Authors: Alex Ross
Listen to This (41 page)
Everything on
Time Out of Mind
goes under one dreamy, archaic mood. The album manages to skip the twentieth century: trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there’s no air-conditioning (“It’s too hot to sleep”), church bells ring, “gay” means “happy,” the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned “down low”), and, most of the time, the singer is walking. He is almost ready to stray into the rustic wasteland of Schubert’s
Winterreise,
which opens with the Dylanesque lines “I came here as a stranger / A stranger I depart.” The wistfulness is intense: the singer is in love with a musical past that is gone forever. You picture him leaning late over his favorite records and song-books, listening, writing, reading, writing. These are songs about the loneliness of listening: you could add to them “Blind Willie McTell,” which was recorded in 1983 and appeared in the
Bootleg
boxed set as a kind of fanfare to
Time Out of Mind.
“I’m gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel,” he sang. “And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”
Time Out of Mind
goes under one dreamy, archaic mood. The album manages to skip the twentieth century: trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there’s no air-conditioning (“It’s too hot to sleep”), church bells ring, “gay” means “happy,” the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned “down low”), and, most of the time, the singer is walking. He is almost ready to stray into the rustic wasteland of Schubert’s
Winterreise,
which opens with the Dylanesque lines “I came here as a stranger / A stranger I depart.” The wistfulness is intense: the singer is in love with a musical past that is gone forever. You picture him leaning late over his favorite records and song-books, listening, writing, reading, writing. These are songs about the loneliness of listening: you could add to them “Blind Willie McTell,” which was recorded in 1983 and appeared in the
Bootleg
boxed set as a kind of fanfare to
Time Out of Mind.
“I’m gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel,” he sang. “And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”
The melancholy could become crushing, but Dylan doesn’t let it. The best songs on
Time Out of Mind
are inexplicably funny: there’s a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatteredness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with history, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon. And in one song—“Not Dark Yet”—all the flourishes of his songwriting come together: slow, stately chords, swinging like a pendulum between major and minor; creative tweakings of the past (“There’s room enough in the heavens” becomes “There’s not even room enough to be
anywhere”
); prickly aphorisms (“I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from”; “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”); and glints of biblical revelation, not to mention what one Internet expert has identified as a quotation from the Talmud (“I was born here and I’ll die here against my will”). If he can’t sing some low notes, he gestures toward them with a slide, so that you feel them. And, as he did in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” Dylan finds a way to augment the refrain. The line “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” keeps creeping up, note by note, in the singer’s now limited range. Like Skip James, the cracked genius among Delta blues singers, Dylan gives a circular form a dire sense of direction.
Time Out of Mind
are inexplicably funny: there’s a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatteredness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with history, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon. And in one song—“Not Dark Yet”—all the flourishes of his songwriting come together: slow, stately chords, swinging like a pendulum between major and minor; creative tweakings of the past (“There’s room enough in the heavens” becomes “There’s not even room enough to be
anywhere”
); prickly aphorisms (“I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from”; “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”); and glints of biblical revelation, not to mention what one Internet expert has identified as a quotation from the Talmud (“I was born here and I’ll die here against my will”). If he can’t sing some low notes, he gestures toward them with a slide, so that you feel them. And, as he did in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” Dylan finds a way to augment the refrain. The line “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” keeps creeping up, note by note, in the singer’s now limited range. Like Skip James, the cracked genius among Delta blues singers, Dylan gives a circular form a dire sense of direction.
