Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Hm!, Hm!, Hm!,” from Die Zauberflote

Few works of classical music can make you laugh. Opera seems particularly ill-visited by the comic muse. Think of Tosca throwing herself of a parapet; Mimi dying of consumption; and Pagliacci stabbing his wife in a jealous rage. Not necessarily what I would call knee-slapping stuff. Even comic opera like The Barber of Seville doesn’t really make me dissolve in howls of laughter. But there is one aria from Die Zauberflote that does.

The opera opens with a dragon in hot pursuit of the Egyptian prince, Tamino. He swoons in fear, but just then, three ladies, the minions of the Queen of the Night, come to his rescue and slay the dragon. As noted in my previous post, Papageno then enters singing his aria, “Der Vogelfanger bin ich ja” (I am the, walrus, sorry “bird catcher”). The singing wakes Tamino, who asks if it was Papageno who saved his life. Papageno says yes, but the three ladies yell at him and for his impertinent lie, lock his mouth shut.

There follows a hilarious duet between Tamino and Papageno, which, by dint of his condition, Papageno must hum his part. That piece still makes me laugh, even after 24 years. Today I started musing on just why that aria tickled my fancy so much. Probably in Mozart’s time period, people still believed in dragons and magic, so the previous scene with the dragon might have actually seemed frightening to Mozart’s audience. To relieve the stress, Mozart introduces a clown to lighten things up. I was wondering what role a willing suspension of disbelief might play in this. All opera requires this, because who in real life ever sings what’s on their mind unless they be aphasic? Maybe it’s the irony that for once a character in an opera can’t sing, and making him hum a duet despite that is funny. Good clean fun.

What this makes me realize, however, was how my sense of humor started to change as a result of living in the French House. And I now wonder if it was for the better. Until then my sense of humor had been fairly benign. I loved slapstick and corny jokes as a boy. In middle school we studied satire and sarcasm, but the intent was to poke fun of pompous authority figures. At the French House, in a highly vocal and articulate crowd, the two preferred forms of humor were wit and putdown, probably because we were a kind of clique. At the same time, because we were studying French, we all became obsessed with the concept of decadence, i.e., leading a voluptuous and sensual existence. Usually that gets translated into alcohol use and abuse, which tends to sap one’s creativity. The result was that many of us became cynical, lost our nerve, and abandoned our dreams. The clique often couldn’t deal with those who had clear goals and often these became the object of ridicule or scorn.

I think of one of our dorm mates. He was a gifted singer, a baritone originally, who had discovered that by singing in falsetto, he had a perfect counter-tenor voice. He was active with the early music consort, and I went to see him once in a performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Since he didn’t actively seek to ingratiate himself with our clique, they sniped at him, and he didn’t seem too bothered by it. His name was Drew Minter and he now has an international career as a counter tenor.

I’m kind of torn up about this now. The French House was the first place I ever felt accepted for my interests by more than just one or two people. If one lacks a strong sense of self, as was my case at the time, one will gravitate and accept the values of the group that offers acceptance. All of my adult life, I have prided myself on being objective and non-judgmental of other groups. I also tried to avoid participation in groups that tend to set themselves up as different or better than others-especially cultural or social groups. Now I realize that in identifying with the group of people at the French House I did just that. So perhaps it’s time to let go of that. I am thankful for having met them all. They taught me so much. But in the words of some sage, “when your memories become more real than your dreams, the end is near.”

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Der Vogelfanger bin ich ja” from Die Zauberflote

Papageno serves as the comic relief in Die Zauberflote. I think of him as a kind of Puck-like character but with the veniality of say, Fred Flinstone.

He lies, he drinks, he chases women, but he sings an incredibly joyful and sweet aria in the first scene:

The birdcatcher am I,
And always merry, tra la la!
I wish I had a trap for girls–
I’d catch them by the dozen then!
I’d keep them in a cage at home,
And all the girls would be mine alone.

If all the girls were mine alone,
Some I’d trade for high-grade sugar;
Then to the one I like the best
I’d give all the sugar she wanted.
And if she then kissed me tenderly.
She’d be my wife and I her husband.
She would sleep beside me
And I would rock her like a child.

