Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA. Dylan just played in Target Center, downtown. Toward midnight, walking away from the arena, I see a bus and a truck parked by a curb. A group of roadies are loading equipment. There is bright electric light from somewhere—the spotlight of a handheld TV camera, it turns out. People are standing around, smiling sheepishly, as they do in the presence of someone famous. My heart begins to beat a little faster. A man with thick, tangled hair is standing next to the bus, looking awkward as he signs autographs. It’s Lyle Lovett, who has just finished playing on the stage around the corner. I walk back to my hotel.

  This episode pointed up for me the embarrassment of fandom. I hadn’t requested an interview with Dylan, but for a moment I thought I was about to see him up close. I felt the bubbling excitement of a fan. I’d been a fan, I suppose, since Dylan’s music first hit me, a few years earlier, when I was staying in a friend’s apartment in Berlin. Highway 61 Revisited was one of the few records my friend owned, and after a couple of days I’d fallen for it: the fiercely funny lyrics, the music that was both common and grand, the whole proud, angry, backward take on life. I later found that my belated conversion to Dylan corresponded all too well to an academic model of rock fandom: Daniel Cavicchi, in a book on Bruce Springsteen’s audience, divides fans into categories out of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, noting that one kind of fan undergoes a sudden conversion, or “self-surrender,” often in a state of isolation or in a foreign land.

  Is fandom as foolish as it feels? Or is it the respect owed to the sort of person who used to be called “great”? Americans have always distrusted the concept of greatness, with its clammy Germanic air. Stardom, the cult of youth and wealth, long ago took its place. Dylan may be many things, but he is not a star: he can’t control his image in the public eye. At the same time, he doesn’t look, act, or sound like any great man that history records. He presents himself as a traveling musical salesman, like B.B. King or Ralph Stanley or Willie Nelson. He is generally unavailable to the media, but he is in no way a recluse, and reclusiveness is traditionally the zone in which American geniuses reside.

  An “artist,” by contemporary definition, is one who displays himself in art, who shares “felt” emotion and “lived” experience, who meets and greets the audience. Art becomes Method acting; art, in various senses, becomes pathetic. With Dylan, the emotion has certainly been felt, at one time or another, but it wells up spontaneously in the songs themselves, in the tangle of words and music. Even at his most confessional, he withdraws his personality from the scene—usually by becoming beautifully vague—and lets the music rise. The highest emotion hits late, in the wordless windups of his greatest songs—from “Sad-Eyed Lady” to “Not Dark Yet”—when the band plays through the verse one more time and language sinks into silence.

  19

  FERVOR

  REMEMBERING LORRAINE HUNT LIEBERSON

  On July 3, 2006, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer. She was fifty-two years old. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world: the singer was hardly a household name, lacking even the intermittent, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly deep kind of grief.

  I was one of those people. In her last years, I found it difficult to assume a pose of critical distance, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her and failed. It felt wrong to call her “great” and “extraordinary,” or to throw around diva-worship words like “goddess” and “immortal,” because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. My attempts at chronicling her career—I saw her some twelve times—were an exercise in running out of words. When I first heard her sing, in Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict at Boston Lyric Opera, in 1993, I described her as “brilliant” and “intense.” When she appeared in Xerxes at New York City Opera, in 1997, I compared her to Maria Callas. In 2001, when she sang Bach cantatas at a Lincoln Center presentation, I reported that she had “sent the audience into a trance.” In 2003, I claimed that her recording of the cantatas, on the Nonesuch label, was “beautiful enough to stop a war, if anyone thought to try.” And, in 2005, I called her Handel disc, on Avie, “pull-down-the-blinds, unplug-the-telephone, can’t-talk-right-now beautiful.” To the extent that music can be captured in speech, she had gone beyond it. Nevertheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard.

  I saw her for the last time in November 2005, when she came to Carnegie Hall with the Boston Symphony to perform Neruda Songs, composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She came onstage wearing a bright-red, free-flowing dress. Although her hair was shorter than in previous years and she looked a little thin, she appeared healthy. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.

  She was born Lorraine Hunt, in San Francisco, the daughter of two exacting Bay Area music teachers. She grew up studying piano, violin, and viola, settling on the viola as her instrument. She gave relatively few performances as a singer in her youth, but when she did she caught people’s attention. At a concert by the Oakland Youth Orchestra, in 1972, she stepped forward to deliver an aria from Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the Oakland Tribune, described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: “She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells.”

  By 1979, she was the principal violist of the Berkeley Symphony. When the orchestra decided to mount a production of Hansel and Gretel at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic debut. She took up singing full-time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church, under the direction of Craig Smith. In an interview with Charles Michener, for a 2004 New Yorker profile, Smith related her singing to her playing: “A viola is a middle voice—it has to be alert to everything around it. There’s something viola-like about the rich graininess of her singing, about her ability to sound a tone from nothing—there’s no sudden switching on of the voice, no click. And, like most violists, she is also self-effacing: without vanity as a singer. When we first performed the Bach cantatas, she just disappeared as a person.”

