Opera — Love
WHEN EAST MET WEST. My parents in Singapore in the mid-1950s.
By Gordon Bowness
Unpublished essay, 2007
Norma is one in a long line of operas where love triumphs over faith, ancestry, reason, politics, even death, where love triumphs over all — except tragedy.
The 1998 Canadian Opera Company production of Norma was the only opera my father and I saw together. He would die within the year.
The title character of Vincenzo Bellini’s sublime opera is a Druid high priestess of astonishing power in Gaul, 50 BC, who betrays the spiritual leadership of her people by falling in love with Pollione, the commander of the Imperial Roman forces of occupation, breaking vows of chastity by secretly giving birth to his two children.
Impending war and the discovery of another woman precipitate Norma’s public confession; she condemns herself to death by fire. His love renewed, the captured Pollione willingly joins Norma on a sacrificial pyre.
My father and I never realized our dream of going together to the Metropolitan Opera in New York; my parents’ visit to Toronto and the COC’s Norma had been an impromptu substitution. My father had cancer; time was running out.
Unpublished essay, 2007
Norma is one in a long line of operas where love triumphs over faith, ancestry, reason, politics, even death, where love triumphs over all — except tragedy.
The 1998 Canadian Opera Company production of Norma was the only opera my father and I saw together. He would die within the year.
The title character of Vincenzo Bellini’s sublime opera is a Druid high priestess of astonishing power in Gaul, 50 BC, who betrays the spiritual leadership of her people by falling in love with Pollione, the commander of the Imperial Roman forces of occupation, breaking vows of chastity by secretly giving birth to his two children.
Impending war and the discovery of another woman precipitate Norma’s public confession; she condemns herself to death by fire. His love renewed, the captured Pollione willingly joins Norma on a sacrificial pyre.
My father and I never realized our dream of going together to the Metropolitan Opera in New York; my parents’ visit to Toronto and the COC’s Norma had been an impromptu substitution. My father had cancer; time was running out.
I don’t know if the opera’s doomed, cross-cultural, love story struck a particular chord with him; it did with me.
In 1952, a young, idealistic biochemist left his native Manchester and a gloomy, post-war United Kingdom to lecture in one of the farthest, most exotic corners of the British Empire — Singapore. A year later, he married a dark Indian beauty — to the dismay of his family and the relief of hers.
As the youngest child of that mixed-race coupling, the opera Norma was a revelation.
Norma is Bellini’s most ambitious opera, celebrated for its intense lyrical and dramatic beauty. It’s a watershed, employing novel structures and unique, unadorned melodies to convey the tragic arc of the story in a way that hadn’t been done before. The role of Norma is seen as one of the most difficult in the entire repertoire. Bellini wrote the role for soprano Giuditta Pasta, a prima donna who overcame vocal deficiencies through intelligence and acting ability to become the greatest soprano — and Norma — of her era (a path Maria Callas would follow in the mid-20th century). Many others singers have crashed and burned long before they reach Norma’s fiery final scene.
When it opened in 1831 at La Scala in Milan — only nine months after the triumph of his La Sonnambula at Milan’s Teatro Carcano — Norma cemented 30-year-old Bellini’s position at the top of Italy’s volatile opera scene, second only to Rossini. (Think Broadway in its golden age. Italian opera was big money, with composers, colourful impresarios and opera houses churning out works as fast as they could. Opera was the star factory of the Romantic era.)
The libretto was by Felice Romani, the most celebrated librettist of his time; he collaborated with Bellini on all his best work (other credits include Donizetti’s Anna Bolena). Together, Romani and Bellini created an amazing marriage of poetry and music.
Despite a disastrous opening night on Dec 26, 1831, Norma was quickly embraced by audiences, with 40 performances its first season. It stormed across Europe and beyond. In fact, Norma was the first fully staged opera ever seen in Toronto, presented in 1853 by a touring company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre (on Theatre Lane, where the TD bank towers now stand).