I find this mix of fantasy, coarseness and tenderness to be quite refreshing. Who else would I choose to identify with? Despite all my self-wallowing, self-pity, I have remained most of my life a puckish, but very optimistic, imp.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from Die Zauberflote

We folks who lived in the French House were addicted to foreign films. Indiana University had a very good film studies program, and you could buy passes to the films that were shown for the various courses. One semester they taught Italian neo-realism and featured Felinni, Pasolini, Antonioni, De Sica and Rosselini. Another semester, the Germans were covered by Murnau, Stronheim, Wenders, and Herzog. This was just around the time that Structuralism was starting to gain ground in academic circles, and in one course they deconstructed the films of the Americans John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Sammy Fuller. By far the most important international filmmaker of the time, however, was Igmar Bergman, and showings of his films were always packed.

I had seen Bergman’s Cries and Whispers with some high school pals the year before and its strong emotions and lush sensuality juxtaposed with images of death affected me deeply. Bergman’s films were all like that.  Sometimes his symbolism was so palpable–like when Death appears in The Seventh Seal and plays chess with the Knight–that you kind of felt bludgeoned by it. Though I wouldn’t call Bergman a happy camper, when you’re an adolescent and caught up in existential angst, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, so we all lapped his films up in the French House.

So imagine our surprise when we found out that Bergman had filmed Mozart’s opera, Die Zauberflote. We wondered what kind of dark spin he would put on this otherwise upbeat and engaging opera. Bergman seemed to play it straight. He starts out showing a group of people listening to the overture in a small theatre. When cast appears, he makes them appear quaint, with kind of Peter Pan costumes and almost tacky props. Little by little though, he lets the magic take over and the production becomes more and more fantastic and artful. Maybe that was the Bergman’s goal: to destroy Brecht’s notion that the audience should never give itself over completely to a play and remember that it is not reality. Despite all attempts to prevent oneself from willingly suspending disbelief, the whole purpose of art is to do just that. That is to connect at a more visceral than intellectual level and change a person’s reality for a time being in order to perceive a different reality (maybe that of the Other).

This opera got a lot of play in the French House. Cynthia Cummings, the resident diva, listened to it quite a bit and the aria entitled “Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” (Hell’s vengeance seethes in my heart) became one of her favorites. I have never asked a soprano, but to me it seems the most demanding aria ever written.

The Queen of the Night sings this aria and in it, she tells her daughter to murder the Queen’s enemy, Sarastro. The soprano must sing at a break neck speed, and also express the passion of hate. For Mozart, who penned some of the most beautifully sweet music, this aria expresses a depth of emotion sometimes absent in his work. But he cannot resist making it one of the most beautiful arias ever written as well. At the most passionate part, the soprano slips up to an incredibly high range and vocalizes a tune that almost sounds like a bird, it is so high and rapid. Later she trills and runs glissandi up and down in the most fluid of ways. The effect sends chills down one’s spine.

We all became smitten with the aria at the French House. After a while, it became almost a joke. Most everyone, men and women, tried singing along with it at one time or other. Years later as a father, I bought a CD of the opera and played it for my daughters. The youngest, Simone, age 7 at the time, walked around for a few days singing the Queen of the Nigh aria. To me that kind of sums up the Magic of Die Zauberflote.

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Carl Orff: “Amor Volat Undique,” “Stetit Puella” and “Dulcissime” fromCarmina Burana

Unlike most fans of classical music, I don’t necessarily compare performers and performances. Usually, whatever recording was the first I heard becomes the definitive performance for me. Of course there were exceptions: I listened to about 10 versions of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony-by Walter, Solti, Szell, Bernstein, Toscanini and others-before finally choosing one by Karajan. And that wasn’t for any profound reason; I just happened to prefer it because I could hear the oboe and English horn passage in the second movement more clearly than any of the others.