The sense of arrival in “Not Dark Yet” is enormous. Once again, as Christopher Ricks would point out, words turn on their axis and encompass their opposite. The song ends, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer /
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” This couldn’t be bleaker, could it? Bob Dylan stares into the face of death and decay. But as he sings “murmur of a prayer,” he lifts the tune yet another step and does a graceful little turn at the top, creating an altogether new melody. And he slips in a triplet—a slight dancing rhythm that someone else picks up on guitar. As the song winds down, it’s not the darkness that lingers but the freshly swaying motion in the music, and that theoretical possibility of a “murmur of a prayer.” The man who worships Hank Williams is looking back at “I Saw the Light,” a would-be uplifting gospel number that was really filled with terror. “I saw the light, I saw the light, / No more darkness, no more night,” Hank insisted, in a melody that fell, and you didn’t believe him. Bob declares, with a gallant upward turn, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer.” You don’t believe him, either.
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” This couldn’t be bleaker, could it? Bob Dylan stares into the face of death and decay. But as he sings “murmur of a prayer,” he lifts the tune yet another step and does a graceful little turn at the top, creating an altogether new melody. And he slips in a triplet—a slight dancing rhythm that someone else picks up on guitar. As the song winds down, it’s not the darkness that lingers but the freshly swaying motion in the music, and that theoretical possibility of a “murmur of a prayer.” The man who worships Hank Williams is looking back at “I Saw the Light,” a would-be uplifting gospel number that was really filled with terror. “I saw the light, I saw the light, / No more darkness, no more night,” Hank insisted, in a melody that fell, and you didn’t believe him. Bob declares, with a gallant upward turn, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer.” You don’t believe him, either.
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA. Dylan just played in Target Center, downtown. Toward midnight, walking away from the arena, I see a bus and a truck parked by a curb. A group of roadies are loading equipment. There is bright electric light from somewhere—the spotlight of a handheld TV camera, it turns out. People are standing around, smiling sheepishly, as they do in the presence of someone famous. My heart begins to beat a little faster. A man with thick, tangled hair is standing next to the bus, looking awkward as he signs autographs. It’s Lyle Lovett, who has just finished playing on the stage around the corner. I walk back to my hotel.
This episode pointed up for me the embarrassment of fandom. I hadn’t requested an interview with Dylan, but for a moment I thought I was about to see him up close. I felt the bubbling excitement of a fan. I’d been a fan, I suppose, since Dylan’s music first hit me, a few years earlier, when I was staying in a friend’s apartment in Berlin.
Highway 61 Revisited
was one of the few records my friend owned, and after a couple of days I’d fallen for it: the fiercely funny lyrics, the music that was both common and grand, the whole proud, angry, backward take on life. I later found that my belated conversion to Dylan corresponded all too well to an academic model of rock fandom: Daniel Cavicchi, in a book on Bruce Springsteen’s audience, divides fans into categories out of William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
noting that one kind of fan undergoes a
sudden conversion, or “self-surrender,” often in a state of isolation or in a foreign land.
Highway 61 Revisited
was one of the few records my friend owned, and after a couple of days I’d fallen for it: the fiercely funny lyrics, the music that was both common and grand, the whole proud, angry, backward take on life. I later found that my belated conversion to Dylan corresponded all too well to an academic model of rock fandom: Daniel Cavicchi, in a book on Bruce Springsteen’s audience, divides fans into categories out of William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
noting that one kind of fan undergoes a
sudden conversion, or “self-surrender,” often in a state of isolation or in a foreign land.
Is fandom as foolish as it feels? Or is it the respect owed to the sort of person who used to be called “great”? Americans have always distrusted the concept of greatness, with its clammy Germanic air. Stardom, the cult of youth and wealth, long ago took its place. Dylan may be many things, but he is not a star: he can’t control his image in the public eye. At the same time, he doesn’t look, act, or sound like any great man that history records. He presents himself as a traveling musical salesman, like B.B. King or Ralph Stanley or Willie Nelson. He is generally unavailable to the media, but he is in no way a recluse, and reclusiveness is traditionally the zone in which American geniuses reside.
