Redux: Heavenly Peace

I first posted this on Christmas Eve of 2013. As fast away this old year passes, the old world I was raised in feels ever further away - as far away on this gray December evening as a snow-covered lawn all those years ago. Perhaps more even than usually, what the next year brings us, none of us yet can know. Still, I hope for a measure, just a measure, of that himmlischer Ruh for all of us.

Another time the year goes 'round; another chance to revisit one of my earliest memories...

O Cohors, Induamur Spectaculum!*

And now for something completely different...

Let the Bright Seraphim

Funny the places one can find solace and inspiration.

Redux: Heavenly Peace

I first posted this on Christmas Eve of 2013. As fast away this old year passes, the old world I was raised in feels ever further away - as far away on this warm December evening as a snow-covered lawn all those years ago. What the next year brings us, none of us yet can know, but I still hope for a measure, just a measure, of that himmlischer Ruh.

Another time the year goes 'round; another chance to revisit one of my earliest memories...

Birthday Girl: One More Kiss

Speaking of Sumptuous, it's worth noting, every now and again, that still we have a giant or two amongst us - today's birthday girl being an excellent case in point:  the great Mme. Licia Albanese is today a lively 101.

Voices Carry

In 1939, April 9 was Easter Sunday.  How can it possibly be 75 years?

Heavenly Peace

Another time the year goes 'round; another chance to revisit one of my earliest memories...

Bonus Camp Explosion: Birthday Stupenda

It was Dame Joan Sutherland's birthday earlier this week (November 7), and I felt badly about missing it, not least because of the marvelous treat you have in store, just after the jump...

Vilia, O Vilia...

My perfectly adequate little business hotel (sadly, a triumph more of function than gemütlichkeit) is located across the street from the Stadtpark, which even among the very high competition set by Vienna parks stands out as especially pretty and insistently themed.

Birthday Girl: A Glorious Voice

An embarrassment of birthday riches today, taking in everyone from Louis Pasteur to Oscar Levant, and from Marlene Dietrich to Cokie Roberts.  Here, however, we have a great lady who can hold her own with them and more, that inimitable practitioner of the gentle (and very nearly lost) art of musical satire, Miss Anna Russell.

If you know Miss Russell, there is is really no need to indulge in further superlatives; if not, it may at this rather distant remove from her heyday be difficult exactly to convey the impact she had on the occasionally rather solemn world of music when she burst upon the scene, as improbable a figure in her thirties as she remained for the rest of her long life.  Suffice it to say that rarely has anyone so deftly, thoroughly, and hilariously eviscerated the pretensions of High Art as she, wielding a combination of genuine authority on the subjects on which she discoursed and a mastery of broad comedy rarely equaled  - as a mistress of the double-take she is a peer of such immortals as Marie Dressler and Beatrice Lillie.

The summit of her art is unquestionably her dissection of Wagner's Ring Cycle, although her comprehensive guide to the writing of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta certainly has its partisans as well.  Personally, I feel lucky to have been introduced to her work at a dangerously early age, and I'm happy to confess that at various times in my life, back in the days when I was making an exiguous living on the fringes of the music business in New York and elsewhere, I have relied on what I gleaned from her recordings to seem a great deal more learned than ever I actually was. 

Here she introduces us to the basic necessities required for undertaking a career as a singer, and as a veteran of more than one encounter with that most fearsome of creatures, the Metropolitan Opera Soprano, I can attest that the description that closes this clip is as accurate a one as you ever will find.

Birthday Diva (and Friends)

There must be something about the day (or a day about nine months ago), for the little girl born Sophie Cecilia Kalos some 89 years ago today is only one of a bouquet of geniuses who celebrate today.

Joining the diva who became Maria Callas are everyone from M. Georges Seurat (who had such a memorable Sunday in a Park) to the fetching Miss Lucy Liu (a remarkable actress still, I think, in search of a great role, although the Kill Bill pictures came close).  Adding to the festivities are Broadway Divo Adolph Green, jazz thrush Sylvia Syms, stage luminary Julie Harris, and couturier/martyr Gianni Versace.