The definitive performance of Carmina Burana for me is the one with Michael Tilson Thomas, in which the soprano, Judith Blegen sings the arias mentioned in the title of today’s post. This recording was one of the first ever done in quadraphonic sound, and so they spared no expense to making it a blockbuster. They had a chorus of 250 singers and used some of the best soloists of the day. On the liner notes it says that Blegen was a regular at the Met during this time period, and she was so good that all they needed was one take. The aria, “Amor Volat Unique” (love flies everywhere), requires the soprano to hold a note for a full 30 seconds. For a long time, Blegen’s was the only recording I heard in which the singer could sustain the note for that long. In some recordings, the sopranos actually took a breath midway through.

“Amor volat unique” has to be one of the most beautiful songs on the album. It starts with a musical interlude in which flutes waft along playing a melody that the soprano will sing at the end. A boys’ chorus then chimes in and with cherubic delivery sing about the rightness of young men and women joining together. Then comes that chillingly beautiful soprano solo:

“If a girl lacks a man
she misses all delight;
darkest night is at the bottom
of her heart.
This is the bitterest fate.

Blegen’s performance still sends shivers down my spine, these 30+ years later. The second soprano solo is called “Stetit Puella”. The poetry has an almost Haiku-like simplicity, but it captures perfectly the feeling of being dumbstruck by love:

There stood a maid
in a red tunic;
when it was touched
the tunic rustled.
Ai!

There stood a girl,
like a rose;
her face was radiant;
her mouth bloomed.
Ai!

Sometimes, however, you can get burned even by a good orchestra and performer. When I lived in Italy five years after first hearing Carmina Burana, my girlfriend bought a copy on Deutsche Gramophon with Eugen Joachum conducting and Gundula Janowitz singing. Not only did Janowitz break the note into two with a huge breath, on the aria, “Dulcissime” where the soprano has to slide up to an impossibly high note, her voice actually cracked. It sounded like a cross between a squawk and a scream.

Depending on your point of view, Carmina Burana may or may not be the perfect music for an adolescent virgin male to listen to in the Spring. Back then I found the songs devoted to love quite poignant and used to just sit around listening to them and dissolve into self-pity. I wonder now at how I could have missed the exhortation in the words to just go out and get on with it. There I was living in a dorm among women who shared similar tastes in music, art and literature, and I was still too tongue-tied to do anything about it. Perhaps it goes back to having formed a warped notion of Romantic love from reading too much Dostoyevsky. Remember, a number of his women characters are fallen women, whom the protagonist worships from afar and sees the means to salvation.

They really should teach you how to fall in love high school.

Orff Biography

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Carl Orff: “Auf Dem Anger” from Carmina Burana

Carmina Burana held me under its spell during most of the Spring Semester of my sophomore year at Indiana University in 1975.   The section of Carmina devoted to spring is divided into two parts, the second of which is called “On the Lawn.”

The first piece is an orchestral interlude called simply “Dance,” which always buoys my spirits. At just under two minutes, it’s an incredible tour de force. It starts out with three trumpet blasts followed by drums-a mini Tattoo. The violins then start playing a wonderful syncopated rhythm that carries you along like a galloping horse. It stops and there is a beautiful little flute solo, before the trumpets and horns return playing the galloping themes. The horns build to a climax and then the dance ends abruptly with a short drum roll.

But the second son, song full of beauty, in the “On the Lawn” section is given to the sopranos and chorus. It is called “Chramer, gip die varwe mir” and goes:

Shopkeeper, give me color, to paint my cheeks,
that young men may not resist my graces.
Young men, look here,
do I not charm you?
Make love, good men and gracious women.
Love will ennoble you.
Hail, o world so rich in joys.
I will obey you always
and accept your bountiful gifts.

This seems like a fitting way to express the feelings invoked by Spring.  And because of its title, it brings backs memories of unrequited love and something that happened “on the lawn,” of my dorm that semester.

Around this time, PBS devoted a number of weeks to showing a series of classic Japanese films. A venerable old Orientalist named Edward Reischauer presented them, giving a little talk about the historical, political or philosophical significance of each. When I was a boy, my father took me to see a number of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, which my brother Bob later told me were based on a couple of the samurai films in the series.

