MUSIC

“I have been to the Opera six times;and I still live.” -G.B.Shaw



Many of us began negatively. And when we looked at opera, when we were forced to listen to opera, we preferred instead to conjure up images of Groucho, Chico and Harpo, romping and stomping, taking what seemed a stuffy and silly “art form” and turning it inside out. As those images of Night at the Opera danced inside our heads, we felt some relief. They knew, those sly and iconoclastic Marx Brothers, just how unbearable opera really was. We identified with the pranksters taking the wind out of the old bags who, overstuffed and overblown, bored us to death.

How could it be otherwise? What were those grand marches about anyway? What sense was there behind the impossible plots, the ridiculous love triangles, the confused identities, the forced heroics? And worse still, who could bear the contrivances of the singing itself? Who could put up with the cornball tenor? What was the meaning of the soprano, letting us have it, full force, with notes impossibly and unpleasantly high, with emotions completely overwrought and unrelated to the way we viewed our own private world of hope and despair? In short, why put up with it? What did it give us to hang on to?

Of course it could be otherwise. We could have been born into such an appreciation; we could have learned the great arias while being burped over the shoulder of an opera buff mommy or an opera buff daddy. But if that were not the case, how and when and where would we be able to cross over? (When is the first time the olive tastes strangely delicious and not strangely repulsive?) If our basic musical culture was rooted in those sounds packaged for quick and satisfying consumption, how could we ever have hoped to leap a century or two backwards and relate to the radically different sensibilities of menacing titans with names like Wagner or Verdi? So for years and years it was, it is, it will be, out of the question. Opera, on the face of it, sounds, looks and feels ridiculous.

And yet…

At the start of this year’s season of the Dallas Civic Opera I find myself moved by an inept and disconnected production of Lucrezia Borgia. And I ask myself why: It is certainly not Beverly Sills’ last-minute replacement, Leyla Gencer, who never makes it as Lucrezia, but cracks and fades and forces her way through the part. It is certainly not Jose Carreras, who sings convincingly through most of the opera only to undercut what credibility he has lent to the role by turning the last scene, in which he realizes that he and his mother have led one another to a common and tragic doom, into unintentional comedy. (In fact, he so exaggerates the death scene, so exaggerates and overplays the final, gasping cry to mother Lucrezia that the audience, who has been with him thus far, breaks out in incredulous laughter.) It is certainly not the sets, which are flat and unimaginative. (The prologue, the loveliest part of the opera, takes place on an after-the-party-is-over night in Venice. Unfortunately the set is more suggestive of the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel than a misty eve off the canals. The rest of the action unfolds in Ferrara – not Gerrara as the program would have you believe-and that city is made to look more like an ornate cigar box than a center of regality.) It is not, then, this version of Lucrezia Borgia which I find so pleasing, but Lucrezia Borgia itself-the thrilling overture, the wonderfully swift movement of it all, the heroism, the son, the mother, the ominous hints of incest and death. Impossible as it seems, silly as it appears, hysterical and foolish as it might once have been, now I buy it all, all three hours worth.

But how did I get here? Why am I sitting and lapping up the lyricism of it all as though it were candy? Why last month, on an empty afternoon during a business trip, did I rush to the Met in New York for the Saturday afternoon matinee of I Vespri Sici-liani, joining the throng, the believers, the fans who follow opera the way fanatics follow hockey or football. I was, of course, seeking pleasure – hours of pleasure – brought to me in the form of extravagant drama and music. And I am doing much the same here at home. For Dallas has been strong in opera, particularly Italian opera, for years, and we have our own home team, our own die-hard fans, our own small claim to fame. Still, getting here was an enormously confusing and painful process. And there is a strange twist in the fact that the season’s opener in Dallas- Lucrezia Borgia – was the very bridge I walked over years back when all this opera business began for me.

I thought, sitting there in the State Fair Music Hall, with Donizetti pouring into my head, of the road between Parma and Cremona in northern Italy. The distance between those cities is no more than twenty miles, but in the dead of winter the fog on that road is overwhelming and the drive seems interminable. For months, the landscape is invisible; you can see no further than a few feet beyond your own hand. The earth literally disappears. The dankness is chilling; cold cuts through you like a knife. The weather leaves you blind and you are forced back into whatever comforts might be afforded by your own thoughts and frozen dreams.

