Strasfogel OPERALAND

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-2309-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 342 Seiten

OPERALAND follows Richie Verdun, a funny, fearless little dynamo, as he enters the glamorous and treacherous world of opera facing almost impossible odds. He's in his early forties, unusually old for a beginner, and without the benefit of either musical or theatrical training. To make matters worse, this irrepressible fireplug of a man is overly fond of inappropriate, almost infantile jokes that are wildly out of place in his sophisticated new surroundings. We first meet him as a hustling car salesman in upper Michigan, deeply devoted to his literate and caring wife Kit and their three young children. When his family urges him to try his luck as an operatic tenor, he enters a world that is utterly foreign to him. The struggle is intense and rejections proliferate, but Richie's energy and ambition never desert him. A seemingly ordinary man unleashes his inner artist and discovers a new way of life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Strasfogel, Ian

Leseproben

Chapter One

Richie

The first thing you gotta understand is I’ve been singing, really singing, ever since I was a toddler. I was a leading pint-sized interpreter of such all-time greats as The wheels on the bus and Baa, baa, black sheep and Here we go round the mulberry bush. I’d belt them out at the top of my tiny lungs any time, any place–at the dinner table, in bed, in the grocery store, the mall, the playground, on the toilet. I just loved the physical pleasure of making all that sound. And getting lots of attention didn’t hurt either. By the time I reached sixth grade, I was so loud, they gave me Curly, the lead in the annual school musical, a cut-down version of Oklahoma!. I started off the show with a rousing boy soprano version of Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ (my man voice hadn’t kicked in yet). By the time I scampered out for my final bow, it was clear I had scored a triumph. Everyone stood and cheered and totally turned my head.

See, it’s all about Vitamin A. Applause. Once we hear the roars and shouts of the crowd, there’s no turning back. It’s like it’s hard-wired, this need for public approval. We want everyone on the planet to like us, love us, worship us. It’s just how we humans are. Deal with it.

Oklahoma! was the standout of my boy soprano days. I retired from singing during puberty, when everything went topsy-turvy: I’d be Cinderella one minute, Prince Charming the next. Once things settled down and I sounded like a proper grownup, I auditioned for Doc Williams, the director of our local church choir. It only took a few bars for him to welcome me with open arms. Don’t be too impressed. I was a tenor and the few guys in the section were so old and weary, all they could do was wheeze.

A few months after I graduate high school–August, 1959, if you’re really curious–Doc Williams gives me a big solo to sing at the end of service, the Panis Angelicus, a beautiful tune, short but intense, which he transposed into baritone territory so I could nail the high notes. When the performance comes around, I’m really feeling my oats and, boy, do I make those high Gs shine. After the service, as everyone files out, I see Kit heading straight for me like a vision, a real-life mirage.

You gotta understand I had a giant crush on that girl ever since she walked, no, floated into my ninth-grade math class, looking like Ava Gardner’s kid sister–short but shapely, with luxurious black hair and tender gray-blue eyes that changed color, depending on the light or her mood. I drove myself crazy (and her, too, no doubt) trying to get her attention, but she just wasn’t interested. She was dating this hotshot Franklin, a super-smart eleventh grader and captain of the math team. I took the hint and turned my attention elsewhere.

In our junior year, Kit’s mom got a terrible cancer. Her dad had died years earlier, so it was up to Kit, young though she was, to deal with the crisis. She spent her last two years of high school studying as best she could, while taking care of her mom and working part time to help with the finances. Her mom died the spring of senior year. All us kids went to the funeral. It was a somber affair, it really shook us up. My heart ached for Kit, who seemed so forlorn, so utterly alone.

To make matters worse, her mom’s medical expenses had gobbled up all the family’s money, so Kit couldn’t go to U Mich like everyone expected. The last weeks of school were terrible for her. She wandered through classes like a ghost.

Now, three or four months later, here she is again, heading straight for me, looking more beautiful, more soft and delicious than ever. I’m so blindsided by the sight of her, so upside down and inside out, I just stand there, dumbstruck.

She flashes me her sunrise smile and goes, “Richie Verdun, how wonderful to see you. Your singing today quite literally took my breath away.” That’s how she always speaks, in complete and balanced sentences. If only I could.