So every Thursday night, I’d go plop myself down in front of the television in the lounge of my dorm to watch the weekly film. No one in the dorm thought this was odd. In fact, one of the girls from my dorm named Andrea, used to come down and we would watch together. Eventually, we became friends after a fashion. She studied karate and talked about the Zen Buddhism. Sometimes Andrea would invite me back to her room after the film and brew up a pot of jasmine tea, and we’d talk until the wee hours. To vary things a bit she would sometimes throw a section of orange or a handful of raisins into the pot.

Andrea occupied the large end room on the second floor of the dorm that looked out over the meadow and the creek. She had hung posters of the Matterhorn and bamboo reproductions of Japanese scrolls on her wall. Her bookshelf was lined with an eclectic blend of novels that indicated her major: comparative literature. She had long, straight, dark hair, and an athletic build. She really looked like she could have stepped off a Swiss hiking trail, which she had in fact hiked the year before. Of course I fell for her, but, some part of her must have sized me up for not being outdoorsy enough, so we just stayed friends.

But she did introduce me to Haiku, which I immediately took a liking to. In my French literature classes, we had to read a lot of poetry, stuff by Hugo and Ronsard, some of which were so artificially contrived that you wondered, what effete snob read this stuff. Haiku, however, was so direct and immediate. Though highly stylized–in Japanese you can only use something like 17 syllables and it must contain a reference to the observer, the season and nature–these poems seemed to have the uncanny effect of telegraphing the poet’s experience and emotions right into me. Someone once told me that dolphins can reproduce the sound pattern that they hear using echolocation and broadcast it to other members of their pod. In that way, they can completely reproduce for another being their sensory impression of the world. And that is how I feel when I read Haiku.

So one day during my “Japanese” period, I trudged off to the library and went looking for a book of Haiku. In the Japanese literature section, I discovered a five volume set that had been collected, translated, and commented on by an Brit named R.H. Blyth living in Japan after World War II. He had devoted one volume to each season, and the fifth to miscellaneous poems. There I read the work of Basho and other poets. I checked out books of Japanese artists like Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro. The emphasis on nature and the desire for ever simpler ways to express complex ideas had a profound impact on me. Here’s a sumptuous one by Basho:

The butterfly is perfuming
It’s wings in the scent
Of the orchid.

The reigning clique in our dorm–the one that hung out in Mark Z***’s room–respected Andrea, though she was a bit too outdoorsy and down to earth to be a full time member. She also had some odd habits. One day near the end of the semester, a number of us got a bottle of gin, several of tonic, and a bunch of limes and went down to have a “garden party” on the lawn by the banks of the creek. It was a warm, overcast day, and we were drinking like fishes and carrying on. Suddenly, the window to Andrea’s room flew open, she stuck her head out and yelled at us: “Would you people shut up. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. People are trying to sleep!” We laughed at this odd notion and invited her down, but she slammed the window back down. End of party.

After that, Andrea was somewhat cooler to me. She left the dorm the next year to live with her boyfriend, an outdoorsy type who always seemed to be wearing shorts and hiking boots.  I guess I identified with the woman in “Auf Dem Anger.”

“do I not charm you?
Make love, good men and gracious women.
Love will ennoble you.”

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Carl Orff: “O Fortuna” and “Primo Vere” from Carmina Burana

This year in DC, we’ve had a bit of a schizophrenic spring.  It was so warm in March, for example, that the cherry blossoms popped well before the festival, which marked the centenary of the gift of the trees from Japan to the US.  The early weeks of May, by contrast have been wet an rainy and cool.  Today, however, it shot up to 84 degrees Fahrenheit.  Is this the effect of global climate change?  Will we ever have the cool, sunny days that allow the blooming plants and trees more time to wear their stunning raiment?  The azaleas and dogwoods are all bloomed out and not longer do you feel  like you sometimes do in the more picturesque parts of DC, i.e., like you’re walking around in an Impressionist paintings full of azaleas and dogwoods and pink, orange, magenta, purple, white, and dark red swatches of color.