Of course, every silver lining has its cloud, and with all this richness we must also accept the regrettable Alexander "I'm in control here" Haig, television staple Cathy Lee Crosby (whom I've just learned is not, in fact, Bing's daughter, and who therefore makes even less sense than I'd thought), and onetime poptart, now pop-zombie Miss Britney Spears.

I was going to try and come up with something clever about Miss Callas, and when I thought of her, I thought (as I often do) of dear Mr. Leo Lerman, about whose marvelous journals published as The Grand Surprise I've often waxed rapturous.  The book is downstairs, and I am up; being lazy, I therefore Googled the pair, Callas and Lerman, and was startled to see in today's New York Times the obituary for Lerman's longtime companion, artist and looker (it was practically a second career, as it was for other 20th century luminaries like Ned Rorem) Gray Foy.  It's a lovely thing, this obituary, and I recommend it highly; it may not say much about Miss Callas, but it says a great deal about her world, which has, with Foy's passage to Fabulon, receded just that little bit further from our lesser days.

Au Petit Matin

MGM's 1938 Marie Antoinette is a film better known as the Widow Thalberg's last fling with the Grade-A Prestige Pictures she'd been making since she hit her stride at the top of the decade than it is as an actual movie-to-have-seen.*  I haven't, and so was all the more surprised to see, as above, how realistically - for a Norma Shearer picture - it plays the dénouement of the sad lady's life.  Would you know this was Norma Shearer, if you didn't know it was Norma Shearer?

All of which comes to mind because today marks the 219th anniversary of the onetime Austrian archduchess's death-by-guillotine.  It was an extreme end to a life of extravagance and so has remained a source of much fascination ever since. 

As a character, the indispensable IMDb tells us, the ill-fated queen has appeared in nearly 100 differents guises on the large and small screens, with a cavalcade of actresses joining Shearer, from silent pioneer Julia Swayne Gordon in 1916's My Lady's Slipper to Jayne Meadows as a guest on Steve Allen's faux/historico talk show, Meeting of Minds.  She has inspired at least one contemporary opera, The Ghosts of Versailles (I was at the premiere, but really almost all I remember is Marilyn Horne playing Samira the Turkish Entertainer in an interpolated star turn that really could be a Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion all on its ownsome).  She also crops up in La Révolution française, the 1973 rock opera by the team of Boublil and Schönberg, who went to on operatize, as it were other picturesque conflicts in Les Mis and Miss Saigon.   She gets to sing a very pretty song, "Au petit matin (16 October 1793)", which you can sample here.

All of which risks our losing sight of the two women really on my mind, the queens of France and MGM.  You can see Shearer's excellent work en route to the scaffold here, but it's best to turn off the execrable music.  The woman she's portraying certainly could never have dreamed how very wrong things would go in her once-charmed life, nor that her death and those of her family would set a dark pattern for so many to follow: her nephew (several times removed), Maximilian of Mexico; the Romanovs in their Ekaterinberg basement; the boy-king of Iraq and his family.  Shearer, of course, kept her head (although, in the end, not her mind), but lost her career. 

Both, I suppose, might be seen in different ways as object lessons of what happens to vain, silly women who suddenly find themselves defenseless after a lifetime of cosseting, but that seems unduly harsh to both.  How much nicer to remember the pretty girl, actress and archduchess alike, setting out on a great adventure that brought her, for a while at least, to the top...

* But oh, you say, what about The Women?  Well, it certainly was an A, even an A+, but it's an ensemble epic, by no means a star vehicle, and by no means a typical Shearer outing.  Actually, it should have been the picture that reinvented her, but after that there are just three pale copies of her earlier triumphs, over and out.  The Women is a treasure, but for Mrs. Thalberg, a dead end.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: La Stupenda

Opera is perhaps the art form most at home with camp, best able to tread the fine, fine line between the ridiculous and the sublime.  Here we have an excellent example of that balancing act:  the "Bell Song" from Lakmé (a number that I prefer to think of by its alternative, far more camp title, "Ou va la jeune Hindoue?"), starring that one-woman Camp Explosion Diva, Dame Joan Sutherland.

