(Law) Law the state or condition of lands, buildings, etc., held inalienably, as by an ecclesiastical or other corporation

[from Old French mortemain, from Medieval Latin mortua manus dead hand, inalienable ownership]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

mortmain

transfer or ownership of real property in perpetuity, as transfer to or ownership by a corporate body like a school, college, or church.

See also: Property and Ownership

This makes dim sense to me. Looked it up, further, and got an interesting account of the struggle in medieval times of property between the Church and State. 

But I was hot and sweaty, exhausted as much by the trot as the labor of two pregnancies. Plus the Brahms was washing through my brain, still. I decided to skip any further investigation of the dead hand, or mortmain.

I’ll take the dead finger instead….

The Climate Inside and Out

Rain, today, and at last. It’s been the second driest June in history—day after day of unrelenting heat, and milky blue clouds (the result of Saharan dust in the upper atmosphere.)

It’s a relief. After cold and rain in both Wisconsin and London, I was ready for hot and dry. Well, it’s the old story: the gods punish us by giving us what we want….

The inner climate has turned as well. I revisited the piece of music—and the writing that went with it—that haunted me in the first week of March.

The d minorPiano Concerto of Brahms. 

It was—like Winterreise and the late quartets of Beethoven—music that I’d been waiting to get into. And like the other works, it’s not conventionally pretty music. 

Nor was my experience with it pretty. I willed myself to go back to that moment of madness—my first panic attack in December of 2011.

Why? Is it rational to revisit the irrational? Wouldn’t a sane person do anything to avoid a return to the world of utter insanity?

Can’t say. I could tell you that I had to go back to see it from the other side—the other side being sanity. Or I could say I had to master my fear that the madness would return by tempting the gods, daring them to fling me into the whirlpool again. I could say I had no choice.

Possibly true, all of the above. None of them feels right.

I only knew, that first week of March (also the first week of Lent) that I was operating on blind faith—and the love and faith of a sister in Tobago. And Raf, who worried silently all throughout the period.

OK—site and setting. El Morro, the oldest of the four remaining fortifications the Spaniards built. It’s built—as is its sister in Havana—at the mouth of the harbor. It’s huge. It is not—by design—inviting. It was early morning—seven, perhaps—and raining / overcast.

And yes, for the fifty minutes that Brahms takes to finish his struggle I took to finish mine. I went back—I was on the same road (though technically not) as I had been. True, there were no cars speeding past me.

There were lashes.

I was being scourged, whipped…and purified.

I came home and wrote the experience as I’ve not written anything in my life. Actually, I didn’t write. I took dictation.

A week of exhausting struggle followed. I relearned everything. How to do the dishes. How to do a copy and paste. How to book a reservation on Expedia.

I practiced a mindfulness in that week that was excruciating.

“And how are you doing,” said my doctor, a week or two later.

“How many movements of the fingers does it take for you to log in and see your email?” I asked.

She was baffled.

“It takes me three. I type a ‘g’ in the address bar and the computer suggests ‘gmail.’ I click on that, and it takes me to the gmail page. As it’s loading, I move the cursor to the area where ‘sign in’ will appear. I type ‘m’ into the username and the computer remembers marcnewhouse333. The cursor is in place—I click on that. The computer remembers my password. I press ‘enter.’ That’s how I get my email….”

It was like being a stroke victim—relearning the things we do automatically every day. And it took an immense will.

I failed, mostly. That’s fine—that’s what Buddhists do. 

I learned some things.

There is no time. Someone always pulls me back—away from the speeding cars or the abyss of pure insanity. That I’m here to serve. That my talents have value.

I’ve lost most of that, now. (If you could see my apartment, you’d know….) But enough remains.

Beethoven Quartet no. 15, 3d movement

It’s a curious thing how no one—at least I think—can write sensibly about the effect of hearing music psychologically and emotionally.

Think of it—we sit in a crowded concert hall, as the crashing last chords of Beethoven’s Fifth blast off into infinity (until the next time around). How to describe that elation?

Or we sit—as I once did—in a dark room in a large empty apartment and hear the slow “Amen” of one of the Monteverdi Vespers for theBlessed Virgin of 1610. I was suspended between faith and despair, and knew that somehow a question of life and going on was occurring. The tears flowed down my cheeks, I fought to stop the sound and the pain, and could not.

But who can write about it?

OK, I’m not all that well read. I should probably do some research. Tolstoy, I know, wrote a long short story based one theKreutzer Sonata—right, know the sonata, don’t know the short story. And others have tried, some of which I have read. And it always comes across flat, or forced, or sometimes just artificial.

Or worse, inflated.

And the better the music, the worse the writing tends to be….

So I should back away from making a larger fool of myself than I normally do. Because the piece that has haunted me, this last 6 weeks, has been one of the greatest of them all: Beethoven’s quartet number 15, third movement.

In German, it’s known as Heiliger Dankgesang, the words Beethoven inscribed on the manuscript. A holy hymn of thanksgiving, that would be, and Beethoven had every reason to be giving thanks—he had been severely ill, and feared that he was dying.

He recovered, and wrote perhaps the most haunting composition of his life.

