My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Donna Leon

  A look at her discography indicates that this is a singer who has chosen her repertory sparingly and has chosen it well. It also shows that she has arrived at the rare position, one generally held only by singers of pop and rock, where her record company has sufficient trust in her musical talent and taste to risk taking a recording chance on her.

  This was certainly the case with her For the Stars disc, which she recorded with pop star Elvis Costello, long a great fan of hers. When I expressed some reservations about the disc, she defended it strongly, and I was persuaded that this defense was based on her sincere belief that the recording succeeded in showing that the two worlds of music, popular and classical, can be made to blend with each other and that fine singing is as at home in one as in the other. The tremendous success of the disc argues in her favor.

  This led, as many things do when people who love opera and classical music talk together, to a discussion of what must be done, in a world where classical music makes up less than five percent of total disc sales, to preserve the art and, in more simple and pragmatic terms, enable singers and musicians to continue to find work. Von Otter was clear that part of the need to cultivate a future audience fell to the schools, and she expressed regret that many countries seem to have abandoned the attempt to teach children how to read musical notation or how to play an instrument. Revitalized music programs, she suggested, would be one way to instill an interest in classical music in children. She also said that opera houses, perhaps in conjunction with schools, should devote more time and energy to finding inventive programs to familiarize children with and interest them in what is done inside of opera and concert halls and to persuade them that opera is not an art intended only for rich old farts. When we agreed on this, she said she regretted the fact that opera houses must now spend so much time on these concerns that they have less time and less money to get on with their chief business, producing operas. Lastly, she expressed a wish that the either-or cultural distinction between pop and classical, high and low, could somehow be destroyed or, if not that, at least mitigated to a point where people unfamiliar with the world of classical music could approach it without the fear and trembling that come with the contemplation of strange or faintly fearful cultural environments. She was intensely aware, as are all people who think about the future of classical music, of the economic forces at work or, more accurately, not at work: less and less state money available for the arts, an aging market of consumers, and the general parlous state of the world economy, which cuts down not only on state subsidies but on the amount of money that private donors are willing to donate to the general cause of music.

  At one point she remarked on the invasive and overwhelming presence of music as background noise in our lives—in post offices, on telephones, during and between most scenes on television—and went on to suggest that this ever present music dulls people’s ability to listen to music carefully. When asked, she admitted that her two sons had little interest in music but do have an interest in the theater, the world in which their father works.

  I asked what her favorite role to date had been, and she shot back, without a second’s hesitation, “Carmen.” Referring back to the image many have of her as cool and reserved, I asked if this had in any way affected her decision to accept the role, in which she went on to enjoy a triumph this summer at Glyndebourne. She laughed at this, said how wonderful it had been not to have to hide behind costume tricks to play a boy but, instead, to be able to play the part of a woman in the middle of her life, not “giggly, stupid Dorabella.” It was evident in all she said that she not only enjoyed Carmen but loved playing Carmen.

  “The music is fantastic,” claimed this mistress of Baroque style. “I’m not in love with full opera voice singing,” said the same woman who belted out an effortless high A during a bravura performance of Ariodante’s “Dopo Notte.” “With French, I don’t have to work hard to sing easily,” said a singer whose Italian diction is but one of the many perfections of her art.

  She admitted that she had been very nervous about singing Carmen, sure she would be a nervous wreck if she did. To prepare for it, she moved with her family to Glyndebourne, amid the sheep and cows that dapple the local fields, and she settled in for six weeks of rehearsal, or what she called, citing the absence of the stage director during the first week, “paper rehearsals.” There followed three weeks of full stage rehearsals, during which she had sufficient time to prepare herself to present something different from “the tourist gypsy with a rose in her mouth.” This was, she said, the sort of role she enjoys, one where she did not always have to sing in the schooled sense of the word, one where she was not constrained to sing consistently with the full opera voice. Most European critics agreed that she had found the role to suit her talents.

  Her schedule contains recitals and concerts for the next six months, but she is scheduled to perform in another opera in July of 2003, when she will sing Ruggiero in Handel’s Alcina at Drottningholm with Christophe Rousset. When asked about how she prepares a major role, she said that she likes six months to prepare, for the process of learning a new role is very hard on the voice. At the beginning, she will devote no more than forty-five minutes a day, with a pianist, to the role. The comparison she gave to feeling herself into and through a role was to the process of working out a crossword puzzle. “Suddenly, the words are there. Suddenly the tempi are real and you see how it has to be.”

  She will, during this process of creeping her way into the role, read through the entire libretto and then write a Swedish translation of her scenes and all the parts leading up to her scenes so that she has a clear dramatic idea of what has happened to lead her character to this point. It is also important for her to understand the message of the aria, not only in intellectual but in musical terms.

