Theodore Chanler, was the only novelty.
“Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.
“I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis Curtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”
“Oh.”
“They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from Il Pastor fido . I could immediatelysee why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in anticipation. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God’s more complicated pranks.
Her choice of songs highlighted her failings. Their delicate textures were constantly broken by her lapses. When we arrived at the Chanler pieces, I thought I was accustomed to her, but I found I wasn’t. The first song begins with the following verse, written by Walter de la Mare, who had crafted all the poems in archaic epitaph style:
Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;
She were so small
Scarce aught at all,
But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.
The vocal line for “She were so small” consists of four notes, the last two rising a half step from the two before them. To work, the passage requires a deadeye accuracy of pitch:
Singing this line, Karen Jensen hit the D-sharp but missed the E and skidded up uncontrollably to F-sharp, which would sound all right to anyone who didn’t have the music in front of his nose, as I did. Only a fellow musician could be offended.
Infuriated, I began to feel that I could not participate in a recital with this woman. It would be humiliating to perform such lovely songs in this excruciating manner. I stopped playing, turned to her to tell her that I could not continue after all, and then I saw her bracelet.
I am not, on the whole, especially observant, a failing that probably accounts for my having missed the bracelet when we first met. But I saw it now: five silver canaries dangled down quietly from it, and as it slipped back and forth, I saw her wrist and what I suddenly realized would be there: the parallel lines of her madness, etched in scar tissue.
The epitaphs finished, she asked me to work with her, and I agreed. When we shook hands, the canaries shook in tiny vibrations, as if pleased with my dutiful kindness, my charity, toward their mad mistress.
Though Paul Hindemith’s reputation once equaled Stravinsky’s and Bartók’s, it suffered after his death in 1963 an almost complete collapse. Only two of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and the Mathis der Maler symphony, are played with any frequency, thanks in part to their use of borrowed tunes. One hears his woodwind quintets and choral pieces now and then, but the works of which he was most proud—the ballet Nobilissima Visione, Das Marienleben (a song cycle), and the opera Harmonie der
“Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.
“I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis Curtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”
“Oh.”
“They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from Il Pastor fido . I could immediatelysee why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in anticipation. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God’s more complicated pranks.
Her choice of songs highlighted her failings. Their delicate textures were constantly broken by her lapses. When we arrived at the Chanler pieces, I thought I was accustomed to her, but I found I wasn’t. The first song begins with the following verse, written by Walter de la Mare, who had crafted all the poems in archaic epitaph style:
Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;
She were so small
Scarce aught at all,
But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.
The vocal line for “She were so small” consists of four notes, the last two rising a half step from the two before them. To work, the passage requires a deadeye accuracy of pitch:
Singing this line, Karen Jensen hit the D-sharp but missed the E and skidded up uncontrollably to F-sharp, which would sound all right to anyone who didn’t have the music in front of his nose, as I did. Only a fellow musician could be offended.
Infuriated, I began to feel that I could not participate in a recital with this woman. It would be humiliating to perform such lovely songs in this excruciating manner. I stopped playing, turned to her to tell her that I could not continue after all, and then I saw her bracelet.
I am not, on the whole, especially observant, a failing that probably accounts for my having missed the bracelet when we first met. But I saw it now: five silver canaries dangled down quietly from it, and as it slipped back and forth, I saw her wrist and what I suddenly realized would be there: the parallel lines of her madness, etched in scar tissue.
The epitaphs finished, she asked me to work with her, and I agreed. When we shook hands, the canaries shook in tiny vibrations, as if pleased with my dutiful kindness, my charity, toward their mad mistress.
Though Paul Hindemith’s reputation once equaled Stravinsky’s and Bartók’s, it suffered after his death in 1963 an almost complete collapse. Only two of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and the Mathis der Maler symphony, are played with any frequency, thanks in part to their use of borrowed tunes. One hears his woodwind quintets and choral pieces now and then, but the works of which he was most proud—the ballet Nobilissima Visione, Das Marienleben (a song cycle), and the opera Harmonie der
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