Spring however always makes me remember the Spring of 1975 at the French House and today’s piece of music. As I mentioned before, our small dorm sat in a meadow through which a small creek ran. The meadow was planted with dogwood, hawthorn, quince, forsythia and other flowering shrubs and trees. Because I felt so happy to be here, having found a group of people who did not think of me as “different,” my eyes seemed to open up to the beauty of nature. I had help of course. There was a woman who lived in the French House named Liz McVeety. She hailed from Jeffersonville, Indiana, which is right across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Derby. Liz was majoring in something like horticulture or environmental sciences and lived upstairs. She was shy, but passionate about nature, good music, and plants. She used to hang out with the artsy crowd in the French House and on a number of occasions we all ended up in her room talking and listening to Joni Mitchell’s album, Court and Spark. That album became a kind of anthem for me because of the song, “Free Man in Paris,” which, hearing all the stories about my dormmates’ adventures in France, increased my desire to go abroad.

Liz had another friend who lived in a different dorm in our complex, who used to sit with us at the French table. Her name was Linda P******, and she was a very thin girl, with a shock–no a mane, really–of wavy red hair. Linda was majoring in Comparative Literature and also the string bass, which seemed an oddly incongruous choice for someone so slight in stature. She had a light, sing-songy way of speaking, and would passionately hold forth about some piece of music, novel, or poem she was studying.

I remember walking across the meadow one day with Liz and Linda at the height of Spring, and they identified just about every flowering plant for me. Ever since, Spring has been the season I look forward to and enjoy the most.

My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I believe Columbia issued a new recording of Carmina Burana during that Spring. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted and the soloists included the soprano Judith Blegen. It seems that PBS also broadcast a concert of this recording. This work completely overwhelmed me. Around this time, I was studying my second year of Latin, reading Virgil and Horace, and was just about getting to the point when I realized it was getting too hard. Along came this recording of poems by defrocked medieval monks and troubadours, written in proto-German and French. After the cool intellectual airiness of the Latins, this poetry full of love, lust, gluttony, and hymns to spring and drink provided a nice change.

But beyond that, the music electrified me. Musicologists sometimes call Carmina Burana “kitsch,” or say it’s kind of facile, like Broadway music. Truly, though, this work has given me so much joy that my life would have been poorer had I not heard it.

Orff worked from 13th century texts that had been discovered in 1803 in an old Bavarian monastery. Out of the 200 or so poems written by these voluptuaries and debauches, Orff chose 24, which he grouped into three sections, devoted to Spring, The Tavern, and Love.

A song for the entire chorus entitled “O Fortuna” frames the cycle of songs. This rousing piece, whose full title is “Fortune, Empress of the World” expresses the medieval idea that fortune is a wheel on which we ride. The lesson was: you may be on top now, but the wheel may turn and cast you down. I’m not sure if this was used to warn against pride or to convey the modern message of “what goes round, comes round.” Kind of fatalistic, but what do you expect from a time when the infant mortality rate was about 50% and the black plague wiped out nearly everybody else? Near the end this poem expresses a Carpe Diem theme as a kind of antidote to what otherwise is a downer kind of poem. Here are the words:

O Fortune,
variable as the moon
always dost thou wax and wane.
Detestable life,
first dost thou mistreat us,
and then whimsically,
thou heedest our desires.
As the sun melts the ice,
so dost thou dissolve
both poverty and power.
Monstrous and empty fate,
thou, turning wheel, a
art mean, voiding
good health at thy will.
Veiled in obscurity,
thou dost attack me also.
To thy cruel pleasure
I bare my back.
thou dost withdraw
my health and virtue;
Thou dost threaten
my emotion and weakness with torture.
At this hour, therefore let us
pluck the strings without delay.
Let us mourn together,
for fate crushes the brave.

Whew. Those word are really a downer. But in contrast the soars and ends with a triumphal blast. On its heel comes a men’s chorus singing a similar song, but with a kind of marching rhythm to it, almost like a drinking song. Considering that Orff wrote Carmina Burana in 1936, perhaps he was sending a warning to his countrymen embarked in the insanity of Nazism.

