diva...amended October 28, 2007.
His high tenor C’s ran their course for four decades and three......two years in teaching, a stint selling insurance to pay for voice lessons.....mortality extinguished a larger than life Caruso last night in Modena outside Roma.
”E non ho amato mai lanto la vita....” I never have loved life so much”
What a work is man offering to the muses bestowing wonder and awe ,those soft lovable high’s, touching us so often....”Nessun dorma”... The celestial beauty of his voice.
Not unlike Michelangelo’s Pieta, Beethoven’s sonotas, Kirov’s performance of Swan Lake, the cosmos of the unconscious.,he raising our consciousness to the sublime, grasping the boy in his arms at the Met’s green room with his childish bubbling over adoration.. ...
“Sasha over here. What have you got to tell me today?” he asked in a Mozartian De Ponte aside from Figaro’s libretto........An “Ave Maria” farewell into the after life of Saint Peter and his angels.
“Addio Lucio..Mille grazie ni manchetante.. A gift from God, he was not allowed to sing in the Vatican. Does not the Catholic church owe the Maestro an apology.
A “grazie millee”. Sleep well maestro.”
I
helly Keats and :Lord Byron weeping into their sensibilities on the 7th Steps of Roma’s piazza., their delirium darkening the consciousness of Dame Joan Sutherland in Australia, remembering the Maestro’s “addios” in Verdi’s ”Rigoletto”...
“Never have I experienced such a feeling of hatred against death, Of contempt for that mysterious bland stupid metamorphosis and craven power. As if God were listening to the polyphonic hubbub of the human race.”
Verdi and Puccini ask “Maestro, what should we do? Find discover cultivate such a God given gift?”
“Riding a bicycle thru Peijing’s Tiananmen Square....a motored cycle with “60 minutes” Mike Wallace holding on for dear life, .begging for another heavenly aria......
An outsized personality with a voice born for glory.... among his Richard Tucker wino pasta and barbershops....”Live from Lincoln Center. Pavorotti and friends....very smart offstage and on, not unlike Verdi’s “La forza del destino”
46 years on the great stages of our musical canon...from Milan’s La Scala to London’s
Covent Garden. To the Met, Avery Fischer Hall.....Wembly Stadium, Glyndebourne Central Park Vienna the World Cup, his cosmic consciousness into Hyde Park, “during a rainy day at Gershwin’s London art museum”. “the 3 tenors concert at the Olympics......
No “Great Caruso” of a gig, Mario Lanza’s mother confessing to ours on a Southern California bus, that Mario, her son, a truck driver in Philadelphia, had been seduced by the sorcerer’s apprentice, abandoning his coach Boris Goldofsky..... marketing his high c’s on an MGM sound stage... lip synching several arias....
He made us better.(actor Burt Lancaster, from the Bronx, caressing those Caruso records on his stoop, below the fire escape) ... transcending heads of state..... Machiavellian chords of sadism and masochism playing out on the battlefields of his humanity....
Mussolini a Jack Oakie’s impersonation., Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator”.
Burl Ives taunting his crutch bearing son “Mendacity. What do you know of mendacity?” ”Cat on a hot tin roof”.
Bette Davis flipping out on the staircase , Dan Duryea mocking her fall, Lillian Hellman’s
“Little Foxes” ..
How else can you explain Lord Byron, Keats and Shelly moaning Masstro’s departure on Roma’s’s 7 Steps....Never stone deaf to his musica.... pausing..in reverence for the Maestro’s soul passing into eternity, his nickel and dime bandits boiling overtime for a piece of their father’s legacy.. Isn’t that the bottom line, dear reader? .
Preserved for all of measured time as the metronome ticks out our heart beats above the spinet.
Step aside Caruso and make space for the Maestro...
Let the mandolins play. All shoemakers cease their toil. Their hi fi FM radios M 3 players I pods satellite radios surfing our planet.
Lincoln Center lower the flag .... half mast.
A thunderous drum roll, the F 16 jet peeling off in a fly over, breaking the sound barrier.
Maria Callas abandoning her shores for Aristotle Onassis, the Mediterranean trappings of tax free havens.... ...sailing the Aegian waters amid the Greek Islands..... waves of whirling yachts.
The birthplace of the human soul at Delphi.
The three poets sitting on Roma’s 7 steps hear the sonic repercussions from the fly over , the green red and white colors of Italy, glittering the blue skies above Modena’s Cathedral..
Nature at a loss for the extinguishment of Apollo’s treasure., the three poets on the Seven Steps of Roma, sobbing into the Maestro’s larger than life handkerchief.....
His four year old daughter.......
“Papa you have loved me so much. I know you will always protect me. I will hold you dear to my child’s heart every tomorrow..
O sole mio.....may the flight of his own Angel sing him to his rest.
Novella Roma, Italy October 28, 2007 amended.... for the 9 decades of George Jellinek’s life, the host of WQXR’s “The Vocal Scene”, January16, 2010