James Robinson’s 1998 production for the COC starred a relatively unknown Russian soprano Marina Mescheriakova, whose small but beautiful bel canto voice contained surprising bite in the ethereal signature aria “Casta Diva,” where Norma prays to the moon for peace while standing under a sacred oak tree.
“Chaste goddess, who dost bathe in silver light these ancient hallowed trees/ Turn thy fair face upon us/ Unveiled and unclouded…/ Temper thou the burning hearts, the excessive zeal of thy people/ Unfold the earth in that sweet peace which, through Thee, reigns in heaven.”
Mescheriakova held rapt the attention of everyone in the more than 3,100-seat barn, previously known as the O’Keefe Centre (then called the Hummingbird and now the Sony Centre).
Allen Moyer’s sets were stark, punctured with clear-cut tree stumps and a Roman fortress of rough-hewn planks standing in flagrant desecration of the Druids’ nature worship. Heather Carson’s lighting shocked with harsh flickering fluorescents.
My father was enthralled. He said it was the best opera he had ever seen.
My father wasn’t a military man but a scientist, a very different aspect of western ascendancy. His was an empire of the mind. My mother is a preacher’s daughter not a pagan priestess. But she is a tempestuous creature; the emotional and spiritual centre of the family, proud of her Asian attitudes.
Rational west; emotional east. Sun and moon. Apollo and Artemis.
East may be east and west may be west, but in my family home, the twain often met.
Southeast Asia in the early 1960s was a turbulent place. Ethnic violence made its shocking debut in the region against the backdrop of war in Vietnam and political instability. Singapore, where I was born, must be one of the few places on earth to be kicked out of another country. It had finally gained independence from British rule in 1963 only to be jettisoned from the Malaysian federation 23 months later. The family decided to emigrate. They moved to an even more remote corner of the empire — Winnipeg.
My father was part of a dying breed, a scientist with a classical education. He was a very literate and cultured man. He regretted the increasing specialization of scientific education, parochialism of any kind. He even helped open the admissions process to the University of Manitoba’s School of Medicine to recognize liberal arts and life experience.
CBC radio’s broadcast of Saturday Afternoon at the Met was a fixture of my childhood. I can still see my father lying on the carpet in the living room, beside him copies of The Manchester Guardian Weekly or National Geographic or Scientific American. He was not to be interrupted, my mother said, though she couldn’t help herself sometimes.
Like many teenaged children, I dismissed my father. I saw him as a stereotypical absent-minded professor, affable but odd, kind of boring. Opera was just another embarrassing proof of my father’s foreignness; so different was he from the macho males of Manitoba.
I grew closer to my father only after I moved to Toronto to go to school. Music was our touchstone; by then I shared his passion for opera. But we were never that close. The generation gap, my gayness, the pervasive presence of my mother, kept us at a distance. I also inherited my father’s English reserve. “You’re just like your father,” my mother still accuses anytime I shy away from talking to strangers or hesitate from raising a fuss with some officiary.
After my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he first tried radiation, then hormone therapy. Neither worked. The cancer spread to his lymph nodes, then his spine. A risky surgery was a last chance effort to at least delay the inevitable. It didn’t work, either.
After his surgery, my father was hospitalized at the Health Sciences Centre, the facility adjacent to the medical faculty of the University of Manitoba where my father taught and worked for 30 years. Many of the people treating him were former students.
Most would have known whom he was — that professor who always rode his bike to work. My father was very fit, biking in the summer and, in winter, cross-country skiing along the riverbank near our house — in latter years accompanied by his corgi, Sir Dylan, porpoising beside him in the snow. He was an avid outdoorsman; all his children shared his love of nature. He didn’t smoke, he wasn’t a heavy drinker, he ate well — after all, his expertise was the chemistry of the human body.
He was a scientist to the end. He knew exactly what his diagnoses meant and would patiently, dispassionately explain to his family all the medical jargon. With tumours spreading up his spine, paralysis, too, would slowly, inexorably move up his body.
All his knowledge, his life’s work, couldn’t save him.