There follow three poems dedicated to Spring (Primo Vere), which run in mood from oriental, to mysterious, to a shout of joy at the rebirth of the world during this season. After quick burst of energy from the xylophones, flutes and oboes, a small chorus softly sings “Veris leta facies” (the bright face of Spring). It describes how spring blows away the cold and wakens the plants and animals from their slumbers. A baritone next sings “Omnia sol temperat” (the sun tempers all) describing how spring get the young man’s sap running and commands us all to be joyful. The last of these three poems, “Ecce gratum” (behold the spring) has a sparkling joy to it as the full chorus backed by chimes and anvils starts a chant that builds. The words describe how spring melts the ice, the flowers bloom and chides the man who neither loves or frolics:

Those who vie a
Taste the sweetness of honey.

And boy about this time, still being a virgin, I was ready for that. But my shyness delayed things for several more months.

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Franz Schubert: Das Wandern

During my residency in the French House at Indiana University in 1975, I first heard today’s song by Schubert. It is called “Das Wandern,” which means “The Wanderer.” It’s a bubbly little song for tenor and piano. Like Schubert’s Trout Quintet it is full of a cute little rhythm representing a brook. The song comes from an entire song cycle that Schubert wrote in praise of the bucolic country life. It’s called DIe Schöne Müllerin (the beautiful mill.) The joyous expression that goes into this song reminds you of light and sun and a walk on a sunny day in the woods. And that in turn reminds me of my sunny days in the French House.

The room I first occupied at the French House had a reputation. The semester before, a guy named Jacques Strange (not his real name) had lived there. He had a reputation, too. The first few weeks people would say, “So you moved into Jacques Strange’s room.” Or else, people would just stop buy and ask “what happened to Jacques?”

One of these was a girl named Dorothy Xristos. She lived in the Spanish House, which occupied the other wing of our two-story dorm. Dorothy embodied the term “spunky.” She spoke fluent Spanish, she was articulate and well-read in English literature, and she espoused the feminist ideology popular around the time. That sat pretty well with me because it meant t-shirts and no bras.

Of course, my admiration of her was more profound than that: she was not afraid to speak her mind, and when she did, it was usually to say something intelligent or funny, which I liked best of all.

One day, Dorothy came knocking at my door asking after Jacques. We had a nice conversation in which she told me a bit about him. He had been a French major, gone abroad for a year, liked to smoke dope, and had kept an aquarium with an Oscar in it named “Oscar.”
“He also had a cat, named ‘Abortion.’”
“Abortion?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dorothy said. “I found him back behind the dorm and brought him to Jacques because he liked animals.”

I instantly fell in love with Dorothy, but being shy, didn’t try to put the moves on her.

We did manage to become kind of friends, that first semester, she always greeting and smiling at me whenever we saw each other. Another time, I watched her get into an argument with a guy over a woman’s role. She debated him skillfully reducing every point he made to its biased or illogical premise. Later that year, she and I and that guy sat in his room smoking dope and talking about literature.

At one point, she was telling a story, when the guy stopped her and said: “Do you realize that as you’re talking, Kurt is using hand gestures that illustrate your story?”

I hadn’t even noticed, but I had been doing just that. Kinda cosmic, eh?

I eventually did meet Jacques Strange. A former resident of the French House, a girl named Michael Grante, (I guess her parents had always wanted a boy) lived off campus and was throwing a party.

This was going to be a big event, and Thom Klem told me I was invited.

“Jacques Strange is going to be there,” he said. When I asked what Strange was like, Thom told me that he had dropped out of school. It turned out that Strange’s father was a journeyman insulator, and managed to get him into an apprentice program.

“Why did he do that?” I asked.

“The money,” Klem said. “He makes about twelve dollars an hour.”

That was an astronomical amount in 1975.

“What a waste,” Klem said.

They had grown up together in South Bend and gone to the same Catholic high school. They had been close friends there in a clique of very smart people. Two of their group had gone to Yale, another to Harvard.

“He blew his mind out on Hashish in France, and he just partied all the time when he came back. He had shared a room with David Grigson, and they hated each other. Then he moved into your room before leaving.”

Klem still had a certain regard for Strange. He thought of Jacques as what the French called an “aventurier” an adventurer, someone who loved to try new, exciting and sometimes dangerous things. Klem told me that he and a friend had once had a discussion about Strange’s character in which they compared Jacques to the ancient Greek hero, Alcibiades. Alcibiades was an adventurer who was more Athenian than the Athenians, and when he fell out of favor, became more Spartan than the Spartans.