She’s standing right in front of me, waiting for some sort of response, but I’m completely tongue tied. There’s this tumult inside me, this wildfire deep in my gut. Finally, after what must have been six million years of ridiculous infantile silence, I mutter, “Gee, Kit, thanks.”

“Do you know who wrote your solo?”

“What solo?”

“The one you just sang, the Panis Angelicus.”

She’s looking at me with such sweetness in her eyes, standing right across from me, shining, glowing in the noontime sun, I forget what she just asked, forget everything I ever knew. We’re stuck with another long silence as my heart hammers and stammers and I feel like a total fool.

“I don’t know, some guy?”

Rather than calling it quits, rather than getting the hell away before she’s forced to spend another minute with the class dunce, Kit stays right where she is and smiles.

“Richie, you’ve got the music clutched to your chest. Who composed it?”

“Oops, sorry.” I read her the guy’s name, as best I can. “Seizure Frank” is what comes out.

“Richie, sorry, but that doesn’t sound quite right. César Franck was a French composer, wasn’t he? You make him sound so American.”

Normally, I don’t take well to criticism. In this case, Kit’s little dig has the opposite effect. It frees me up, I’m back to my normal self. I go, “Hell, honey, we’re in America. Suck it up.”

“César Franck wasn’t American, and besides, I’m not your honey.”

I give her my here comes a joke look, where I pull the weirdest, craziest face I can. “You may not be my honey now, but you sure as hell will be.”

Brilliant move, right? What a wordsmith, what a wit. The bad news is she just laughs and beats it outta there. The good news is that in no time at all, we’re seeing each other, crazy mad in love, scheming and dreaming, and before you know it, we’re teenage newlyweds with one, then two, then three little kids and a million things on our plate.

Yet, even then, in those early days of building our life together, when we were insanely busy and scraping for every single buck, I continued to take singing seriously. Every week I studied the music for the next Sunday service using my trusty little pitch pipe. (I don’t have perfect pitch and don’t read music well and there was no way in hell we could afford a piano.) Doc Williams called me his old reliable because I refused to stroll into rehearsals unprepared and make a fool of myself. Most everyone else would sight read hymns sounding like cats in heat and never even blink an eye. Not me. I really cared, especially when it came to my solos. I’d have them pretty much ready for rehearsal, almost memorized. (I could pick up things in those days much faster than I do now, which is a nuisance since they keep throwing so much new stuff at me to learn.)

Anyway, even back then I didn’t want to come off like a jerk and Doc Williams really appreciated that and his praise meant something. I mean, he’d gone to U Mich for a masters in choral conducting and knew what the hell was what. I liked that he valued me and after a while the rest of the gang stopped their kidding and complaining: “Lighten up. Richie. You’re making us all look bad.” They were bad, total amateurs, and they shouldn’t have taken advantage of good old Doc, wasting the poor man’s time like they did, but it was just Graystone, Michigan, a tiny place in the middle of nowhere special, and they really didn’t get it.

But I did. To me it was music. It was singing. It was my voice. And that meant every morning without fail I’d do my vocalises, a full set of arpeggios going up as high as I could, which didn’t win me any friends at home, let me tell you. Okay, Kit was pretty supportive, but Jesus, the kids, they’d growl and howl like I was some kind of threat to their sanity. It was my sanity I worried about, especially with all their shenanigans, them being young kids and all. Usually it was Timmy, the middle one. He was always on my case about one thing or another. Carol, the oldest, was pretty much the quiet type, always reading books like her mom, always thinking things over before she opened her mouth.

Things got better for Kit and me after I got a job as a salesman on Frank’s lot, so I only was working days and we finally could start affording things. We moved into our house, bought a second car, took proper vacations. Kit was still pretty much a homebody because Billy came along as a big surprise to all of us, which meant she had to spend another bunch of years back home with him. She worried all she’d ever be was a professional mom, but she just soldiered on and never once complained about all the insane things the kids made her do, like scolding and praising and cleaning and cooking and ferrying them all over the damn place.

Anyway, right at the end of that period, Billy was maybe six or seven, Doc Williams comes to me after service and says there’s someone he wants me to meet and takes me over to this tall, and I mean way taller than me, carrot-haired woman in a tight black skirt and smart gray jacket which makes her look unlike anyone else in church, actually unlike anyone else in the whole town of Graystone. It was...