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Deep, deep down in the river's bed, he's looking for the ring
My mother just called to ask if she was remembering correctly that I used to sing a song about a black swan. I answered yes, absolutely: "The Black Swan" from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946). I heard it for the first time in high school; it terrified and transfixed me; it became my standard audition aria for years. I sang it as a folk song sometimes, unaccompanied; it has the form of one, a drowned and sleepless murder ballad set like a jewel in an Aickmanesque opera of supernatural noir. Fragments of it worked out into my fiction for decades, even as recently as "The Face of the Waters." I have no recordings of myself performing it.
My mother just heard it performed by Rhiannon Giddens. She had the undercurrent of someone else's voice running through her memory throughout and it turned out she was hearing me. You should listen to Giddens' version: it is much closer to Nina Simone's than to the original Menotti, still full of that swirling river-darkness. The same album contains a similarly rewilded version of "The trees on the mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), also a song I performed because it was classical folk, in the same way that I brought "The Trees They Grow High" and the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" to my recitals when I had them. I know they are not and never were my songs in any possessive sense—opera as much as folk is a tradition of perpetual reperformance and reinterpretation and it is in any case another world I no longer have any rights to—but it is still a little strange to hear them in someone else's voice, in such different settings, especially when the Menotti lived so close to my nightmares and my yearning for so long. They must mean as much to Giddens or she wouldn't have selected them out of her wide repertoire to share. I am glad they will reach people who might otherwise not hear them. Now that she's hit two out of my three favorite twentieth-century English-language operas, I shall wait and see if she does anything with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).
I finally got some sleep this morning, admittedly on either side of having to get up and stop the box fan from making a weird flanging sound that so exactly mimicked the vibration of my alarm that it woke me. Much of the afternoon was beautifully sunny and beachside baking hot and then in about the last fifteen minutes the clouds slammed together and the skies broke open; it looks darker out there than it's been at actual night. My errands for this evening may have to be postponed unless I want to swim them.
Anyway, speaking of lost children, drowned tongues, singing from rivers' beds: Nadia Misir, "manual for the tongue whose first language is a churile of my second."
My mother just heard it performed by Rhiannon Giddens. She had the undercurrent of someone else's voice running through her memory throughout and it turned out she was hearing me. You should listen to Giddens' version: it is much closer to Nina Simone's than to the original Menotti, still full of that swirling river-darkness. The same album contains a similarly rewilded version of "The trees on the mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), also a song I performed because it was classical folk, in the same way that I brought "The Trees They Grow High" and the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" to my recitals when I had them. I know they are not and never were my songs in any possessive sense—opera as much as folk is a tradition of perpetual reperformance and reinterpretation and it is in any case another world I no longer have any rights to—but it is still a little strange to hear them in someone else's voice, in such different settings, especially when the Menotti lived so close to my nightmares and my yearning for so long. They must mean as much to Giddens or she wouldn't have selected them out of her wide repertoire to share. I am glad they will reach people who might otherwise not hear them. Now that she's hit two out of my three favorite twentieth-century English-language operas, I shall wait and see if she does anything with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).
I finally got some sleep this morning, admittedly on either side of having to get up and stop the box fan from making a weird flanging sound that so exactly mimicked the vibration of my alarm that it woke me. Much of the afternoon was beautifully sunny and beachside baking hot and then in about the last fifteen minutes the clouds slammed together and the skies broke open; it looks darker out there than it's been at actual night. My errands for this evening may have to be postponed unless I want to swim them.
Anyway, speaking of lost children, drowned tongues, singing from rivers' beds: Nadia Misir, "manual for the tongue whose first language is a churile of my second."
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You're welcome. I think I have listened to her ever since discovering the Carolina Chocolate Drops via their take on "Why Don't You Do Right."
I've accompanied sopranos singing both arias, but I'd love to hear you.
I can certainly sing one or both for you at Readercon.
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I can do them without music if necessary.
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I look forward to them. [edit] I read this sentence to mean the songs brought the ghosts, not your own history. If the intended meaning was the latter, then I am glad the songs are there for them instead.
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The was one of my arias too, when I was seventeen and had a solid high G for the first time and wanted to put it to good use. (And 'The Trees They Grow So High' was one of my folk song choices too later on, at university.) (And now my high G is dead and in its grave doth lie...)
Monica's such a great character. I mean, she's a great role too, but that's not the same thing as been interesting as a fictional character. This weird, intense teenage girl growing up all alone with her alcoholic fake-psychic mother and her mother's mute assistant with his quasi-incestuous (under the circumstances) passion for her. Who fills in the words for Toby in ways that are both too-insightful and yet not what he meant to say, and who thinks 'The Black Swan' is a suitable lullaby to sing when her mother's freaking out in the wake of her first ever real psychic experience.
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You're welcome. I didn't know about Simone's version myself until this evening.
Who fills in the words for Toby in ways that are both too-insightful and yet not what he meant to say, and who thinks 'The Black Swan' is a suitable lullaby to sing when her mother's freaking out in the wake of her first ever real psychic experience.
Agreed on all counts. I love The Medium. It was the first opera I fell in love with. I should rewatch the film one of these days and write about it.
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I think you would like her new album a lot.
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She's touring right now!
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(She may be touring, but apparently the folk revival scene near me isn't cool enough?)
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You're welcome!
(She may be touring, but apparently the folk revival scene near me isn't cool enough?)
(Bah! Do you have any excuse during the tour to be near a different folk revival scene?)
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I really would loan my teleporter if I had one.