The health system failed him, too. He never recovered from the surgery, so his last days were spent in the intensive care ward of the Health Sciences Centre, a place not ideally suited to administering palliative care, the more advanced science of pain management for terminal cases. At one point, he lost his mind; his blood chemistry, his electrolytes, had gone out of whack because of various medications. It was a temporary but terrifying episode. Some of his ravings were painful.
(Though he was not above making jokes. My mother and her friend were sitting beside my father in the hospital when they got the idea that someone crazed, near death’s door, might be privy to inside information. So the inveterate gamblers asked my father if he knew the next winning lottery numbers. He answered, slowly, lucidly: 5…, 4…, the two women scrambled to write down the heaven-sent insights, 3…, he continued the countdown, 2…, 1. My mother and her friend laughed fiendishly at their own gullibility.)
My father eventually did regain his wits. But that was the kind of slip a more specialized ward is designed to avoid. He felt his caregivers were blameless; it was an honest mistake.
He never did secure a hoped-for transfer to the palliative Riverview Hospital located, ironically, directly across from our house, separated by only a few hundred metres of vegetable and flower gardens.
So he died in a grim room, where he could hear fellow patients ranting from the aftereffects of neurosurgery for brain traumas.
Wearing a neck brace and unable to move his head, he was positioned by a window so that all he could see was an outside wall.
Through that whole creeping nightmare, music was my father’s solace. My eldest brother, the only sibling who still lived in the same city as our parents, was impressed by my father’s ability to transport his self — above the pain, away from his bleak surroundings — by listening to music. It was more powerful than morphine.
After he started to lose motor control of his hands, visitors had ample opportunity to peruse his bedside collection of favourite CDs as they helped load his portable disc player.
When I went back to Winnipeg to see him, the latest CD I had sent wasn’t among the few that made the journey to the hospital — Brahms’ German Requiem.
Brahms, an agnostic, completed the requiem a year after his mother’s death. The text is comprised of Brahms’ own selections from the Lutheran Bible. It opens with Matthew: “Blessed are they that mourn/ For they shall be comforted.”
It’s an overpowering choral work, as if grief was forcing Brahms to overcome his religious doubts.
“Lord, make me know mine end/ And the measure of my days/ What it is/ that I may know how frail I am,” goes one of the chosen Psalms.
Now I see it as a totally inappropriate choice, so bombastic and brooding. We are an immigrant family, a small, self-contained unit. Despite letters from overseas and infrequent visits, I knew no other family. My father’s was the first death of a loved one I ever experienced. I think I had become enthralled with the requiem as a way to feel his impending death, as a way to give shape to grief.
As if my father needed that.
The CD sent from my boyfriend at the time did make final hospital room selection; he was more musically astute than I. It was Frederica von Stade’s recording of the Songs of the Auvergne arranged by Joseph Canteloube. My father loved these simple shepherd songs, with their plaintive, beautiful melodies, at once both cheering and melancholy. Canteloube collected the unique folksongs, sometimes called “regrets,” travelling through the Auvergne region in the south of France in the early part of the 20th century.
In the most popular of these songs, “Baïlèro,” a shepherdess sings out across a valley to a shepherd on the neighbouring hilltop. The pair wonder whose side of the valley is prettier. The shepherdess calls to the shepherd to join her, but alas, a river separates them. “Dio lou baïlèro, lèro…,” she repeats, commanding the shepherd to sing “baïlèro,” a Langued’oc word untranslatable from the ancient, vanishing language.
I can see my father transported to that green hilltop, a lovely voice calling to him from across the lush valley.
The last time I saw my father alive, I brought roses; he loved roses, he was English, a Lancashire lad. I thought the scent would cheer up the sterile room. But they were past their prime. (My mother later told me they never had any scent.)
It wasn’t a long visit. I told him I loved him — the first time ever — kissed him on the forehead and left. I don’t remember if he said he loved me — odd that I don’t remember, it would have been the first time he said those words to me, too.
Thankfully, given his prognosis, my father died a few weeks after that visit. I got the call when I was at my boyfriend’s house. I could tell it bothered him that I didn’t cry.
Before he died, my father’s favourite opera singer was Renée Fleming; her Signatures album was in constant rotation during his last days.
