Smilin Through
One of my constant and mostly happy memories of childhood center around the family being together, relatively peaceful, and listening to music. My mom loved Jeanette MacDonald films and Nelson Eddy films and so we would traipse to the Vanguard theater, or the vintage theater to see their films. Now every time I see or hear one of their many wonderful lush melodies, I have to say, I get a little misty-eyed.
These excerpts from Smiling Through, one of my mommas favorite songs, and the ending of the fabulous “Maytime”, with their reunion.
May I take a moment of pure selfish sentimentality?
My Mom in the last years of her colorful life fought against colon cancer, which went un detected even after colonoscopies. “They missed it…”. She had a way of making chemo look merry and okay so her kids wouldn’t be afraid. A cup of hot chocolate and graham crackers in the Memorial Sloan Kettering lobby awaiting the poison thought to prolong life. She made it okay when we were told there was nothing left they could do.
Her face was so beautiful and radiant and AWARE. She knew, she was scared as any of us would be. But she weathered it with great humor and heartbreaking sweetness. Hospice in my home; the sound of the oxygen machine oddly reassuring.
The thought of this world without her? Quite frankly, I have been in the dark for a few years now, and only feeling her constant presence keeps the feet moving, and of course her greatest gift to me, and Dad’s gift to me, Opera, keeps the soul full of hope.
The fog is lifting and the call to arms is loud. I hope she helps me.
I hope my mother passed over full of music and in her mind sitting under that bower of roses by bendemeer stream, a song she used to love to sing like no one else, listening to the tune of the Nightingale, with a walk way of cherry blossom trees and the wind driven lanes filled with leaves strewn about and that all of her loved ones came and took her Home.
Who is to say it doesn’t happen like this?
Those who love music are more sensitive to it’s magic.
Maybe it is our golden ticket to a good end, as they say in the Legends of the Fall, with the wonderful Indian Voice, the enigmatic character Tristan’s best friend, best mirror, best reflection of himself, (Brad Pitt amazing and handsome), “He had a good death….”
I pray, as I think of my Mom and Dad and Step Dad, and Grandma,and other family, as well as Luciano and Beverly and my dear Renata and Zinka, as well as the Divine Muzio and Callas, I hope they made a good crossing. With all that music in their hearts, I am SURE they did.
amazing and very personal mastery of Caro Nome
Tinkel Vesel-Polla, soprano “Caro Nome” 1928= very personal but quite accomplished bel canto.
As Bayreuth changes
This week we hear the grand old fellow of Bayreuth is finally to abdicate his “throne” to one of his family. Most likely a contentious but never boring trio.
New York Times story by Anne Midgette
“Death, or catastrophic world war, has been the usual conclusion of the tenures of past directors of the opera festival that Richard Wagner founded in Bayreuth, Germany, 132 years ago. But yesterday Wolfgang Wagner, 88, the composer’s grandson who has led the festival since 1951, announced that he is stepping down as of Aug. 31, when this year’s festival ends.
He leaves a hereditary post from which the Bavarian government attempted, unsuccessfully, to oust him several years ago, and the succession to which has been the subject of hot debate for more than a decade.
One thing that has kept Wagner, who is reported to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease,
in his post for so long is the question of which family member would succeed him.
Candidates for the post have included Eva Wagner-Pasquier, Wolfgang Wagner’s estranged daughter from his first marriage, a consultant to the festival in Aix-en-Provence who has also worked with the Metropolitan Opera; and Nike Wagner, a daughter of Wagner’s brilliant late brother Wieland, who has upheld her father’s provocateur spirit with a more avant-garde take on the work of a festival impresario.
(Nike went so far as to suggest the unthinkable: presenting operas at Bayreuth by other composers.)
Wolfgang himself had refused to step down unless he could be succeeded by his daughter by his second marriage, Katharina, now 29. Katharina has been groomed for the position since birth; in the past few years, she has been trying her hand as a stage director, with an intriguingly provocative “Flying Dutchman” in Wurzburg and, last summer, her first production at Bayreuth itself, a modern-dress “Die Meistersinger” that stirred up all the controversy one could wish.
Katharina’s cause was aided by her mother, Gudrun, who many said had been effectively running the festival for years anyway. But in the fall Gudrun died unexpectedly after routine surgery, at 63.
In the wake of the power vacuum that this left, the half-sisters Katharina and Eva, who have hardly ever spoken to each other, have improbably joined forces. Yesterday they submitted to the Bayreuth board a joint proposal for running the festival. Unlikely as it is, the alliance makes a certain sense: Eva, 63, is a veteran administrator, while Katharina aspires to be an artist.
The succession will be officially determined by the 13 surviving members of the Wagner family, who have until the end of August to figure it out, giving many of them a chance to start speaking to one another again.
“We’ve been having difficult discussions about this since 2001,” Thomas Goppel, the Bavarian minister for science, culture and art, told reporters in Bayreuth yesterday. “Now at last . . . we can think about the future of the house of Wagner.”
