The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  In the final days of college an event occurred that intensified my addiction to opera: I came upon three different music stores whose owners were liquidating their stocks of Red Seal records on the credible grounds that with the advent of radio there would no longer be much interest in the old records. The first store, in Philadelphia, was selling its stock at $1.00 per record. The second, in New York, was selling at $.69 a record. And the third store in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with a gigantic collection, was getting rid of them at $.50 each.

  I spent several hundred dollars of my first regular salary on these precious records, untouched by any needle, and started a collection that would be unmatched among my acquaintances. Now great new voices sang for me: Gigli, Pertile, Bjoerling, Castagna, Pons, Sayao, Ponselle, Warren, Rethberg, Pinza and one whose name few now remember except those who truly cherish the beauty of the human voice, Toti dal Monte. She did not sing much in America, nor did she make an abundance of records, but I acquired almost every one she did make.

  I had always had the habit, which I adhered to in my response to the arts, of trying to look or listen with an unprejudiced intellect. For example, whenever I entered a museum I would walk to the center of each room, from where I could see no labels, and ask myself: What is worth noting here? By taking this approach I not only discovered some excellent art but also gained confidence in my artistic judgment so that I have never had any hesitancy in relying upon my own taste. I have consistently fortified it with the opinions of others—I read a great deal of criticism—but I have never allowed critics to dissuade me from making my own evaluations. As a result my appreciation of the arts has been nothing but positive, and it has been one of the best parts of my life. I doubt that I would have felt this way had I been overawed by the opinions of others.

  The record that lives in my memory as perhaps the finest I ever owned was sung by Gigli, Rethberg and Pinza; it offered two trios I had never heard of, from two Verdi operas I would never see. From I Lombardi came the ‘Qual voluttà trascorrere,’ a passionate outcry in which the three voices blend superbly. From Ernani came the inspired ‘Ernani, involami,’ of which the accompanying notes said:

  With the words ‘Ernani, involami’ (Ernani, fly with me) Elvira, sung by Miss Rethberg, begins a coloratura of great brilliance, whereupon Don Carlos, King of Castile, sung by Mr. Pinza, breaks into the room and begins to make violent love to her. She is about to be dragged off by force when Ernani, sung by Mr. Gigli, steps forth to save her.

  I have never met anyone else who prized this record, nor have I ever talked with anyone who even knew of the I Lombardi trio, but to me it remains an almost perfect example of what ensemble singing can be, and I vastly prefer it to other more famous trios, such as the one in the concluding scene in Faust.

  But it was Toti dal Monte who totally captivated me. She sang one or two seasons at the Metropolitan, but she was short and dumpy—‘Little Toti,’ they called her—so her appeal was limited. But she had a voice of crystalline beauty that she handled superbly. She seems to have been one of those singers who sound better on records than they do live, and she won the hearts of listeners all over the world. She gave me great joy, and I am proud to be the honorary and perpetual president of the Toti dal Monte Admirers Club.

  Among the bargain records I acquired by chance I discovered marvels I would otherwise have missed: Martial Singher intoning the malevolent ‘Scintille, diamant,’ from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann; Eleanor Steber’s dark lament for Euridice, lost in Hades, from Gluck’s opera; or the impassioned contralto aria from Don Carlos, ‘O, mio regina,’ in which the one-eyed Princess Eboli acknowledges the harm she has done her queen.

  Another record from Don Carlos would play a curious role in my life. I would like to claim that at first hearing I recognized this for the fine composition it was, and for the extraordinary singing it represented, but I did not. It was the ‘Dormiro sol nel manto,’ in which King Philip of Spain says that he will sleep one day in his kingly shroud in the depths of the Escorial; it is a terrifying song of despair sung by a bass or a bass baritone. Here the singer was Ezio Pinza, a name I had learned only a few weeks earlier as the powerful voice in the Lombardi trio. When I first heard his great aria from Don Carlos, I thought little of it. Indeed, I preferred another unknown selection, which appeared on the reverse side: ‘O tu Palermo,’ from I Vespri Siciliani. But the more I heard the Don Carlos aria, the more I came to love it both as a piece of music and as an exhibition of what a dynamic singer like Pinza can do, and I sought out his other recordings, paying full price for them when I could not find them in the bargain basements. My response to Pinza must have been prophetic, for twenty years later he would sing in the musical play South Pacific, based on my book Tales of the South Pacific, and in this role so ideally suited to his remarkable talents he would find the popular recognition that had eluded him even though he had been one of the finest Mephistopheles and Don Giovannis ever to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House.

  At our first meeting, when I was nervous about facing a man whose work I treasured, and he was nervous about his ability to speak in English—he memorized lines that were phonetically written at first—the atmosphere was eased when I told him how much I admired ‘Dormiro sol nel manto.’ And in an apartment high above New York, where we were conducting an audition, we sang the great aria together. It was a disaster, of course; not only can I not carry a tune, but the aria begins with a tremendous, rumbling recitative, ‘Ella giammai m’amo’ (She never loved me), which had not been on my record because it would have made the cutting too long. So Pinza sang the complete aria, while I kept trying to butt in with the popular last half. He smiled and, continuing to sing, reached the overpowering moment when the king foresees his death: ‘I shall sleep in my kingly shroud beneath the black vault, here in the Escorial.’ I knew all the words—many dozens of times I had sung them with Pinza—and now we were really singing them together.