My father said he’d be quite happy if we didn’t have a funeral, but if we did, he requested we play a track from that CD, Fleming singing the transformation scene from Richard Strauss’s Daphne — one of the most haunting arias in all of opera.
It concludes the story of a dreamy shepherdess who falls prey to a tug-of-war-and-love between the god Apollo in disguise and her childhood friend and mortal suitor. When Apollo kills the young man, Daphne is overcome by grief and guilt; her love of the sun and nature betrayed. For Daphne, life is no longer possible. She entreats Apollo to turn her into a tree, to be united in death to her lover and in life to nature.
The chastened sun god agrees to her request. “Ich komme — ich komme…,” sings Daphne. “I am coming — I am coming — verdant brothers/ Earth’s sap flows sweetly through me/ To meet you — with leaf and branch/ Most chaste light.”
Unusually, the actual transformation, the climax of the opera, is a wordless, orchestral passage. A laurel tree flooded with light from a full moon appears in Daphne’s stead; her sighs echo above the opera’s dying chords.
Strauss is a controversial figure; many accusations of Nazi collaboration still stand. Early in the Nazis’ rise to power, Strauss, Germany’s preeminent composer, seemed tacitly to support the regime, remaining in the country and accepting honours and positions as other artists fled.
Daphne was written during a time of increasing estrangement between Strauss and the Nazi regime. The government was passing increasingly harsh prohibitions against Jews. Strauss’s second librettist, the Austrian Jew Stephan Zweig, decided that it was too dangerous for him and for Strauss to keep working together. So, at Zweig’s urging, Strauss began working with Josef Gregor on three new projects, including Daphne.
By the time of its premiere in Dresden in 1938 (it was completed in Sicily, near Bellini’s hometown), Strauss’s position in Germany had become untenable. The first roundup of German Jews happened a month after the premiere, on Nov 9 — Kristallnacht. The authorities even came for Strauss’s Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice; luckily, she was away. But her young children were forced into the streets and made to spit on other Jews as they were herded away.
Regardless of Strauss’s initial indifference to the Nazis — perhaps because of it — the composer seemed to pour all his conflicted emotions into Daphne: Her terror and confusion at falling in love with a godhead, her complicity in murder, her salvation in “beloved light” and communion with nature in contrast to “savage” and “clumsy” people worshipping Dionysus and his “mysterious forces.”
In the opera’s final passage, Strauss had found an escape.
So, too, had my father.
The transformation scene runs roughly 12 minutes. My brothers balked at the idea of such a long and complicated operatic interlude at the funeral. A compromise was reached. I was only allowed to play just more than three minutes. But it’s an impossible piece to cut into or out of. Unsatisfactorily to say the least, the section we played meant we never actually heard the moment of Daphne’s transformation.
We left my father in musical, if not temporal, limbo. (Don’t worry about my father’s eternal soul; he wasn’t religious, just reverential toward music. When asked about his faith, he described himself as a deist; he believed in some notion of a life force.)
To this day, when I hear that point in the opera where we stopped the music at the funeral I break into a smile.
By the final notes, I’m crying.
Only now do I appreciate the romantic spirit hidden under my father’s staid British exterior. I have in my possession the playbills my father collected from 1951 in Liverpool where he went to university: The Covent Garden Opera’s Tristan Und Isolde with Kirsten Flagstad and Set Svanholm (the last Isolde sung by the legendary Wagnerian soprano from Norway), The English Opera Group’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Montiverdi and Dido And Aeneas by Purcell, both conducted and arranged by Benjamin Britten with Peter Pears singing.
These opera tours to the provinces in the early 1950s were of great significance to Britons. They signaled a return to normalcy after World War II, a symbol of British resiliency after so much destruction and sacrifice. How these operas must have fired the imagination of the young student my father was then, fuelling his Technicolor dreams of adventure and romance amidst the dun-coloured reality of post-war Britain, with its rations and queues and fast unraveling empire.
He once told me that science offered a life of adventure.