I chose to remember here a long standing genius of the “old world” Wagner, soprano Martha Moedl. The first clip is an interview with Madame Moedl and two other great Bayreuth Prima Donne, Nilsson and Varnay.
The second is a clip from her 50th anniversary gala performance of Pique Dame in Vienna.
The last a bit of the welcome after on stage from those grateful for her fifty years of stunning service.
She is 80 years young in the final two clips. Bravissima.
Fascinating and tragic:
This beautiful voice that sang with Muzio, and according to the youtube info for her died in 1980 being murdered in a metro station in Chicago. Breaks my heart, as this is a first class instrument that worked with Raisa, John Charles Thomas, and Flagstad. Two lovely people are being inerviewed, graciously, by someone not listed. Her life escaping the German horror as a Jew, with such a tragic ending of her life, is an opera in itself. What a great sound though, listen as she lives again in the wonder of this cyber world. Maria Hussa….
Soprano MARIA HUSSA, Austrian/American, 83 years old, in Chicago 4/19/80.
In 1917 she made her debut at the Vienna Volksoper, and appeared at the Vienna Staatsoper the following year. She sang in Berlin from 1923 to 1926, and was a member of the Hamburg State
Opera 1926-32, where she assumed major roles.During that time she also sang the soprano leads in the premieres of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane and Respighi’s La Campana sommersa. She emigrated to the United States in 1934, sang the role of the Marschallin at the Metropolitan Opera in 1940, and the same role as well as Sieglinde in Chicago during the same season. Later she taught at the Sherwood Music School.
SPc photo by Willinger Wien of the smiling soprano Wien 1936. She was a pupil of Elizza and sang in Vienna, Prague and all the German houses including Hamburg 1926-1932 where she created Korngold’s “Der Wunder der Heliane” and Resphigi’s “La Campana Sommersa”. She emigrated to Chicago in the late 1930s sang with the Chicago Opera and one Marschallin at the Met in 1940. She opened a successful voice studio in the windy city and lived there till 1980. Some Homochord and HMV records. Lovely artist.
Nearer my God to thee
Click on title of MP3- Millo below
charlie-church-music-old-movie
This is the respect opera deserves
A fabulous clip from Youtube.com, what is fast becoming the last bastion for real opera lovers to see a marvelous array of opera splendor not over hyped in today’s way and really having something very special.
This is a selection from the Gala in honor of Rudolph Bing. Look at the white tie and tail coats on almost all the board members. The incoming Mr. Gentele, who actually was the man who signed my first contract. He seemed a lovely and articulate man. We will never know what wonderful things he would have done, as he died in a car crash before being able to begin his tenure.
The orders of some wonderful honor either from Austria or Paris or the British monarchy, hang around Sir Rudolph Bing’s neck and his pride evident but his horror of exposed emotion.
My childhood was filled with reading his books, the first I believe was called, “5000 Nights at the Opera” being the one I read most. His fierce devotion to giving the Met the best and the brightest stars, travel to Europe brought us all the stars from Italy and Germany. Tebaldi, being my favorite. He searched for the best voices and the best voices being those who could really sing their specialities and he brought them to the Met.
I was so thrilled that he was a fan, and wasted no time telling me so. He had seen the second Boccanegra, the first Ernani of my Met career, the first Trovatore, and Aida in the Parks. He always came back after the crowds had gone, or found me at a gathering or dinner party soon after to tell me his opinions and ideas of repertoire. Until he was not himself, suffering from some kind of onset dementia towards the end of his life and his last marriage, I was thrilled for his interest, his praise and his counsel.
The elegance of opera remains in it’s music, it’s desire to serve music and the composer, and in some naturally elegant people today. All too often we are asked to dumb ourselves down, shy away from the beautiful accoutrement of the “old fashioned” singer, eshewing tail coats, and patent leather shoes for leather pants and no tie, perhaps a silk shirt or without jacket.
It’s all good perhaps, but for me, this is the opera I had in my house, elegant men and women dressed with great respect for their positions as artists, the men in suits and tie to rehearse. The maestri always eager and knowledgeable to help you and your own unique gifts and how to best use them while in service to the composer. It felt “blessed”. THEY adapted to the talent knowing full well there was never only ONE way of singing something.
Enjoy this lovely moment in Met History, and in the life of Sir Rudolph.
Further explore opera’s importance in world events, in Austria for the then reopening of the State theater just after the war. You will see how much national pride was reawakened by Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, with the fabulous Martha Moedl…….a whole other world.
Then go to another world exactly in the heavenly throat of Renata Tebaldi in G. Verdi’s masterpiece Requiem. The heaven on earth of one of the voices Mr. Bing fought to bring to America, the true Voce D’Angelo, Renata Tebaldi in a 1951 Verdi Requiem that will take your breath away.
My cherished notion
Who didn’t love Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet”. I was ruined with Leonard Whiting. How absolutely beautiful he is.