During the schoolyear of 1969-1970, my wife and I lived in Parma, in the heart of the city’s ancient center, in a palace-turned-apartment house which, still splendid and formidable, had been built in the 16th century. Our small apartment had floors of marble, ceilings at least twenty feet tall. No heaters could drive away the dampness; no woolen socks, no matter how thick, could protect our frostbitten feet. We shivered through the winter months like infants after a bath. Going to sleep at night, closing my eyes, I imagined that my bed had been transported to the icy plains of Siberia. I felt vulnerable, threatened by natural phenomena far beyond my control or comprehension.

I was in Parma to teach as part of an exchange between my American university and the University of Parma. I would wind up teaching courses in basic literature-American and Italian-to Italian English majors. There would be cultural confusion. Would I really be able to explain Emily Dickinson, in Italian, to college kids whose English was practically non-existent and whose strongest feelings about poetry were primarily the negative results of having to mindlessly memorize enormous passages from Virgil and Dante? I was also to teach a course at the University of Cremona. That meant I would be driving there twice a week, although the trip often had to be cancelled due to the thickness of fog in the mysterious Po Valley.

Parma itself seemed the most charming of Italian cities. There was the refined influence of Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon who reigned there for the first half of the 19th century. The people spoke softly, quietly riding their bicycles to and from work and the marketplaces. The shops were elegant and the fashions appeared every bit as chic as the clothes I had noticed in Paris or Milan. Each Saturday morning the men of the city would congregate in the central square-Piazza Garibaldi (what else could it be called?) – and move about for hours, talking to one another in what seemed to me a lovely ritualistic cocktail party. I would often wander through the crowd, eavesdropping, picking up snatches of conversation here and there. There was something fine about the city – the formal archways, the superb cheeses, the rich and exact cooking, the precise, easy formality to public life.

Why, then, in the middle of all this charm, was I convinced I was dying? Had the harshness of winter gotten to me, the dread chill of slate-grey skies and bleak, starless nights? Had those fog-laden drives between Parma and Cremona, through a countryside which would not be visible until spring, spooked me into losing my emotional equilibrium? Had the fact of being an expatriate left me faceless and hungry for cheeseburgers and the start of the Cowboy season? Was teaching students who were fundamentally disinterested in what I had to say and whose chief question was “Will it be covered on the exam?” – was that bringing me down? I tried to immerse myself in the local soccer season, but my efforts were half-hearted at best. I raced to the train station each day to pick up the International Herald-Tribune, fresh from Milan, at 5 o’clock. When the paper was there, I was revived for an hour or two. When it failed to arrive, my heart sank like a lead balloon. I thought of packing up and leaving early. I would escape the winter, though I wondered whether this fog had not encased the entire planet. (“It’s a rainy night in Georgia,” the song goes, “and it seems like it’s raining all over the world.”) Fortunately, my wife would have none of this. I had signed up to teach two semesters, and teach I would. I would lie awake at night, my hand over my heart, waiting for those steady beats to stop. I did not know why, but my normally enthusiastic self had disappeared. I peered through the shutters of our apartment window and there was nothing to see.

We lived on a street called Via del Conservatorio, named for the music conservatory at the end of the block. When I went to the luncheonette across the street I would hear operatic chirpings emanating from the music school. Someone told me that Arturo Toscanini was born and bred in Parma. I visited his home, now a museum, just across the river. Renata Tebaldi was a parmigiana, too, one of the music students told me. And one day, while I was coming back from Cremona (which, by then, I had learned was the home of Monteverdi, of the Guarnerius and the Stradi-varius families, the renowned violin makers, and of Mina, the most fabulous of all Italian popular singers), I found myself by chance in Busseto, hometown of none other than Giuseppe Verdi. The Teatro Regio, the opera house in Parma, figured large in the history of Italian opera; the lyrical tradition in the city in which I was living was strong. Opera was to be found everywhere. And all this was news to me.

I noticed that gas attendants and shopkeepers alike often hummed the famous arias from the big Puccini and Verdi operas. There was a popular feeling about those composers in Parma. And I learned, too, that the Parma audiences were infamous for their catcalls and hissing if a singer did not meet their standards. (That proved to be true enough, though what the audiences demanded was not so much vocal perfection, but rather the sort of overly romantic and melodramatic interpretations which, to more objective ears, might seem overreaching. I recall a miserably inadequate tenor singing the famous “Nessun dorma” aria from Turandot. I thought the audience would murder him and was shocked when instead they showered him with applause, even made him stop the show to sing it again. What they were responding to, of course, was his sappy rendition; they were quick to overlook any technical flaws. Nonetheless, singers feared the Teatro Regio and would often avoid Parma and the brutality of its opera crowd.)