A festival of orientalist kitsch, brownface aplenty, extreme coloratura, and a style of acting that can most kindly be referred to as gestural, it manages to be laughably silly (impersonating the dainty teenage daughter of an Indian priest, the statuesque Dame Joan looks like nothing so much as a drag queen dressed as the Duchess of Windsor en route to an ashram) and simultaneously quite marvelous (the woman can sing).  It's the sort of thing that in this day of headline operas and disposable "stars" is mostly just a memory, kept alive in the fever dreams of Opera Queens.

It's fine to be solemn and serious, to promote against all odds spiky new works in "transgressive" new settings - but sometimes, all you really want is a big lady in a bigger dress, being adored by a crowd of supernumeraries, singing loud.  Dame Joan, as always, comes through.  There's a treasurable moment round about 6:25, in which she assumes an attitude of almost superhuman self regard, as if the thought just struck her: Damn, I'm good.  She is.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

63 years ago today, photographer Peter Stackpole captured for the readers of Life this rather intriguing moment in the homelife of Mr. Mario Lanza.  I'm sure the very well set-up young gentleman on the mat is simply, as it were, encouraging the tenor to greater heights of physical fitness.

Well, there's certainly something physical about this snap, no?

Despite the undeniable presence (in history albeit nowhere to be seen here) of Mrs. Lanza and four little Lanzettes, I can't help but think it's telling how the erstwhile Alfred Cocozza chose his stage name - his sainted mother was born Maria Lanza.  And, whatever else may be going on here, you have to admit: great Adirondacks.  Which sound like it ought to be a naughty euphemism, but, at least in this case, isn't.

A Visit to the Portrait Gallery

On our last day in Washington, while Mr. Muscato slept (Ramadan being, for the fasters, a time for mornings starting as late as one can possible manage it), I slipped out and went for a walk.  It was the first time I'd been able, what with matters business, medical, and bureaucratic, to get away and actually be in the city, wander around, enjoy it a little.

I am surprised to say it impressed me.  I've always spent as little time as possible there, hurtling in for boring corporate stuff and flying away.  When I was first spending much time there, I was a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, and part of that package is a certain snootiness about Our Nation's Capital.  Also, in those days, much of the central part of town, away from the Federal Disneyland, really did look like a bomb zone.

Now, though - not so much.  We stayed near Thomas Circle, an area I remember finding distinctly unsavory, and on my morning out I walked from there, in a circuitous sort of way, down to one of my favorite places, the National Portrait Gallery.  It's astonishing how much the whole area has changed.  I suppose it's all really gentrification at its worst, and has all sorts of negative ramifications invisible to the outsider, but my goodness - the restaurants, the shops, the tidy new buildings of offices and apartments (many of them unusually quite handsome, and most at least in keeping with the city's distinct architectural atmosphere)!

Even the Portrait Gallery, along with its sister Museum of American Art, has been given a once over, the historic building they share gleaming and a dramatic new glass umbrella covering its central courtyard.  Fortunately, on the whole it has been spared the fate of Kensington Palace (and not a few of the other Smithsonian entities - and yes, I do mean you, Museum of American History) and not been hyper-stupidified for the benefit of the imagined hordes of ADD-afflicted tourists who seem to be the prime target of museum designers these days.

So I had a lovely hour or so, checking in on friends old and new at the Gallery, and I'll likely be sharing a few in days to come.

For example, a highlight of the New Acquisitions room is the lovely drawing above, in unexpected polychrome, of one treasurable New Yorker by another.  I really can't quite grasp that neither are still around, but hasn't Mr. Hirschfeld done well by Miss Sills?