An “artist,” by contemporary definition, is one who displays himself in art, who shares “felt” emotion and “lived” experience, who meets and greets the audience. Art becomes Method acting; art, in various senses, becomes pathetic. With Dylan, the emotion has certainly been felt, at one time or another, but it wells up spontaneously in the songs themselves, in the tangle of words and music. Even at his most confessional, he withdraws his personality from the scene—usually by becoming beautifully vague—and lets the music rise. The highest emotion hits late, in the wordless windups of his greatest songs—from “Sad-Eyed Lady” to “Not Dark Yet”—when the band plays through the verse one more time and language sinks into silence.
FERVOR
REMEMBERING LORRAINE HUNT LIEBERSON
On July 3, 2006, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer. She was fifty-two years old. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world: the singer was hardly a household name, lacking even the intermittent, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly deep kind of grief.
I was one of those people. In her last years, I found it difficult to assume a pose of critical distance, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her and failed. It felt wrong to call her “great” and “extraordinary,” or to throw around diva-worship words like “goddess” and “immortal,” because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. My attempts at chronicling her career—I saw her some twelve times—were an exercise in running out of words. When I first heard her sing, in Berlioz’s
Beatrice and Benedict
at Boston Lyric Opera, in 1993, I described her as “brilliant” and “intense.” When she appeared in Xerxes at New York City Opera, in 1997, I compared her to Maria Callas. In 2001, when she sang Bach cantatas at a Lincoln Center presentation, I reported that she had “sent the audience into a trance.” In 2003, I claimed that her recording of the cantatas, on the Nonesuch label, was “beautiful enough to stop a war, if anyone thought to try.” And, in 2005, I called her Handel
disc, on Avie, “pull-down-the-blinds, unplug-the-telephone, can’t-talk-right-now beautiful.” To the extent that music can be captured in speech, she had gone beyond it. Nevertheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard.
Beatrice and Benedict
at Boston Lyric Opera, in 1993, I described her as “brilliant” and “intense.” When she appeared in Xerxes at New York City Opera, in 1997, I compared her to Maria Callas. In 2001, when she sang Bach cantatas at a Lincoln Center presentation, I reported that she had “sent the audience into a trance.” In 2003, I claimed that her recording of the cantatas, on the Nonesuch label, was “beautiful enough to stop a war, if anyone thought to try.” And, in 2005, I called her Handel
disc, on Avie, “pull-down-the-blinds, unplug-the-telephone, can’t-talk-right-now beautiful.” To the extent that music can be captured in speech, she had gone beyond it. Nevertheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard.
I saw her for the last time in November 2005, when she came to Carnegie Hall with the Boston Symphony to perform
Neruda Songs,
composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She came onstage wearing a bright-red, free-flowing dress. Although her hair was shorter than in previous years and she looked a little thin, she appeared healthy. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.
Neruda Songs,
composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She came onstage wearing a bright-red, free-flowing dress. Although her hair was shorter than in previous years and she looked a little thin, she appeared healthy. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.
She was born Lorraine Hunt, in San Francisco, the daughter of two exacting Bay Area music teachers. She grew up studying piano, violin, and viola, settling on the viola as her instrument. She gave relatively few performances as a singer in her youth, but when she did she caught people’s attention. At a concert by the Oakland Youth Orchestra, in 1972, she stepped forward to deliver an aria from Saint-Saëns’s
Samson and Delilah,
and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the
Oakland Tribune,
described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: “She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells.”
Samson and Delilah,
and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the
Oakland Tribune,
described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: “She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells.”
By 1979, she was the principal violist of the Berkeley Symphony. When the orchestra decided to mount a production of
Hansel and Gretel
at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic debut. She took up singing full-time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church, under the direction of Craig Smith. In an interview with Charles Michener, for a 2004
New Yorker
profile, Smith related her singing to her playing: “A viola is a middle voice—it has to be alert to everything around it. There’s something viola-like about the rich graininess of her singing, about her ability to sound a tone from nothing—there’s no sudden switching on of the voice, no
click.
And, like most violists, she is also self-effacing: without vanity as a singer. When we first performed the Bach cantatas, she just disappeared as a person.”