  In the first stages of preparation, she will listen to a disc or watch a video of the opera. Having said this, she observed ironically, “You should be prevented from watching yourself on video.” As she works her way through the piece, she gradually gets a sense of whether the music is stronger than the text. Things improve for her once the director makes an appearance, for she enjoys having a director who will tell her what to do on stage while she concentrates on the singing. Recordings of operas, she believes, should be made live, for this captures the excitement of performance from start to finish. Repair sessions can attend to the errors made in the performance. During them, she likes to go through an aria once, then immediately through it again because she thinks the voice is too often cold the first time through. It is often the case that this second take will be used as the base for the recording, during which the recording engineer will “correct the spelling.”

  Interested in this phrase, I asked if this was indeed the right comparison or if perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that the finished product, be it an aria or an entire opera, was a patchwork quilt, with bits and pieces from this take joined to bits and pieces from others, all of them stitched together so well by the sound engineer as to render the threads invisible/inaudible to the average listener.

  “There’s no need for a listener to hear a wrong note,” she said, justly. “I want the result to be a particular way. Why should the listener have to listen to me sing badly?” she asked with equal justice. “If a record is nicely made, it can take a lot of listening before you’re tired of it.”

  It was best for us not to waste time discussing this question, for there is no answer. It is in the nature of the printed word that the writer be given time to correct, rethink, change, adjust a text before it is presented to the reader; since the invention of writing, it has always been like this. Yet until the past century it was the very essence of opera that each performance was unique and that those who failed to put themselves in the physical presence of the singing of Malibran, Pasta, or Rubini would never be able to hear them sing that particular performance. Thus one of the defining characteristics of musical perform
ance was that no performance could ever be repeated in the same way: art mirrored life in that each event was unique. The modern technology of sound recording has put paid to that and now offers us a limitless selection of note-perfect performances, which can then be committed to memory; it can even now go back and change the instruments with which singers such as Caruso sang, just as it can put the film Metropolis into color. These technological manipulations, though they provide people who could not attend a performance with an idea of what it sounded like, also raise the question of what “live” recording means.

  In a world of decreasing state support to theaters and with the disappearance of Mr. Vilar’s millions, recordings also provide work. I asked why someone as famous and frequently interviewed as she had consented to give more interviews. Von Otter was quite frank: she felt that every person involved in a project that results in the making of a disc—as is the case, thank God, with Minkowski’s Giulio Cesare—needs to chip in and do their part to see that the disc sells. Thus she was willing to sit in the lobby of her Vienna hotel on a day when most performers would be far less generous with their time and answer the same old questions and sit for the same old photos.

  Her intelligence and wit, however, flashed out with sufficient frequency to show that this was not just another celebrity on auto­pilot; so did the honesty of much of what she said. I remarked that she is now, and has long been, considered one of the world’s great singers, and she pushed this away by commenting on a series of bad reviews she had received in the (of course) French press, and one that said her voice was “in shreds.” She admitted that a review like this can still get to her, as can the habit of stupid people who ask her if she has read the review. Some bad reviews, she admitted, can be interesting and helpful (I’ve heard countless singers say the same thing, although this is the only time I actually believed the person who said it), but this particular review had done little but cause needless pain.

  I asked about her future projects and her answer gladdened my Handelian heart: Ruggiero with Rousset and Xerses with Christie at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in November of 2003. There is also a fair bit of non-Handel, music that singers perform and, I have it on good authority, other people listen to: Les Nuits d’Eté and Béatrice et Bénédict, Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Das Lied von der Erde, and Capriccio, as well as concerts and recitals that will take her around the world. She will also teach a master class in Denmark. Would she ever think of directing an opera? No!

  The cat who had slept on the sofa of the hotel all during our talk now stood up and stretched, perhaps expressing the sentiments von Otter was far too polite to display. This reminded me that two hours had passed, and it brought me back to time and its passing. Where is the voice going? Von Otter answered instantly that it/she would like to go into the more dramatic repertory, Janácˇek and Strauss’s wicked women. Since the heavy Verdi heroines are not parts into which she could put her heart, she said, she won’t miss never singing them.

  She paused, her face flirted with a smile, and then she said, “Le Nozze di Figaro, ah, that’s gone now.”

  Deformazione

  Professionale

  I have long been of the opinion that the only thing a person in the audience of an ongoing opera performance is allowed to say is, “I’m having a heart attack.” Age and experience, as well as many hours in opera audiences, have led me to conclude that the first three words might be unnecessarily distracting to the other persons in the theater, and thus the final two will suffice. It is one of destiny’s crueler jokes that a person with such a belief should live in Italy, as if a Jehovah’s Witness were to end up in, say, Saudi Arabia.

  Last night, at the dress rehearsal of Cimarosa’s L’Olimpiade at Teatro Malibran (eleven years in the process of restoration), minutes after the second act began, an elderly gentleman sauntered into the theater, a much younger woman on his arm. They took seats in the orchestra, almost directly below my own seat in one of the side boxes. Halfway through the orchestral introduction to the act, my attention was distracted by a male voice, but I ignored it, drawn to the beauty of the playing.