I'm an unabashed, star-struck Bubbles fan, which I know isn't strictly fashionable these days in opera-queen-land, but what can I do?  She was a staple of television when I was a tot at my grandparents' knees, and while I only heard her in full performance once (a Barber of Seville in Philadelphia - I remember principally that she wore a powder-blue gown and romped beautifully), I had the enormous luck to spend a little time with her, some thirty years ago.

She came to campus, as a Distinguished Guest, for a week of talks and other programming.  As one the university's more obviously aesthetic types, as it were, I suppose I was drafted into helping, and so ended up taking her from activity to activity, holding on to her things when she was speaking and generally presaging my future career as a modern-day Birdie Coogan to the Great and Good (a phase of my life that I often reflect on for its sheer oddness).

She was everything one could hope - charming, funny, sensible, and with that great gift of the greatly gifted of making you feel, when they speak with you, that you are at that moment the center of their attention.

She was not, as you may remember, a small lady - in any way.  Sills was tall, and zaftig, and when she laughed, she laughed, in a way that made you laugh, too.  She was perfectly turned out, in a succession of elegant diva-in-the-daytime numbers, the shoes, the bag, the bits of jewellery here and there, all of them almost exaggeratedly understated, as if to offset her own larger-than-lifeness.  At one point, she noticed me noticing one piece that remained unchanged throughout the week - a ring that was noticeable precisely because it was larger and a shade more extravagant than the rest of her discreetly elegant accessories.

"Ah, you caught me."  And she showed me the ring, large and round and, if memory serves, diamond-encrusted - with, in the center, a tiny, ticking clock.

"I was raised, you see, that it was rude for a lady to check her watch, especially when people are talking to you.  But I have to keep on schedule, and nobody ever thinks twice about a lady admiring her own ring!"

And for the rest of our too-brief time, I would notice her, during Q&As or chatting during the inevitable coffee-hours after, discreetly looking with satisfaction at her perfectly manicured hand, and starting to make her goodbyes.  And off we'd go to the next engagement.

Sadly, she said her final goodbyes far too early, professionally while she was still in relatively good voice (and could likely have gone for years in undemanding recitals and crossover parts) and then, at last, permanently.  I don't know that we'll again have opera singers with her kind of general celebrity.  Then again, I don't suppose we today have anyone quite like Al Hirschfeld to immortalize them.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion

Because some days, you just wanna fuckin' dance.

It's an oldie, but beyond goodie, and I'm sure quite familiar already to many Café regulars. I'm amazed it hasn't featured here already.  Probably the best dance anthem ever taken from a contemporary "headline opera" (in this case, Jerry Springer: The Opera).  Alison Jiear, a regular on the UK stage, sings the hell out of it.  I like this one of the several edits floating around, as it incorporates footage of her from the stage version.  She sings Shawntel, a frustrated housewife who, well, just wants to dance.

Book Nook, Opera Queen Division

Looking for a good read? I hate to be anything but a total enthusiast about someone so fabulous, but I'm afraid that after ten days of slogging, I can recommend one book to avoid.

A Prima Donna's Progress, the autobiography of the redoubtable Dame Joan Sutherland, the Antipodean sensation known to opera lovers everywhere as La Stupenda, is less a memoir than a semi-guided tour of the world's most detailed datebook. It chronicles seemingly every event in the lady's long and varied career, one that should be - one might think - absolutely chockablock with incident, drama, and anecdote.

Instead, we get a relentless listing of every flight, every rehearsal, and Lord knows every performance that took place in a career that stretched from the end of the Second War almost to the end of the century. In fits of enthusiasm, people she encounters are described as "clever", "kind", or (in a rare spasm of enthusiasm) "talented"; otherwise, she remains singularly and obdurately silent on questions such as personality, aesthetics, or even the occasional on-the-fly observation of the goings-on about her.

Even so, it must be admitted, something of the magnificent absurdity of a diva's existence does float to the surface, apparently despite the authoress's best intentions. There is, for instance, the evocation of a vanished world conjured up by the juxtaposition of the lady's activities during a single week in the early '70s, in which she combined rehearsals at the Met with a quick stop at the book launch for Cole Lesley's tome on his life as Noël Coward's amanuensis and companion, with a (one presumes) lengthier appearance at a record signing in her honor - at Korvette's.

Still - it's a long haul, and the occasional gems are few and far between. It's frustrating to spend time with someone who's met everyone from Marjorie "Interrupted Melody" Lawrence to the Queen Mother but who doesn't have an interesting thing to say about anyone, a certain sniffy dismissal of Pavarotti's starstruck ways possibly excepted.

Instead, why don't you read Cole Lesley's book, or the brief and touching memoir by Graham Payn, who was also Coward's intimate? The latter writes movingly on how much it meant that Sutherland - unlike many of the Master's other friends and toadies - kept up her relations with the eccentric band of companions Coward called "the family" even when the great man was no more (rarely has any widow been more thoroughly and completed dropped than Payn, and by people who really ought to have known better).

Reading Dame Joan, one senses that there is a fascinating, sympathetic soul in there somewhere lost in the rush to get from place to place; reading about her, one learns with satisfaction that there truly is.

La Stupenda

"Joan Sutherland is a cross between Margaret Dumont

and a high-school pageant." - Leo Lerman

I really can't tell you how much I'm enjoying Lerman's journals, published a few years ago as The Grand Surprise. And I have to warn you - there will likely be more of these, as it turns out that some of his best friends are some of my favorite ladies...

Happy Birthday, Butterfly

The great Licia Albanese is having a birthday today, something in the upper 90s, and isn't it nice to know that she's still with us? She topped a remarkable career spanning well over half a century with a bravura performance in Lincoln Center's all-star Follies, which gave her a whole new fan base (me included - for me she's the definitive Heidi, no one better able to plumb the heights and depths of what amounts to the piece's theme-defining aria, "One More Kiss").

I was never a Total Opera Queen in my New York days, but I would get out at least a couple of times a season, often enough to note the differences in impact made by the arrival in the audience of one or another of the Great Retired Ladies. Tebaldi was always received with reverence, the crowd parting, a discreet smattering of applause as she took her seat (always perfect, in something floating and elegant, the kind of thousand-shades-of-neutral gown that perfectly set off her still remarkable beauty); Sills, appearing in her manager's seats or across the way at the Met was still the hometown girl made good, jolly and eager, but very much a Public Figure; Albanese, though - it was like watching a parade, the arrival of Dolly Levi. Always with one or two gentlemen in tow, her lacquered black hair a performance in itself, dressed in Diva Uniform - pearls, shawls, perhaps a fan - and speaking, as one (rather lovely) profile notes, entirely in exclamation points, she could whip the crowd into a little tide of joy, one she would then generously turn over to her successors on the stage. You knew, whether or not the singing really was first rate, that you were out at an Event.

There aren't all that many left who can do that kind of magic, based on time, accomplishment, and that most elusive of ingredients, the Little Something Extra that makes a star.

Speaking of stars, today also sees celebrations in order for, in no particular order, a motley crew that includes thrush Margaret Whiting (another audience-favorite, if at rather different venues), actor/guest Orson Bean, painter-of-anomie Edward Hopper, troubled Ronette Estelle Bennett (gone too soon, and too recently), professional mother Rose Kennedy, etiquetteuse Amy Vanderbilt, Priscilla-tranny Terence Stamp, underused neo-Lena Lonette McKee, and, God help us, Bob Dole. What a dinner party you could make out of that crowd!

Hong Kong Carmen

Eastern superstar Grace Chang sizzles in this number from her 1961 epic The Wild, Wild Rose. She's equal parts Anna May Wong and Kathryn Grayson, with just a twist of Eartha Kitt here and there. Enjoy...