Queen of the Night - Mozart Staccato and Upside Down

 I have a weakness for the razz-matazz.  Much as I'd like to think of myself as a sophisticated listener of classical music, lyrical pieces like Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, I'm more often drawn to pieces that require technical virtuosity - fingers that "fly across the keyboard."

My go-to music is instrumental, chiefly piano, and also violin.  But I have no trouble defining the human voice as an instrument, as well, and this especially holds true, it seems to me, for singers with exceptional talent and well harnessed raw powers - singers like Pavarotti or Joan Sutherland, to name just a couple of my favorites.

When it comes to showing off at the piano, Liszt comes first to my mind.  But there are many others: Chopin, Prokofiev, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit.  

But I want to focus here on what I think must be the most difficult piece ever writtten for a coloratura  soprano, credit going for Mr. Mozart himself.  I'm talking about that challenge not only to the voice box but to the lips and tongue and cheeks as well: "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (The Vengeance of Hell boils in my heart)" from The Magic Flute. It's kind of a rite of passage for coloratura sopranos to attempt it, so there is no shortage of performances to listen to.  For me, the leader of the pack has got to be Diana Damrau.  Here she is all gussied up on a costume that does justice to her magical vocal skills, a gown suggestive of a bonfire and a wig that looks like she's wearing a Victorian sofa nestled in an electric fan.  Pure theatricality to give form to what's going on here on stage: a mother, known as "The Queen of the Night" telling her daughter, Pamina, that she has to put a dagger in the heart of Sarastro. Not because he has been holding Pamina hostage, but because he has robbed her, the queen, of her powers.  "Do it," says the queen, or "you will be my daughter nevermore!"  A heavy trip to lay on an innocent kid.

Opera is by nature histrionic, but nowhere more excessively dramatic than in this aria, which is part of opera lore, and not just in German-speaking countries, where they call German operas like The Magic Flute not by their Italian name, but by a German name, a "Singspiel" - a song play.

An example of how much fun German speakers can get out of this over-the-top piece of music can be seen in the jazz takedown by Bodo Wartke, Germany's cabaret artist and musical satirist par excellence.   To help you follow along (and why wouldn't you?), here are the lyrics in English translation and in the original German:

[I hope I haven't crossed the copyright lines here.  If so, I will take this down immediately, of course.  But just so you can follow Bodo's performance... 

Hell's Vengeance Boils in My Heart,
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,

death and despair,
Tod und Verzweiflung,

Death and despair flames around me!
Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!

Doesn't Sarastro feel the pain of death because of you,
Fühlt nicht durch dich Sarastro Todesschmerzen,

Sarastro's death pains,
Sarastro Todesschmerzen,

Don't you, my daughter, ever again.
Sot du meine Tochter nimmermehr.

You never do that to me, my daughter.
Sot du mei, meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Aaaaaah...
Aaaaah...

my daughter never again.
meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Aaaaaah...
Aaaaah...

My daughter will never do that again.
Sot meine Tochter nimmermehr.

Be cast out forever and forsaken forever,
Verstossen sei auf ewig und verlassen sei auf ewig,

May all bonds of nature be shattered forever,
Zertrümmert sei auf ewig alle Bande der Natur,

Abandoned, abandoned, and shattered
Verstossen, verlassen, und zertrümmert

all the bonds of nature, all the Baaaa...
alle Bande der Natur, alle Baaaa...

Aaaaah..., gang, all the bonds of nature,
Aaaaah..., Bande, alle Bande der Natur,

If not for you Sarastro will turn pale!
Wenn nicht durch dich Sarastro wird erblassen!

Hear, hear, hear revenge, - gods!
Hört, hört, hört Rache, - Götter!

And lest you think he's the only one making silly of this Queen of the Night aria, here's a lady doing it upside down.

So much for attending the opera in a black suit and a starched collar.

Bounce's Yahrzeit

Bounce and Miki

 Sometime in the early 1950s I found myself in Temple Beth Israel, the synagogue in my home town of Winsted, Connecticut.  I can't remember how or why I got there; possibly it was the time our youth group at the First Church, which was directly across the street from the synagogue, got invited to services in a move to bridge the space between our religious faiths - my home town was good that way.