  The singers appeared and began to sing but the speaking voice, not at all a musical voice, continued. Glancing down, I saw the white-haired man’s head inclined toward that of the young woman. His face was blocked by the sheer volume of her hair, but the motion of his hands told me that it was he who was talking. And talking. And talking. And talking.

  Tenor, soprano, mezzo-soprano, duet: his voice, like a bass Valkyrie, droned above them all. Not even the soprano aria with oboe obbligato could stop the flow of his chatter. Is this what it’s like to be cornered by the town drunk or the club bore? Had his poor wife pushed the money into his hand and begged him to go to the opera? Perhaps even paid for the other woman’s ticket as well? Anything, anything at all to get this dreadful chatterbox out of the house so she could have a moment’s peace.

  As the tenor began his aria, the man raised what was surely meant to be an instructive finger toward the stage, the conductor, a singer, even at the portrait of poor dead Maria Malibran, hanging above the stage, but Malibran said not a word. The more complex the music became and the greater demands it made on the singers’ absolute concentration, the louder droned his voice. I thought of dogs, pissing out their territory. I also thought of throwing something at his head. Like the putative wife, I was willing to go to any lengths, do anything, if only to put an end to the ceaseless drone.

  He paused as the singers began the sextet with which the opera concludes, and I thought he had stopped. But these hopes died when he turned the final ensemble into a septet. Curtain. He clapped his hands together limply a few times, rose to his feet, and smiled graciously about him, as though all that applause, so honestly earned by the orchestra and cast, were really intended for him.

  It was only later, leaving the theater, that someone told me he was a former artistic director of the theater.

  Later, at a post-rehearsal reception, I found myself besieged by material: the arch and artificial squeals of delight with which the guests greeted one another; the carefully polite greetings between people I know dislike each other; the strange similarity of expression on the faces of the women, as if they’d all passed under the knife of the same surgeon: all of it was grist for a writer’s mill. There was no one I much wanted to kill, so I put my mind to theft. How best break into the palazzo, rob it of those glorious Ming platters on the wall behind the bar? Meeting my host, I found myself wondering whether he’d be strong enough to fight off two unarmed, though masked, robbers. What window to use to escape? A few women had left their purses on a table near the door, so I busied myself planning how to pick one up and walk out with it, and would it contain another guest’s wallet or incriminating letters from a lover? But that would strain any reader’s power of belief, so I abandoned the letters. Maybe nothing more than the lover’s private number programmed into her telefonino? Thus, see them linger a moment too long when shaking hands, pretending to be introduced for the first time, and, if so, why would she have his number in her telefonino? I suppose firemen spend their free time planning how to get out of buildings safely or assessing people by how difficult it would be to carry them down a ladder. Do surgeons chop us up when they meet us? Deformazione professionale.

  ON MANKIND

  AND ANIMALS

  Mice

  Back up in the mountains for the summer, I’ve had to adjust to the rhythms and tempos of life, all a bit slower than the already slow pace of Venetian life. There is also a difference in perspective, for things that have no currency in Venice loom large on the horizon here. For example, mice.

  A few days ago, I went over to my neighbor’s to ask to borrow a spade and found her seated on the bench in front of her house, in her hand a contraption that looked as though it had last seen use during the Spanish Inquisition. It was a wooden block, about the size of a shoe box, the front of which was covered
with small holes, each of these covered with a double set of strings, those strings in turn tied to a mechanism controlled by a spring that was hammered into the top. I asked what it was and she explained that it was a mousetrap, built by her husband about forty years ago. But it seemed no longer to function, for the mice were taking over the storeroom where she kept her cornmeal. I told her I had two American mousetraps in my house and went to get them. When I came back, I carefully explained the spring mechanism that delivers the death blow—zap!—to the neck of the mouse unfortunate enough to pull at the piece of cheese set there as bait.

  Yeah, I know: animal rights, WWF, Greenpeace, Bambi. But that’s the cornmeal that makes the polenta we eat for lunch every day, so principle went right out the window. That afternoon I heard a tap on the window and, looking up, saw her there, grinning happily. Saying nothing, she held up two fingers and then, after a long pause, proudly announced, “Due.” Of course, I had in conscience to go and see the results of my betrayal. Indeed, two.

  Hunters

  Okay, I’ll say it directly and have done with it: I hate hunters. I hate them in their multipocketed jackets, their stout boots, their flap-eared caps, their hand-tooled gun cases. I hate their arrogance, their bloody-mindedness, and the cliché-ridden sophistry with which they attempt to justify their bloodlust to kill small animals with fur and feathers. I hate their legal right to hunt on my land, so long as they stay a hundred meters from my house, and I hate the basic dishonesty of the justifications they present for what they do.