It starts agonizingly slow—moving as if under water. Or perhaps floating—there’s an ethereal quality of suspension and immersion in some other dimension. And it’s modal—which means that it uses the one of the scales of Gregorian chant. And then, it breaks into a joyful, almost manic second section. Here it’s classical, ordered, as ornamented as a Versailles drawing room. “Strength regained,” writes Beethoven at this point in the manuscript, and indeed, there is all of the joy that attends recovery from a near fatal illness.

And then the slow section returns, though slightly altered.

The light breaks through again, as the second joyful section is repeated. 

And then comes the final—fifth—section, again slow as the first and third had been, again very similar thematically and harmonically. But now Beethoven introduces the theme that has been hiding in the prior two slow sections. And it’s here that words fail.

Not just for me. Apparently T. S. Eliot was obsessed as well. Some think that the Heiliger Dankgesang may have been the inspiration for the Four Quartets. At any rate, he wrote to Stephen Spender, “I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” (Thanks, Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_No._15_(Beethoven)

Well, not having read the Four Quartets, I’ve no idea whether Eliot did. I can only tell you my own experience, as real as Winterreise was for me. A party had been announced on the third of May—the second anniversary of Franny’s death. Being a guest myself, I was spared the problem of who should be invited or not. It was a Morning Glory affair—put together by the people who had cared so lovingly for Franny for the two years or so when we could not.

So—back to the Acres, to the house that had seen her last days, as well as so many others. Eric kindly put off planting a garden and joined me there—the two of us, greatly more united than before, would face this together.

It takes some fortification, of course, to go into any house in which a parent has died—somehow, the Acres presented even more of a challenge. This was also the house where so many parties had been given, so many friends joyfully received and talked to, so many stories had been told. And Franny had been something of a party animal herself—unlike Jack, who liked smaller affair.

So Eric hit on the possibly questionable idea of buying the largest vat of bourbon ever to hit the market—it would easily have filled a Victorian hipbath….

Well, we were equal to that task….

And it may have been a good thing. For as always, Franny hit us, first thing on entering the house.

Silence—as prevailing and lingering as the wood smoke from the Norwegian smoke had been.

Well, silence is something we don’t do well—either in Puerto Rico or in the Newhouse family. We cast around for rescue.

Fortunately, the Zanas—as ever—proposed coming out a few days before the party and bringing us food and diversion. This was quickly agreed to.

And they brought the stories—of Jack sitting down to eat his Chinese food, closing his eyes, savoring, and saying, “hmmmmm….” The talk turned a bit metaphysical.

“You know,” said Bess, “it’s a curious thing—I always associate my mother with deer. And once, when my sister and I had been talking about her, after she died, I went to the window and told my sister ‘wouldn’t it be wild if I opened the curtain and there was a deer?’”

Don’t have to tell you, do I?

There wasn’t one deer…

Just fourteen or so. All grazing gently, moving without care or concern.

You can imagine Bess and her sister….

“Might not have worked in New York City,” I was about to say, when…

…we were jolted out of our seats by the smoke alarm. I tell you the explicable because it leads so well to the inexplicable. No one was smoking—of course!—no one was cooking. There was no fire of any kind, and no smoke in the house.

And those babies are LOUD! So I grabbed the thing from atop the beam supporting the roof—Norwegian American height does come in handy, despite banging my head on every Frank Lloyd Wright entrance I’ve visited (he made all his entrances just an inch of two above his own head, the arrogant bastard)—and took it outside, where a strong breeze was blowing.

Clearly, someone had her finger (note possessive adjective) on the “test” button. The alarm wouldn’t stop.

Not at all sure that it would work, I removed the battery. And you-know-who took her finger off the button….

A silence even greater than the night of our arrival fell.

So she was there, all right. Well, why not? It is her house.

Though about to be sold.

But it may be that she was ready, at last, to go on. When the night of the party arrived, the weather finally turned warm—it had been a week of cold, sullen, spiteful rain. But at last it was warm—warm enough for the shorts I had blithely packed.  Relief!

At 1:40 in the afternoon—two years to the minute from her death, Eric and I listened by ourselves to the Beethoven.

This is called emotional preparation.

Within seconds, each one of us was weeping silently, shaking or rocking in our individual chairs. At the end—after 17 minutes of the most wrenching music Beethoven could produce—we stood and hugged.

Yes, a bear hug.

One of Eric’s specials—now gratefully received.

And then the hosts arrived, all 16 of them. Their party was to start.  We two guests welcomed them at the door, and let them go to it.

Of course they brought the food—and what food it was! They brought poetry as well, and what poetry it was! And the evening grew dim—the classic Wisconsin sunset that I had known, two years ago, had been revived.

It seems that no Newhouse can NOT have the last word, the last story.

I moved to the speakers I had bought. And played the Heiliger Dankgesang. If she had spent eleven days fasting to her death, some of her dearest friends could spend 17 minutes reliving it.

And we did. The light fell—softly, gently—and at last the violist announced her noble theme. The others joined. It became unbearable, as Beethoven took the theme, expanded it, came to a climax, retreated, rethought, reworked, reconciled, and then….

…rejoiced.

“That was amazing,” said Eric, after the last guest had left.  “Wonder what an outsider would have thought of this event….”

And then, the porch light went out.