His work meant discovery and utility. His career took him from one end of the earth to the other. And he married a woman of a different race from a distant land at a time when few would have had the nerve. They stuck by each other for 46 years until his death — almost a year to the day after we saw Norma.
Two years after his death, my father’s ashes remained in a zip-lock plastic bag in a shoebox, sitting atop the chest of drawers overlooking my mother’s bed. The ashes of the dog, Sir Dylan, had since joined his; somehow the dog got a nice urn. Alone in that big house, those remains were both a comfort and a curse to my mother. She kept hearing bumps in the night, convinced that her husband and his dog were playing jokes on her.
My sister and I convinced my mother that it was time to let go, to spread the ashes.
It was an overcast night. My sister and I dumped the ashes rather unceremoniously between a bicycle path and the river near our house, along a stretch of park my father (and his dog) passed countless times, under dogwoods, maples, elms and oaks that reach up towards the prairie sky as they cling to the muddy banks of the Red River. From there the river flows north to Lake Winnipeg and, by the Nelson River, to Hudson’s Bay, the Arctic Ocean and beyond. •
© 2007
In 1952, a young, idealistic biochemist left his native Manchester and a gloomy, post-war United Kingdom to lecture in one of the farthest, most exotic corners of the British Empire — Singapore. A year later, he married a dark Indian beauty — to the dismay of his family and the relief of hers.
As the youngest child of that mixed-race coupling, the opera Norma was a revelation.
Norma is Bellini’s most ambitious opera, celebrated for its intense lyrical and dramatic beauty. It’s a watershed, employing novel structures and unique, unadorned melodies to convey the tragic arc of the story in a way that hadn’t been done before. The role of Norma is seen as one of the most difficult in the entire repertoire. Bellini wrote the role for soprano Giuditta Pasta, a prima donna who overcame vocal deficiencies through intelligence and acting ability to become the greatest soprano — and Norma — of her era (a path Maria Callas would follow in the mid-20th century). Many others singers have crashed and burned long before they reach Norma’s fiery final scene.
When it opened in 1831 at La Scala in Milan — only nine months after the triumph of his La Sonnambula at Milan’s Teatro Carcano — Norma cemented 30-year-old Bellini’s position at the top of Italy’s volatile opera scene, second only to Rossini. (Think Broadway in its golden age. Italian opera was big money, with composers, colourful impresarios and opera houses churning out works as fast as they could. Opera was the star factory of the Romantic era.)
The libretto was by Felice Romani, the most celebrated librettist of his time; he collaborated with Bellini on all his best work (other credits include Donizetti’s Anna Bolena). Together, Romani and Bellini created an amazing marriage of poetry and music.
Despite a disastrous opening night on Dec 26, 1831, Norma was quickly embraced by audiences, with 40 performances its first season. It stormed across Europe and beyond. In fact, Norma was the first fully staged opera ever seen in Toronto, presented in 1853 by a touring company at the Royal Lyceum Theatre (on Theatre Lane, where the TD bank towers now stand).
James Robinson’s 1998 production for the COC starred a relatively unknown Russian soprano Marina Mescheriakova, whose small but beautiful bel canto voice contained surprising bite in the ethereal signature aria “Casta Diva,” where Norma prays to the moon for peace while standing under a sacred oak tree.
“Chaste goddess, who dost bathe in silver light these ancient hallowed trees/ Turn thy fair face upon us/ Unveiled and unclouded…/ Temper thou the burning hearts, the excessive zeal of thy people/ Unfold the earth in that sweet peace which, through Thee, reigns in heaven.”
Mescheriakova held rapt the attention of everyone in the more than 3,100-seat barn, previously known as the O’Keefe Centre (then called the Hummingbird and now the Sony Centre).
Allen Moyer’s sets were stark, punctured with clear-cut tree stumps and a Roman fortress of rough-hewn planks standing in flagrant desecration of the Druids’ nature worship. Heather Carson’s lighting shocked with harsh flickering fluorescents.
My father was enthralled. He said it was the best opera he had ever seen.