  During South Pacific’s long run on Broadway, I became good friends with Pinza and often we sang ‘Dormiro sol nel manto’ together; and the rumbling tones issuing from his deep chest would drown out the ineffectual noises I was able to muster.

  Among the discards I found a delightful thing put together by two famous American singers, the soprano Alma Gluck and the contralto Louise Homer. They joined in making ‘Whispering Hope,’ a sentimental old hymn with harmony so close as to be breathtaking. From the moment I played the record, which had come to me as part of a huge bundle, I was enslaved by it. The two voices blended with such delicious precision that an air of sanctity pervaded my room; this was religious singing of the most heartwarming kind. I should think that if the record was reissued with stereophonic background orchestra it might once more enjoy the enormous popularity it had in the 1920s.*

  While listening to my new records I discovered that I had a pronounced fondness for operatic choruses, and one day I stumbled upon what is generally considered to be the most effective chorus ever presented in an opera, the simple plainsong of the exiled Jews in Verdi’s Nabucco. In Babylon the exiles remember Jerusalem, and in their home-sickness they sing: ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate’ (Go, my thought, on golden wings.… ) This four-verse chorus, sung in unison against a simple accompaniment, swept Italy and all the other opera-loving nations. It was played at memorials, and when Verdi was buried in 1901 his mourners automatically began singing his best-loved composition. At his state funeral sometime later, Arturo Toscanini led a chorus of eight hundred in the number that had been Verdi’s favorite. Considering all this, it is remarkable that I did not even hear the music until I was past fifty.

  I am not sure that much else in opera escaped me, and yet one day in a pile of records sent to me by a now-defunct dealer in New York I came upon that staggering chorus from Fidelio. Its position in Beethoven’s opera is not unlike that of ‘Va, pensiero’ in Verdi’s Nabucco: a gang of prisoners is released for a few moments from their dark cells, and as they see the light for t
he first time in months they sing softly ‘O welche Lust’ (O, what delight!). This may have been the most powerfully operatic record I ever acquired, for the music spoke to me with overwhelming force. Through it I saw all prisoners, and the great dungeons of Piranesi, along with the cruel injustices of the world. Whenever I am confronted by civil tragedy I tend to recall this chorus; its steady beat throbs in my heart, and through it I suffer with those who are suffering. If I am an avowed liberal, and if I have been willing to spend time and effort in supporting worthy causes, it is partly because my attitudes were formed by the deeply humanistic qualities of the great operas. None had a stronger influence on me than Fidelio; if at some future time, someone should want to name a theme song that would exemplify what I hoped to have stood for in life, it could only be ‘O welche Lust.’

  In the area of human emotions, as opposed to the intellectualism of Fidelio, the record that superseded all others was another that I stumbled upon. It was a ten-inch record, and I avoided these because they seemed to give an inadequate return for the money spent acquiring them and the time spent in playing them. But this one appeared in a pile that a store wanted to get rid of, and I suppose I got it for next to nothing. It was a duet I had never heard before from an opera about which I knew nothing, Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele. Margherita and Faust are singing in prison of remembered days: ‘Lontano, lontano,’ (‘Far away, far away,’ or as always given in the catalog and on the record, ‘Far away from all strife.’) This time, from the moment the turntable started revolving, I appreciated the duet at its full value; it is a remarkable composition, very brief, and totally tragic. For me it subsumes all human experience where men and women are involved with love. It is a statement of human passion that echoes forever—the lost glories, the futile hopes, the remembered passions, the burning desire to reach some other place where love will be everlasting. Occasionally in my travels I have come upon someone who knew this duet; such admirers are not numerous, but they have made it immortal. It is not an important piece of music; it just happened to impress me when I was forming my values, and in a thousand instances when I have been far removed from record players or operas or singers this duet has echoed through my mind. I know of only one version, an extremely old one sung in French by Geraldine Farrar and Edmond Clément. No finer recording was ever made, for on this one they become all star-crossed lovers. How they could have expressed so much in such a brief time span is truly a marvel.

  If opera has had the moral effect on me that I have just stated, as in the case of ‘O welche Lust,’ how dare I say, as I did earlier, that it was a destructive vice?

  From that moment when I first heard the quartet from Rigoletto, I was enmeshed in a form of art which is inherently romantic, passionate, absurd and illogical. The stories upon which opera is founded are so preposterous that no rational man or woman should really bother with them. I have never met a person with a really first-class mind who wasted his or her time on opera; it is a make-believe world, reserved for us lesser types who can anesthetize our sense of reason, who can take the nonsense so seriously that we would memorize scores and texts—betraying an inability to separate common sense from the sheerest fantasy.