  Her work at Emmanuel caught the attention of the young director Peter Sellars, who, in 1985, cast her as Sesto, Pompey’s son, in a modern-dress production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. The character of Sesto became a wild-eyed young radical, swearing vengeance with an Uzi in his hands. The singer was revealed not only as a supremely musical artist but also as a keenly dramatic one. “She started singing, and you were in the middle of this raging forest fire,” Sellars recalled. “Certain things were a little out of control, but what you got was sheer power, sheer concentrated energy.”

  She went on to sing in a series of Handel performances and recordings with the Philharmonia Baroque, also of Berkeley, and appeared in Mark Morris’s celebrated choreographic stagings of Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. She decided to devote herself to singing full-time only after her viola was stolen. In the 1990s, she finally began to find wider fame, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars’s production of Handel’s Theodora at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera debut in 1999, in John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby. The ovations
that greeted her Dido in Les Troyens at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.

  Yet she fit uneasily into the classical mainstream. “Lorraine’s a bit of a nut,” people in the music business used to say. They were referring to her Northern California nature—her spiritual pursuits, her interest in astrology, her enthusiasm for alternative medicine. She sometimes rattled her colleagues with her raucous sense of humor and her braying laugh. She loved all kinds of music; in private settings, she’d give scorching renditions of jazz and blues standards, and she declared herself a fan of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, among others.

  In retrospect, her extracurricular interests and supposed eccentricities were essential to the evolution of her art. She broke through the façade of cool professionalism that too often prevails in the classical world, showing the kind of unchecked fervor that is more often associated with the greatest pop, jazz, and gospel singers. I compared her to Callas, but she might have been closer to Mahalia Jackson. One of her favorite encores was the spiritual “Deep River,” and there was something uncannily natural about her recitation of the text: “Deep river, my home is over Jordan / Deep river, Lord, I wanna cross over into camp ground.”

  The voice was rich in tone and true in pitch. There was something calming and consoling about the fact of the sound. “Time itself stopped to listen,” Richard Dyer wrote in his obituary for The Boston Globe. Central to the singer’s repertory was a group of arias that I think of as her benedictions, her laying on of hands: “Ombra mai fù,” from Xerxes, a purely sensuous experience; “As with rosy steps the morn,” from Theodora, which she made into an anthem of beatitude; Bach’s “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen,” which, in the uncomfortably haunting Sellars staging, she sang while attired in a hospital gown.

  Such performances were the product not of intuition but of conscious craft. I asked the mezzo Rebecca Ringle, whom I met at Marlboro, to analyze how Lieberson’s voice worked. “Her primary gift was for phrasing,” Ringle told me. “It’s a good instrument, but she has great technique, and superstar, beautiful-human-being phrasing.” The vowels are very pure, Ringle observed, meaning that they sound much as they do in everyday speech, instead of being stretched out and distorted, as often happens in classical singing (“I am” becoming “ah ahm,” and so on). “When I saw the Sellars Bach cantatas in Boston,” Ringle said, “I was floored by one section that she sang quieter than I thought it would be humanly possible to understand, and yet I got every word.”

  Loveliness was just the point of departure. She could also communicate passion and pain and a fearsome kind of anger. At City Opera, her Xerxes, so bewitching at first appearance, whipped around to deliver an up-against-the-wall tirade in “You are spiteful, perverse, and insulting.” There was a prophet-in-the-wilderness quality to her rendition of “La Anunciación,” her centerpiece aria in John Adams’s Christmas oratorio, El Niño. When she sang Benjamin Britten’s cantata Phaedra at the New York Philharmonic, she froze listeners in their seats with her high monotone chant of the words “I stand alone.” And as Irene, a leader of the martyrdom-bound Christians in Theodora, she made her voice into a kind of moral weapon. There is a DVD of the Glyndebourne Theodora, and the pivotal moment comes in the air “Bane of virtue, nurse of passions … Such is, prosperity, thy name.” In other words, money kills the soul. The phrase “thy name” is sung eighteen times, and by the end the voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword.

  No modern singer rivaled her in Dido’s Lament. On a recording with Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque, she begins in a mood of unearthly tranquility, joining notes in a liquid legato. The first iterations of the phrase “Remember me” are gentle, almost quiescent. But when the cry recurs, at the top of the range, her voice frays a bit, in a way that ratchets up the emotion of the scene. When the sequence is repeated, the first “Remember me” has a slightly weaker, more tremulous quality, while the last is suddenly bolder, more operatic. With utmost economy, she traces out the stages of Dido’s grief, ending on tones of radiant defiance.