My father wasn’t a military man but a scientist, a very different aspect of western ascendancy. His was an empire of the mind. My mother is a preacher’s daughter not a pagan priestess. But she is a tempestuous creature; the emotional and spiritual centre of the family, proud of her Asian attitudes.
Rational west; emotional east. Sun and moon. Apollo and Artemis.
East may be east and west may be west, but in my family home, the twain often met.
Southeast Asia in the early 1960s was a turbulent place. Ethnic violence made its shocking debut in the region against the backdrop of war in Vietnam and political instability. Singapore, where I was born, must be one of the few places on earth to be kicked out of another country. It had finally gained independence from British rule in 1963 only to be jettisoned from the Malaysian federation 23 months later. The family decided to emigrate. They moved to an even more remote corner of the empire — Winnipeg.
My father was part of a dying breed, a scientist with a classical education. He was a very literate and cultured man. He regretted the increasing specialization of scientific education, parochialism of any kind. He even helped open the admissions process to the University of Manitoba’s School of Medicine to recognize liberal arts and life experience.
CBC radio’s broadcast of Saturday Afternoon at the Met was a fixture of my childhood. I can still see my father lying on the carpet in the living room, beside him copies of The Manchester Guardian Weekly or National Geographic or Scientific American. He was not to be interrupted, my mother said, though she couldn’t help herself sometimes.
Like many teenaged children, I dismissed my father. I saw him as a stereotypical absent-minded professor, affable but odd, kind of boring. Opera was just another embarrassing proof of my father’s foreignness; so different was he from the macho males of Manitoba.
I grew closer to my father only after I moved to Toronto to go to school. Music was our touchstone; by then I shared his passion for opera. But we were never that close. The generation gap, my gayness, the pervasive presence of my mother, kept us at a distance. I also inherited my father’s English reserve. “You’re just like your father,” my mother still accuses anytime I shy away from talking to strangers or hesitate from raising a fuss with some officiary.
After my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he first tried radiation, then hormone therapy. Neither worked. The cancer spread to his lymph nodes, then his spine. A risky surgery was a last chance effort to at least delay the inevitable. It didn’t work, either.
After his surgery, my father was hospitalized at the Health Sciences Centre, the facility adjacent to the medical faculty of the University of Manitoba where my father taught and worked for 30 years. Many of the people treating him were former students.
Most would have known whom he was — that professor who always rode his bike to work. My father was very fit, biking in the summer and, in winter, cross-country skiing along the riverbank near our house — in latter years accompanied by his corgi, Sir Dylan, porpoising beside him in the snow. He was an avid outdoorsman; all his children shared his love of nature. He didn’t smoke, he wasn’t a heavy drinker, he ate well — after all, his expertise was the chemistry of the human body.
He was a scientist to the end. He knew exactly what his diagnoses meant and would patiently, dispassionately explain to his family all the medical jargon. With tumours spreading up his spine, paralysis, too, would slowly, inexorably move up his body.
All his knowledge, his life’s work, couldn’t save him.
The health system failed him, too. He never recovered from the surgery, so his last days were spent in the intensive care ward of the Health Sciences Centre, a place not ideally suited to administering palliative care, the more advanced science of pain management for terminal cases. At one point, he lost his mind; his blood chemistry, his electrolytes, had gone out of whack because of various medications. It was a temporary but terrifying episode. Some of his ravings were painful.
(Though he was not above making jokes. My mother and her friend were sitting beside my father in the hospital when they got the idea that someone crazed, near death’s door, might be privy to inside information. So the inveterate gamblers asked my father if he knew the next winning lottery numbers. He answered, slowly, lucidly: 5…, 4…, the two women scrambled to write down the heaven-sent insights, 3…, he continued the countdown, 2…, 1. My mother and her friend laughed fiendishly at their own gullibility.)
My father eventually did regain his wits. But that was the kind of slip a more specialized ward is designed to avoid. He felt his caregivers were blameless; it was an honest mistake.
He never did secure a hoped-for transfer to the palliative Riverview Hospital located, ironically, directly across from our house, separated by only a few hundred metres of vegetable and flower gardens.
So he died in a grim room, where he could hear fellow patients ranting from the aftereffects of neurosurgery for brain traumas.