The day of the party, Strange arrived. He had a tall, muscular frame and strawberry blond hair. His face was perfectly round, and he wore the stubble of a wispy beard that softened a pock-marked face. He smoked Marlboro’s and spoke in a seductively slow way which was half hippie, half southern drawl. Cool and full of life. I liked him immediately.

We all went over to Michael Grante’s house during the afternoon and helped her get ready for the party. Strange announced he was going to make a shrimp quiche, but he had to go out buy the ingredients. He needed eggs, shrimp, butter, and cream. Somehow I ended up going shopping with him. He had a hot red Fiat sedan that had a great stereo in it. He popped in a copy of David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” and we drove off. After being around the hermetic, esthete French House, Jacques was a breath of fresh air.

Many people in the Department of French and Italian came, who didn’t live at the French House. Strange’ quiche turned out perfectly. He was quite comfortable at the party and many people came up expressing pleasure and surprise at seeing him. They all asked how he was doing and showed even more surprised to hear he had left school.

The group who hung around Mark Z***’s room for the most part ignored him. I never got the whole story about why he fell out of their favor. Jacques wasn’t gay, but in all the years I knew him, (and he and I eventually became very good friends), I never heard him say a disparaging word about gays. So homophobia seems out of the question. Who knows? Maybe he got tired of the hot-house atmosphere of our dorm.

Whatever the reason for his departure, I’m glad I met him.

Schubert Biography

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Erik Satie: Trois Gnossiennes

Michael D**, whom I met at the French House cafeteria in 1975, had a friend named Thom Klem, who often joined us for meals at the table where all the people from the French House sat. Klem came from South Bend, Indiana. His grandfather had bought the Coca-Cola franchise in town and ran the bottling plant. Almost everyone who ever did that became millionaires, and Thom’s parents lived in a posh, but not ostentatious part of town.

Thom was majoring in Chinese language, but he, too, spoke French, and he also had a smattering of Spanish. His minor was history, and though he loved reading that, he also read just about anything else. He had a rocking chair in his room, and many evening you could find him there, nose stuck in a book.

Thom and I became fast friends. Like me, he showed enthusiasm for any new body of knowledge, especially off-beat and arcane ones. In addition, he shared a love of cooking, which has always been a hobby of mine of mine. Like almost everyone else in the French House, he had studied in France, but he had also spent a semester in Taipei, Taiwan, so in addition to haute cuisine, he could do a mean stir fry.

Thom was a kind of mentor and partner in crime to me. I had inherited a number of early 20th century fountain pens from my grandfather, and it turned out that Thom prided himself on only writing with fountain pens. Once he came to my room with a great discovery. An old bookstore in Bloomington was going out of business, and they were selling of an old cache of fountain pens from the 40s and 50s. (The bookstore had once been a restaurant called the Gables, and local legend had it therein Hoagy Carmichael had penned Stardust.) Upstairs, from a dusty old case, a dusty old woman produced a box of pens which we rifled through, buying about 3 or 4 a piece. Some took cartridges. Others had ink-encrusted bladders. A number had a very complex capillary system for drawing up ink. We took them back to his room and got a number of working, although, for weeks afterwards we tended to have stains on our index fingers.

In food, Thom was always exploring new and odd tastes based on his literary excursions. Once he read that some author was fond of drinking a warm glass of milk before bedtime with a spoonful of vanilla in it. So that became a ritual of his for a while, but of course, only after having tracked down the best, pure vanilla extract. Another time, someone else had expressed a fondness for red vermouth, and so he methodically went through ever type of the apéritif the local liquor store had to offer before settling on the one that suited his tastes–Noilly-Pratt by the way.

Perhaps, he was a bit of an anachronism, but from him I learned the pleasures of small, material objects, and the little rituals that make life rich. He taught me the joy of buying a nice sheet of linen writing paper, getting out a fountain pen, cleaning it, filling the reservoir, shaking the excess ink off, and then writing a letter in long-hand. Later, when I went abroad for the first time, he and I corresponded in long-hand almost daily.