  Having run the gamut from angelic serenity to angelic wrath, this most complete of singers concluded her career with a very human demonstration of love. She met Peter Lieberson in the summer of 1997, on the occasion of the premiere of his opera Ashoka’s Dream, at the Santa Fe Opera. They fell in love and eventually married, and Lieberson began to write with his wife’s voice in mind. By reputation an expert practitioner of twelve-tone technique, Lieberson had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony. I attended one of his classes in college, and I remember that at one session he spent an hour or more delving into the Adagietto movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, savoring each bittersweet suspension and enriched triad. When Lorraine Hunt entered his life, that pursuit of harmonic pleasure came to the forefront of his work, although the music remained scrupulous in method.

  Neruda Songs contains some of the most unabashedly lyrical music that any American composer has produced since Gershwin. It is also courageously personal music, the choice of Neruda poems seeming to acknowledge the fragility of Lorraine’s health. The final song, “Sonnet XCII,” begins, heartbreakingly, with the words “My love, if I die and you don’t—” The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major, and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hand of the singer who came from their ranks. The composer is holding her hand, too. The last word is “Amor.”

  20

  BLESSED ARE THE SAD

  LATE BRAHMS

  The composer Morton Feldman once told a story about music and meaning. “Two guys visit Haydn, two journalists from Cologne,” Feldman said. “They ask him about literary, programmatic pieces and he says, ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘oh, I wrote this piece which was a dialogue between God and a sinner.’ Big theme, right? And they said, ‘What’s the name of that piece?’ He said, ‘I forget.’”

  Feldman’s joke—based on an episode from Haydn’s biography—could have been told about Johannes Brahms. It could have been told by Brahms. This titan of German music, whom Hans von Bülow placed with Bach and Beethoven in the league of the “three B’s,” had a wily sense of humor, and he often did a variation on that little dance with meaning—a feint of disclosure, a quick step back.

  In 1879, Brahms wrote a characteristically devious letter to the composer and conductor Vincenz Lachner, who had inquired about a passage in Brahms’s Second Symphony. The work is ostensibly a pastoral scene in the summery key of D major, beginning with horn calls from afar and ending with an earthy dance for orchestra. But ominous shapes glide beneath the surface—low chords in the trombones and tuba, pungent dissonances in archaic cadences. Why such “gloomy lugubrious tones” at the outset of a light-filled piece, Lachner wished to know? Brahms replied:

  That first entrance of the trombones, that belongs to me—I can’t get along without it, nor the trombones. Defending the passage would require me to be long-winded. I would have to confess, by the way, that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings incessantly flap above us, and that in my output this symphony is followed—perhaps not entirely by accident—by a little essay on the great “Warum?” [the motet Why Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery?]. I will send it to you if you do not know it. It throws the necessary sharp shadows across the bright-spirited symphony and may explain those trombones and timpani.

  At this point, Vincenz Lachner and all of us reading over his shoulder are thinking, “Aha! The Master is giving away secrets!” The Second Symphony has a subtext, and it is Job’s despair, a blasphemous longing for death, quite literally a “dialogue between God and a sinner.” Then Brahms laughs out loud: “Please don’t take all this too seriously or too tragically, especially that one passage!” And he goes on to describe a passing dissonance in the closing bars of the movement as a “sensuously beautiful sound” that “comes abou
t in the most logical way—entirely of its own accord.”

  In other words, it’s all a question of technique. Such things as black wings and light in darkness and dialogues with God are sweets thrown to musical children. When we grow up, the music will be sufficient in itself. Brahms more or less repeated the joke in a letter to his publisher about the Warum? motet and its companion piece, O Savior, Fling Open the Heavens. He proposed, in the interest of saving space, the following advertisement: “Motets by Joh. Br. No. 1. Why? No. 2. Oh!”

  Yet it is not so easy to forget those flapping black wings. They are like Dostoyevsky’s polar bear, the one you are supposed to try not to think about. The message to Lachner is revealing because it mirrors a mechanism in the music itself. Not only does Brahms the letter-writer hint at, and then withdraw, meanings in his music; Brahms the composer does the same. The Second Symphony begins with a dipping-and-rising three-note figure, the thematic kernel of the entire piece. The opening paragraph—warm, deliberate, lushly scored—establishes the symphony’s dominant mood. But the music soon loses momentum: the texture thins out, the strings wend their way downward, and that hooded Wagnerian quartet of trombones and tuba creeps onstage. The three-note figure sounds bleakly in the woodwinds, the timpani rumbling underneath. Thus Brahms breaks the conventional narrative rhythm of a symphonic movement. He has the tone of a storyteller who launches into his tale—“Once upon a time, in my youth …”—and then falls silent, overcome by some vague memory.