Wearing a neck brace and unable to move his head, he was positioned by a window so that all he could see was an outside wall.
Through that whole creeping nightmare, music was my father’s solace. My eldest brother, the only sibling who still lived in the same city as our parents, was impressed by my father’s ability to transport his self — above the pain, away from his bleak surroundings — by listening to music. It was more powerful than morphine.
After he started to lose motor control of his hands, visitors had ample opportunity to peruse his bedside collection of favourite CDs as they helped load his portable disc player.
When I went back to Winnipeg to see him, the latest CD I had sent wasn’t among the few that made the journey to the hospital — Brahms’ German Requiem.
Brahms, an agnostic, completed the requiem a year after his mother’s death. The text is comprised of Brahms’ own selections from the Lutheran Bible. It opens with Matthew: “Blessed are they that mourn/ For they shall be comforted.”
It’s an overpowering choral work, as if grief was forcing Brahms to overcome his religious doubts.
“Lord, make me know mine end/ And the measure of my days/ What it is/ that I may know how frail I am,” goes one of the chosen Psalms.
Now I see it as a totally inappropriate choice, so bombastic and brooding. We are an immigrant family, a small, self-contained unit. Despite letters from overseas and infrequent visits, I knew no other family. My father’s was the first death of a loved one I ever experienced. I think I had become enthralled with the requiem as a way to feel his impending death, as a way to give shape to grief.
As if my father needed that.
The CD sent from my boyfriend at the time did make final hospital room selection; he was more musically astute than I. It was Frederica von Stade’s recording of the Songs of the Auvergne arranged by Joseph Canteloube. My father loved these simple shepherd songs, with their plaintive, beautiful melodies, at once both cheering and melancholy. Canteloube collected the unique folksongs, sometimes called “regrets,” travelling through the Auvergne region in the south of France in the early part of the 20th century.
In the most popular of these songs, “Baïlèro,” a shepherdess sings out across a valley to a shepherd on the neighbouring hilltop. The pair wonder whose side of the valley is prettier. The shepherdess calls to the shepherd to join her, but alas, a river separates them. “Dio lou baïlèro, lèro…,” she repeats, commanding the shepherd to sing “baïlèro,” a Langued’oc word untranslatable from the ancient, vanishing language.
I can see my father transported to that green hilltop, a lovely voice calling to him from across the lush valley.
The last time I saw my father alive, I brought roses; he loved roses, he was English, a Lancashire lad. I thought the scent would cheer up the sterile room. But they were past their prime. (My mother later told me they never had any scent.)
It wasn’t a long visit. I told him I loved him — the first time ever — kissed him on the forehead and left. I don’t remember if he said he loved me — odd that I don’t remember, it would have been the first time he said those words to me, too.
Thankfully, given his prognosis, my father died a few weeks after that visit. I got the call when I was at my boyfriend’s house. I could tell it bothered him that I didn’t cry.
Before he died, my father’s favourite opera singer was Renée Fleming; her Signatures album was in constant rotation during his last days.
My father said he’d be quite happy if we didn’t have a funeral, but if we did, he requested we play a track from that CD, Fleming singing the transformation scene from Richard Strauss’s Daphne — one of the most haunting arias in all of opera.
It concludes the story of a dreamy shepherdess who falls prey to a tug-of-war-and-love between the god Apollo in disguise and her childhood friend and mortal suitor. When Apollo kills the young man, Daphne is overcome by grief and guilt; her love of the sun and nature betrayed. For Daphne, life is no longer possible. She entreats Apollo to turn her into a tree, to be united in death to her lover and in life to nature.
The chastened sun god agrees to her request. “Ich komme — ich komme…,” sings Daphne. “I am coming — I am coming — verdant brothers/ Earth’s sap flows sweetly through me/ To meet you — with leaf and branch/ Most chaste light.”
Unusually, the actual transformation, the climax of the opera, is a wordless, orchestral passage. A laurel tree flooded with light from a full moon appears in Daphne’s stead; her sighs echo above the opera’s dying chords.