Maybe that is why I associate Thom in my mind with Trois Gnossiennes by Satie. I remember listening to it one day in the room of either Mark Z*** or Cynthia C***, and all of us were touched by its poignancy. Satie was an old guy before Debussy and others discovered him playing in a bars and championed his simple sounding but complex melodies. And maybe that was what drew me to Klem–his unassuming air, but complex interior life.

When Thom died of AIDS in the early 1990s, I sat down to write his mother a letter of condolence. Without thinking, I bought some nice paper, cleaned my old fountain pen, and sat down in a quiet place to write. Suddenly I realized that he had taught me how to do that. After I became an adult, he was the first person near my own age to die. So here’s to you, Thom. I’ll write more about you later.

Biography

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Frederick Delius: Song of Summer

Delius’ music paints rich soundscapes of lush vistas that stretch from Yorkshire to Florida. This piece, in particular, always evokes for me a happy time when I was discovering new worlds brought to me by people living in my dorm (the French House at Indiana University) during my sophomore year of college in 1975.

Before moving into the French House, I had never heard the term “polymath.” Not only did I learn the meaning of the word–someone with encyclopedic knowledge–it seemed like every other person at the French house was one. Take Michael Dr***.

Michael was majoring in Uralic and Altaic studies at Indiana University. Uralic refers to people of Finnish and Hungarian background, whose languages are related. Altaic covers people of Turkish origin. I don’t know how he got interested in that field, especially coming from some podunk town in Indiana. But that was just the start. Michael also spoke French, and was taking Chinese, Turkish and Uighur, a language spoken by medieval Turks. Even more astounding, he also took music composition classes in the school of music!

Michael dressed meticulously, spoke articulately, and expressed his emotions with a wry sense of humor. Drompp’s eclecticism fascinated me: he could keep up with Mark Z*** on his Byzantine rifts and later go up to Liz K****’s room and lip synch to the greatest hits of Diana Ross and the Supremes. He was also double-jointed in the elbow, and would send people running by resting his palms on the table with the elbows pointing toward you and then lean forward, bowing them in the opposite direction they should.

One day, Michael came to Marks’s room very excited about a piece of music he had recently heard. This was Delius’ Song of Summer. Delius was born in Bradford, England, and as a youth his father sent him to Florida to take run an orange plantation. Delius eventually persuaded his father to let him return to Europe to study music, which he did with Edvard Grieg. He composed a number operas, which became well known, but by the time he was 65, he was living in France, completely blind and paralyzed, the result of a youthful case of syphilis. Around that time, a young English composer named Eric Fenby, heard about Delius’ condition and went to stay with him, eventually becoming his amanuensis (which comes from a the Roman word for a slave who does shorthand.) Fenby spent 5 years (unpaid) transcribing some of Delius’ most beautiful works.

This was the detail that Michael seized upon. “He composed A Song of Summer when he was blind with syphilis! And listen to it. It is one of the most lush and beautiful pieces every written. It’s full of light!”

And indeed it is. It starts out with a low rumbling, almost giving the impression of a storm that has just passed. Then, a flute wells up, like a bird singing in the clearing afternoon. The orchestra eventually takes over, welling up and playing a passionate melody that celebrates life and the wonder of nature.

Biography
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Leos Janacek: Sinfonietta

Brass music rarely does it for me. Janacek’s “Sinfonietta,” however, full of brass and timpani crashes, really stirs me. Composed for a gymnastic festival in 1926, when the composer was 72, it is filled with themes, moods, and colors that evoke the passion and pride of the Czech people. Some parts are bombastic, others have passages filled with shimmering violins that fill the piece with light. It also contains a number of peasant-inspired passages, which shows in a way that Janacek was a forerunner of Bartok, who studied and expanded Western music with the introduction of complicated “primitivistic” harmonies and rhythms.

Janacek experienced a second spate of creativity toward the end of his life, from which “Sinfonietta” comes. Supposedly that phase was inspired by a married woman, 38 years his younger with whom he formed a passionate, but platonic, relationship. A new lease on life. We don’t always know it, but often receive the opportunity to have new leases on life. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to find people who can point out when it’s necessary to abandoned old forms of thought or behaviors in favor of new and fertile ones.

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