What I do remember is that at some point in the service a man got up to speak of his father.  It was his father's "yahrzeit" I learned, the anniversary of his death. It was the moment, if I were to pick one, when my lifelong respect, not just for things Jewish but for the Jewish religion in particular, began.  A profoundly human community thing to do, to stop for a moment and give an individual a chance to speak publicly of the grief they felt over the loss of a loved one.

I know there are people who see my assertion that one can love an animal as fiercely as one can a fellow human being as disrespectful, somehow.  Even folly.  But I have lived these last 365 days in sadness since we took the life of my beloved canine daughter, Bounce, because she had a growth in her belly and, at age fourteen, the pain and confusion of an operation, I decided, would take her too far below the quality of life line to justify keeping her alive. 

It's one thing to define dilemma as a philosophical concept. It's quite another to feel it in your bones. I had long since recognized that the capacity to love and care for another was actually more important to the soul than the gift of being loved, so it didn't surprise me that I was facing some serious grief.  In no small part because Miki had died just a short year and a half earlier. But I wasn't ready for what it would do to me to be the one to pull the plug, to give the order for the vet to put Bounce to sleep and then administer a second medication to stop her heart.  As I watched this beautiful little creature close her eyes and relax into a face at peace, I had what it takes to convince myself I was doing the right thing.  I wanted selfishly to keep her alive at all costs, but chose to put her comfort and freedom from pain ahead of my own desires. Why then, was I feeling like I had failed at one of life's greatest challenges, to love and care for another, to be the guardian and protector of another life.  

It has been a year today. The ache is not as acute, but it won't go away. I can speak of it, and I spend a great deal of time dealing with death and dying now that I've lived beyond the normal lifespan of an American male.  I trust I will process this grief eventually. 

Just not yet.

Boots - a review of the TV series

It's easy these days to succumb to dismay or even depression over the efforts of the oafish Pied Piper in the White House to dismantle democracy in the U.S.A.  Two hundred and fifty years we've been at this project, trying to include more and more of the American populace into our sometimes hit sometimes miss effort to make the Enlightenment ideals in our founding documents a reality.  We are in an era where our steps forward seem to be wiped out by steps backwards.  But... but... I'm writing this on October 18 and the images are coming in of millions in the streets of all fifty states on No Kings Day, so the fat lady ain't sung yet.

It's always useful to be reminded of how far we've come.  It's for that reason I just sat through the eight Netflix episodes of Boots, a series inspired by The Pink Marine, a book by Greg Cope White, about his experiences as a gay man in the Marines in the days before "Don't Ask Don't Tell."  Normally I don't take a lot of pleasure in beating my head against the wall, but I read somewhere that the fact that it was spread over eight episodes meant it was able to track the progress of gay liberation in the military that paralleled the progress in society at large, and who doesn't like happy endings?

There were times when I thought I'd wandered into enemy territory.  Boots is gay history and ultimately a coming out story with a happy ending.  But it is also a full-throated endorsement of the world of macho men and the U.S. Marines.  The story takes place at a basic training camp where "boys are made into men" - i.e., where they learn to shout "kill" at every opportunity and grit their teeth against pain.  I wanted to turn it off at times.  The reason I didn't was that the acting was superb and the gay characters were complex personalities.  There are multiple sub-plots, all shedding light on contemporary American minority groups.  The lead character, Cameron, and his best friend, Ray, join the Marines to get away from home. Cameron is running from his mother's neglect, Ray from his father's pitiless machismo.  They wonder at times if they haven't moved from the frying pan into the fire when Cam gets bullied for being gay and Ray for being a mixed-race kid.  There's a lot of bullying, in fact.  The recruits are not the most enlightened of folk.

I discovered, once I got far enough into it, that one of Boots' producers was Norman Lear. The company is headed by a female captain, there are twin brothers working out family dynamics, a suicide, masochistic leadership, and plenty of examples of selfish kids learning to care for their fellow recruits.The characters grow and mature over time, and that is probably the reason why I couldn't put it down.  It's a superb sociological study of America's difficulty in handling its diversity.  

And lots of jingoism and chauvinism.  You have to take the less appealing with the more appealing.

Semper fi!