Strauss is a controversial figure; many accusations of Nazi collaboration still stand. Early in the Nazis’ rise to power, Strauss, Germany’s preeminent composer, seemed tacitly to support the regime, remaining in the country and accepting honours and positions as other artists fled.
Daphne was written during a time of increasing estrangement between Strauss and the Nazi regime. The government was passing increasingly harsh prohibitions against Jews. Strauss’s second librettist, the Austrian Jew Stephan Zweig, decided that it was too dangerous for him and for Strauss to keep working together. So, at Zweig’s urging, Strauss began working with Josef Gregor on three new projects, including Daphne.
By the time of its premiere in Dresden in 1938 (it was completed in Sicily, near Bellini’s hometown), Strauss’s position in Germany had become untenable. The first roundup of German Jews happened a month after the premiere, on Nov 9 — Kristallnacht. The authorities even came for Strauss’s Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice; luckily, she was away. But her young children were forced into the streets and made to spit on other Jews as they were herded away.
Regardless of Strauss’s initial indifference to the Nazis — perhaps because of it — the composer seemed to pour all his conflicted emotions into Daphne: Her terror and confusion at falling in love with a godhead, her complicity in murder, her salvation in “beloved light” and communion with nature in contrast to “savage” and “clumsy” people worshipping Dionysus and his “mysterious forces.”
In the opera’s final passage, Strauss had found an escape.
So, too, had my father.
The transformation scene runs roughly 12 minutes. My brothers balked at the idea of such a long and complicated operatic interlude at the funeral. A compromise was reached. I was only allowed to play just more than three minutes. But it’s an impossible piece to cut into or out of. Unsatisfactorily to say the least, the section we played meant we never actually heard the moment of Daphne’s transformation.
We left my father in musical, if not temporal, limbo. (Don’t worry about my father’s eternal soul; he wasn’t religious, just reverential toward music. When asked about his faith, he described himself as a deist; he believed in some notion of a life force.)
To this day, when I hear that point in the opera where we stopped the music at the funeral I break into a smile.
By the final notes, I’m crying.
Only now do I appreciate the romantic spirit hidden under my father’s staid British exterior. I have in my possession the playbills my father collected from 1951 in Liverpool where he went to university: The Covent Garden Opera’s Tristan Und Isolde with Kirsten Flagstad and Set Svanholm (the last Isolde sung by the legendary Wagnerian soprano from Norway), The English Opera Group’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Montiverdi and Dido And Aeneas by Purcell, both conducted and arranged by Benjamin Britten with Peter Pears singing.
These opera tours to the provinces in the early 1950s were of great significance to Britons. They signaled a return to normalcy after World War II, a symbol of British resiliency after so much destruction and sacrifice. How these operas must have fired the imagination of the young student my father was then, fuelling his Technicolor dreams of adventure and romance amidst the dun-coloured reality of post-war Britain, with its rations and queues and fast unraveling empire.
He once told me that science offered a life of adventure.
His work meant discovery and utility. His career took him from one end of the earth to the other. And he married a woman of a different race from a distant land at a time when few would have had the nerve. They stuck by each other for 46 years until his death — almost a year to the day after we saw Norma.
Two years after his death, my father’s ashes remained in a zip-lock plastic bag in a shoebox, sitting atop the chest of drawers overlooking my mother’s bed. The ashes of the dog, Sir Dylan, had since joined his; somehow the dog got a nice urn. Alone in that big house, those remains were both a comfort and a curse to my mother. She kept hearing bumps in the night, convinced that her husband and his dog were playing jokes on her.
My sister and I convinced my mother that it was time to let go, to spread the ashes.
It was an overcast night. My sister and I dumped the ashes rather unceremoniously between a bicycle path and the river near our house, along a stretch of park my father (and his dog) passed countless times, under dogwoods, maples, elms and oaks that reach up towards the prairie sky as they cling to the muddy banks of the Red River. From there the river flows north to Lake Winnipeg and, by the Nelson River, to Hudson’s Bay, the Arctic Ocean and beyond. •
© 2007