I was in bed, happily contemplating the length of my just completed nap, when my cell phone rang across the room. Its odd frog-like burbling did not annoy me. With some suggestion of lithe energy, I threw off my down comforter and made it to the phone before it went to voice mail.
It was my assistant, Cory.
“Yello,” he said, and the greeting was returned.
A couple sentences passed, where we discussed his inability to attend my concert at the Metropolitan Museum this evening. But then we came to the heart of the matter.
“I think,” he said ominously, “I’ve had my last Chantico.”
Such crucial topics are often discussed by us, and though I was not surprised by the serious tone this conversation was taking, I laughed nervously. “Your last one?” I repeated…
“Yes,” he said.
“How long ago was this final Chantico consumed?”
“Two nights ago.”
He was referring to an evening shared by his girlfriend, he, and I, in the company of some large shaken drinks. I deduced, then, that Cory had not been entirely sober when he had his ‘last Chantico.’ Was there some terrible admixture of effect?
“What made it your last Chantico?”
Then he proceeded to outline a gradual diminuendo of joy, proceeding from the initial Chantico, which was “fantastic,” to further Chanticos, each less delightful than the last. Drinks and mood had nothing to do with it; the spiral of diminishing enjoyment was seemingly outside the hurly-burly of contingent circumstances. was something greater and more terrible.
“So,” I said,”aesthetic exhaustion is the reason why you have had your last Chantico.” He concurred ruefully, and we agreed further that it was as good a reason as any to abandon an expensive beverage, although perhaps not as pressing as, say, should it become clear that animals or children would have to be murdered somewhere in order to make Chantico. On this sad, gruesome, but thankfully entirely hypothetical note, another of our essential phone conversations ceased.
Falstaff vs. Augusten Burroughs
Today on my way home bought a copy of Burroughs’ memoir, ‘Dry.’ Spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on my couch, totally absorbed–or was I simply dragged along? I feel beaten. A completely harrowing account of alcoholism, and the addictive personality in general.
So, I finished the book. I can’t say I recommend it–so dark and searing–but it is brilliant.
Then I put on my old recording of Verdi’s Falstaff (one of my desert island pieces, see next post). And only one phrase is necessary to dispel all the modern New York malaise, to lighten and transform all his misery. It breathes like the breeze Burroughs feels at an outdoor cafe, while he is falling in love, “that seems to have arrived via FedEx for this exact moment from a resort hotel in Cabo San Lucas.” But it is an Italian breeze, where foibles are only foibles, characters are flawed but humanized with a Renaissance, understanding glow, with an entomologist’s love of classifying human bugaboos, arranged in the garden of “types” which is almost the garden of Eden… The husband is jealous, Falstaff is fat and lustful, the ladies are scheming… it all works, and Verdi loves them all, MUSICALLY, with one sympathetic orchestration after another, one perfect fragment after the next… one perfectly nuanced Italian phrase (sentence? poem? song?) after another… like Jarrell says “the little themes that come in, flicker their wings once, and are gone forever.”
I can put this together: the piece always makes me feel as though I am in love. Every phrase is in its honeymoon period; it never has time to grow stale or tired; it is supernaturally fresh.
The affection that passes through the music to the characters is enormous, an affection inflamed by imagination, inspiration. Whereas some operas seem to be enactments, spectacles, in which the human emotions are “translated” into musical terms, (from character outward, like hurling the voice out into the opera house) here the musical language is the original, the source of the stream … the characters are not “projected” by the music, the music seems to flow into them, to fill them, to caress them (music “making love” to people, to character).
Why did “Dry” yield so emotionally for me to “Falstaff”? Passing so quickly from tragedy–fatal flaw, inescapable cycle–to comedy (also with inevitable flaws, organic but not tragic), like emerging from a modern fluorescent light into Italian sun. From a young man’s self-hate to an old man’s love for everyone.