  I have been damaged, in some ways, by my fixation on opera, for it has helped to delude me into seeing human experience in a more dramatic form than facts would warrant; it has edged me always closer to romanticism and away from reality; it has made me a confirmed liberal when saner men, pondering the objective record, tend to be pessimistic conservatives; and it has encouraged me toward artistic conventions that I might have done well to avoid. For example, my love of the operatic aria has encouraged me to allow my characters to declaim at length when a brief speech might be more effective, and my enormous respect for the great duets tempts me to have two characters speaking to each other just a bit longer than the literary scene would warrant. In almost every respect my dalliance with opera has influenced my understanding of the problems of art. That sunny afternoon when Uncle Arthur lugged his fateful Victrola into our home, he condemned me to some wrong values and set my small feet upon some improper roads.

  And yet much of the mindset that has enabled me to enjoy a creative life was acquired through my intensive study of opera. I absorbed the verities expressed in the individual arias, taking seriously the lessons championed there, and I think it is fair to say that I have been guided in my moral decisions as much by the lessons I acquired from opera as by the preachings of either the Old or the New Testaments.

  The first of the two scenes from opera that best illustrate this curious teaching power comes at the opening of the third act of La Bohème, where the two pairs of lovers meet in the snowy dawn at one of the gates of Paris. The days of rapturous lovemaking are over, and the time for harsh reassessment is at hand; the lovers see each other in a new light, and when I see or hear them singing their impassioned music, I see not operatic performers but real people who live down the street. Boy meets girl in the way Rodolfo met Mimi; they draw apart; they see new aspects of the one they loved; they experience anguish and soaring emotions; and the dream fades. As I have been allowed to observe the world’s emotional life, I have often found it is six o’clock on a snowy morning and the gates are locked.

  I recommend that young men listen with attention to the powerful solos, duets and trios of the third act of Aida, for they deal with loyalty and patriotism and love and temptation, and few human lives will be lived to their conclusion without having to confront one or another of these aspects of human behavior. When I hear this magnificent music, so perfectly attuned to the problems of the three characters, I become Radames and face the terrible decisions he must make: love versus duty, treason versus loyalty, a passionate moment versus a long life of service, personal gratification versus the advancement of one’s career. These are the kinds of problems that confront not only Radames but many young men everywhere.

  Several times I have had to deal with such problems and have reacted in accordance with the convictions about loyalty forged when I put myself in the place of Radames. Treason to my country, or even disloyalty, would be absolutely impossible for me, not because I am a strictly moral man but because as Radames I see what such behavior can lead to.

  The tragedy of the young American politicians who were undone by the Watergate scandals was that they had not faced in their imaginations the conditions that were going to overtake them in real life. There are infinitely more practical ways of acquiring moral bases than going to see Aida, but that’s how I found mine, and I would hope that others would find theirs in their own preferred areas of interest.

  But the segment of opera that touches my wandering life most intimately comes at the conclusion of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a difficult work that many may not enjoy. The gods, assembled after a chain of hellish actions and betrayals, finally attain their goal: they are free to cross over the arched bridge from darkness into the sunny glories of Asgard and Valhalla. All the wanderings I have done are epitomized for me in their stately passage: their uncertainty as they are about to enter a new world with new complexities; the hopefulness of Wotan as he perceives possibilities; the inexorable fate that cuts us all down to un-heroic size; and the mysterious forces released with the discovery of any new world. I have spent much of my life crossing golden bridges to new lands and new adventures and have always done so largely in terms of this towering scene. If grand opera had given me nothing more than this guideline to the travels and explorations I would make, it would have served me well.

  My obsession with opera was well advanced before I learned what pure music was. While a sophomore in Swarthmore College I was stopped in the hallway by Professor Fritz Klees of the English department who had never had me in class. ‘They tell me you’re doing first-class work,’ he said, ‘I have a free ticket to the Philadelphia Symphony for Saturday night. Would you care to join me?’ Eager for any new experience in learning, I accepted. I looked in the paper to see what the program would be and learned that
the famous Boston conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, was conducting a program of only two works, Beethoven’s Fifth and Third. Doing what any self-respecting young scholar would do when faced with an intellectual challenge, I hurried to the library and checked out books—Beethoven, symphony, orchestra and general musical history. By the time I climbed the stairs at the incomparable Academy of Music I was prepared to treat the forthcoming concert with respect based on some knowledge.

  I remember that one of the books on which I had crammed had described the revolutionary way in which Beethoven had ended his third movement of the Fifth, with only heavy passages in the double bass making the transition, without pause, into the glorious final movement. ‘This,’ said the writer, ‘is something powerful to listen for.’ And I prepared to listen. The four opening chords of the first movement were also praised, but I was not prepared for the majesty with which they filled that hall.

  It was music so grand, so inevitable that it swept me along, breathless; I was stunned by the brilliance that a strong conductor and a superb orchestra, working together, could produce, so that by the end of the third movement, I was limp from this earthshaking experience. And then the low rumble that my guide had spoken of began, and by the time the transition led to the explosion of the final movement, that song of triumph, I was literally out of my chair as I leaned forward to see which instruments were taking over from the rumbling double basses to create this heavenly sound. I had started my serious musical education with Beethoven’s Fifth.