That winter, then, deep in some depression which I could neither overcome nor understand, I followed the opera season. Before, opera meant nothing to me. It felt the very opposite of the sort of music which I had loved first and best-the natural singing of Billie Holiday. It seemed enclosed in a formality totally foreign to me. Why all the screaming and the screeching? What did it mean and why did it last so long? And why should I care? Unapproachable – that was the single word which came to mind when I thought of opera. And unapproachable it remained until, on a cold and clear night in December, we rode the train to Milan, to La Scala, to hear Montserrat Caballé sing Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia.

I had read the libretto, something which seems to me essential for anyone who wants to begin to approach an opera. (Lester Young, the finest of all jazz tenor players, was quoted on someone’s album notes as having said that it is mandatory for a jazz instrumentalist to know the lyrics to a song he is playing. An opera listener is in that same situation.) It was in the prologue, during the scene when Lucrezia sings to her son Gennaro who lies asleep, when I gave myself over to the opera.

I realized, first of all, that the plot was anything but ridiculous, and that it dealt with the impossible love between mother and son. I was convinced of both the love and the impossibility of that love ever being realized. Caballé herself was the persuader; her voice was almost too exquisite to comprehend; and most moving was her perfect pianissimo. Her most emotionally charged moments were the quietest. (I remembered a stereo component salesman who had one told me that the test of a fine system is the quality of reproduction at the lowest levels of volume.) Opera, I understood, required a leap of faith, from myself (and what seemed listenable and soothing to me) to the singers; from myself (and what seemed credible and provocative to met to the plot. Perhaps it was the fact of being in La Scala, an opera house which looks like the inside of a lovely jewel box, especially breathtaking when the lights are dimmed and only a warm, red glow is visible around the boxes. The contrast between festivity and doom grew out of the performance, out of the scenery, out of the work itself. (The final party scene in which wine, supposedly the agent of joy, is the instrument of death was believable in an emotional way which I had before associated with the poetry, say, of John Keats.)

Sitting there, in Milan on a December night, I felt immersed in so much melody, so much lyricism; it was like floating in the midst of a bubble bath. And when Gennaro struck the letter “B” from the crest reading “Borgia” to unwittingly insult his mother and leave the word “orgia,” I thought of my own strange high school pranks. And when, in the final scene, the frivolous party was destroyed by the knowledge that the guests had been drinking poison, I thought of the airplane ride from Buffalo to New York City when, after all the passengers had had a couple of drinks and no one seemed to have a care in the world, our high was broken; the jet flew into the eye of a raging storm and we were all convinced that the end had come. In short, I had related. I was transformed by an opera. And most surprising of all, I had broken down and wept during a performance of Lucrezia Borgia, a work of art which, only a month before, I would have argued had nothing to do with my life.

Was all this due to the infectious operatic environment of northern Italy? Or was I looking to be inspired and elevated by something distant from my own psychological past? It is hard to say. I have been listening recently to a record for which I have been searching for months and, thanks to the people at King Record Mart on deep Elm, have finally found. It is Joe Turner singing “Time after Time” (the album is Big Joe Rides Again, Atlantic 1332), and, hearing Joe’s incredibly strong blues/bass voice push that song to its limit, I am reminded of how close the emotional link between the lyrical heights of jazz and operatic singing. Joe’s technical equipment, his need to fire the melody, the overwhelming virtuosity of the performance – those are things often associated with opera. The same is true, I believe, of soul men Sam and Dave whom I heard several months ago. They sounded for all the world like great opera singers, so forceful and commanding were their abilities to shake you down.

Needless to say, I survived the winter and reveled in the opera season. The next year I would find myself marching down the center aisle of the City Opera in New York, planting myself in a front row seat for which I had paid too much, and relishing every moment of what must have been no more than a mediocre rendition of Tosca. (Years before, I had done the same thing for a Wilson Pickett show at the Apollo; I had let myself be assaulted by the show for two hours; I had given myself over to the catharsis.)

What is involved, then, in that leap of faith? It happened to John Stuart Mill who, at age 22, under a continuous siege of depression, found himself near a nervous breakdown, not knowing why or how. He credits Wordsworth with saving his life-Wordsworth who, like grand opera, is often accused of overworked and flowery emotionality. Here is what Mill has written in his Autobiography:

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it. . . What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind was that they expressed not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings.