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Prima la musica, dopo le parole

All the heavy lifting for this posting is being done by far better writers than I. I just wanted to share two poems that seem to me to be superb responses to great opera. The first is by James Merrill:

 

BRUNHILDE CONFRONTS SIEGFRIED


Brunhilde confronts Siegfried. That is to say,

Two singers have been patiently rehearsed

So that their tones and attitudes convey

Outrage and injured innocence. But first

Two youngsters became singers, strove to master

Every nuance of innocence and outrage

Even in the bosom of their stolid

Middle class families who made it possible

To study voice, and languages, take lessons

In how the woman loves, the hero dies…

Tonight again, each note a blade reforged,

The dire oath ready in their blood is sworn.

Two world class egos, painted overweight,

Who’ll joke at supper side by side, now hate

So plausibly that one old stagehand cries.


This is one of the poems in Merrill’s sequence THE RING CYCLE and encapsulates wonderfully the absurd magnificence of the whole operatic process. I am very moved by the fact that the journey taken by the two opera stars was also mine, although I was never a star, and did not sing at the New York Met Opera…

 

James Merrill came from a wealthy background and a trust-fund meant he never had to ‘work’ in the conventional sense but be left a fine body of poetry and other writing. He was a great opera fan and endowed a seat at the ‘new’ Met.

 

 

John Heath-Stubbs was also from a monied background. Most of his working life was spent in academia; he also published a good deal of poetry, criticism, and a volume of autobiography. He is one of the most important British poets of the second half of the twentieth century and he writes particularly well about music. Diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 18 he was completely blind by the time he was 60. In my view, Leporello is the greatest English poem written about opera.


LEPORELLO

 

Do you see that old man over there? - He was once a gentleman's gentleman;

His skull is bald and wrinkled like a leathery snake’s egg;

His forehead is not high, his eyes, though horny are cunning,

Like an old jackdaw’s beginning to moult a few grey feathers;

His nose is sharp like a weasel’s, and his lips always a little smiling,

His narrow shoulders crouched forward, hinting a half-finished bow.

Did you notice how beautifully white and smooth and soft his hands were?

His coat is dowdy as the dusty shards of a house haunting beetle,

His cuffs and collar not quite white, like the foam on a fouled mill-race.

But Fear flickers over his face - now settling like a fly

On his sunken cheeks, now haunting his blurred eyes;

And his pale mouth is always ready to fall open and gasp and shriek….

Night after night he’s here, in all weathers,

Drinking. They say his wife is a shrew and holds her head high

For all for that once …. Night after night, under the yellow lantern-light,

Always the same old chair in the corner, night after night.

But he likes to talk to a stranger - it makes a nice change.

Why don't you buy him a drink and get him talking?

He can remember his master well - those were the days! -

Feast days, Carnival days - fans and flowers and bright silk shawls

Tossing like a poppy-patched cornfield the wind dishevels,

And then milky moonlight flowing over close-kept courtyards;

And while his master climbed the balcony, he would keep watch,

Whistle and rub his hands and gaze at the stars -

His co-panders; or there were mandolins murmuring

Lies under windows that winked and slyly slid open;

Or the hand’s clutch and half-humorous gasp of the escapade

And after a doubling hairs turn, choking laughter at fooled footsteps

Trotting away done wrong turnings; or when cornered,

The sardonic simple decided flash of a sword-his master's sword.

And he can remember that night when he stood on the terrace

Sunning himself in black beams of vicarious sin,

While the waltz whispered within;

And three unaccountable late-comers came,

And gave no name -

(But she in the blue brocade is Anna:

And she has forged her outraged chastity into a blade

Of thin sharp ice-coloured steel; her hair is brown

And her eyebrows arched and black like two leaping salmon

Scene against the sun-flecked foam of a weir down-rushing;

And like a slim white hound unleashed she snuffs for the blood

Of a father's killer. And not far away is Elvira:

She wears silver and black but is heavily veiled

And has laid a huge jewelled crucifix over her hungry heart

In vain; for she is like an old frosty-feathered gyrfalcon,

With chrysolite eyes, mewed-up now, whose inactive perch

Frets her hooked feet; who cannot bear to gaze out

At the blue sky-paths slashed by young curving wings;

Her heart is a ruined tower from which snake-ivy

Creeps, fit to drag down an oak and smother him in dark green leaves.)

But the windows we're all golden spotted with candles,

Shadowed by dancing shapes; till above the silken strings

Flute and violin had trailed across the evening - a cry:

Zelina, like a wounded hare tangled in that black net.

 

It is very quiet in the graveyard - a strange place to be waiting for him;

The moonlight hints queer perjuries - for all the Dead

Are tucked up snug in mud; we have heaped vast lumps of masonry

Over their head and their feet, fenced them round with crosses

And stones scrolled over with white lies; we have given them flowers

Against the stench, and stopped their nostrils with mud;

We have lighted candles for hollow sockets; they will not trouble us;

They cannot see to climb the slippery stairs of their vault;

They're blind spectators who have long dropped out of the game -

But what if they didn't play fair? What if quite suddenly

This polished transparently reasonable world was shattered?

When the soft curtain of the night is ripped up by the bray of trombones,

And a dumb stone abstraction can speak, and the madman invites it to supper -

This is no laughing matter. If you are young and well born

And have no heart, it seems you can go home and laugh,

Drink wine and do yourself well; but he, Leporello,

A poor man, sir, always attentive to business, no great scholar,

Had never thought of these things didn't know how to deal with the dead gentleman,

Or Hell stretching out a flaming hungry arm

To snatch the ripe fruit of sin from the lighted banqueting hall.

 

So that is why he is always a startled look that, old man;

For he feels he is being watched by dead eyes from behind the curtains,

And is still expecting a knock at the door, and the stone foot’s tramp on the stairs.

 

The character of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ is superbly conveyed, as are individual characters therein, and Heath-Stubbs ‘graveyard scene’ is suitably chilling.

 

 

 

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