Hansel and Gretel
at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic debut. She took up singing full-time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church, under the direction of Craig Smith. In an interview with Charles Michener, for a 2004
New Yorker
profile, Smith related her singing to her playing: “A viola is a middle voice—it has to be alert to everything around it. There’s something viola-like about the rich graininess of her singing, about her ability to sound a tone from nothing—there’s no sudden switching on of the voice, no
click.
And, like most violists, she is also self-effacing: without vanity as a singer. When we first performed the Bach cantatas, she just disappeared as a person.”
Her work at Emmanuel caught the attention of the young director Peter Sellars, who, in 1985, cast her as Sesto, Pompey’s son, in a modern-dress production of Handel’s
Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
The character of Sesto became a wild-eyed young radical, swearing vengeance with an Uzi in his hands. The singer was revealed not only as a supremely musical artist but also as a keenly dramatic one. “She started singing, and you were in the middle of this raging forest fire,” Sellars recalled. “Certain things were a
little
out of control, but what you got was sheer power, sheer concentrated energy.”
Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
The character of Sesto became a wild-eyed young radical, swearing vengeance with an Uzi in his hands. The singer was revealed not only as a supremely musical artist but also as a keenly dramatic one. “She started singing, and you were in the middle of this raging forest fire,” Sellars recalled. “Certain things were a
little
out of control, but what you got was sheer power, sheer concentrated energy.”
She went on to sing in a series of Handel performances and recordings with the Philharmonia Baroque, also of Berkeley, and appeared in Mark Morris’s celebrated choreographic stagings of Handel’s
L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
and Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas.
She decided to devote herself to singing full-time only after her viola was stolen. In the 1990s, she finally began to find wider fame, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars’s production of Handel’s
Theodora
at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera debut in 1999, in John Harbison’s
The Great Gatsby.
The ovations that greeted her Dido in
Les Troyens
at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.
L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
and Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas.
She decided to devote herself to singing full-time only after her viola was stolen. In the 1990s, she finally began to find wider fame, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars’s production of Handel’s
Theodora
at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera debut in 1999, in John Harbison’s
The Great Gatsby.
The ovations that greeted her Dido in
Les Troyens
at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.
Yet she fit uneasily into the classical mainstream. “Lorraine’s a bit of a nut,” people in the music business used to say. They were referring to her Northern California nature—her spiritual pursuits, her interest in astrology, her enthusiasm for alternative medicine. She sometimes rattled her colleagues with her raucous sense of humor and her braying laugh. She loved all kinds of music; in private settings, she’d give scorching renditions of jazz and blues standards, and she declared herself a fan of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, among others.
In retrospect, her extracurricular interests and supposed eccentricities were essential to the evolution of her art. She broke through the façade of cool professionalism that too often prevails in the classical world, showing the kind of unchecked fervor that is more often associated with the greatest pop, jazz, and gospel singers. I compared her to Callas, but she might have been closer to Mahalia Jackson. One of her favorite encores was the spiritual “Deep River,” and there was something uncannily natural about her recitation of the text: “Deep river, my home is over Jordan / Deep river, Lord, I wanna cross over into camp ground.”
The voice was rich in tone and true in pitch. There was something calming and consoling about the fact of the sound. “Time itself stopped to listen,” Richard Dyer wrote in his obituary for
The Boston Globe.
Central to the singer’s repertory was a group of arias that I think of as her benedictions, her laying on of hands: “Ombra mai fù,” from
Xerxes,
a purely sensuous experience; “As with rosy steps the morn,” from
Theodora,
which she made into an anthem of beatitude; Bach’s “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen,” which, in the uncomfortably haunting Sellars staging, she sang while attired in a hospital gown.
The Boston Globe.
Central to the singer’s repertory was a group of arias that I think of as her benedictions, her laying on of hands: “Ombra mai fù,” from
Xerxes,
a purely sensuous experience; “As with rosy steps the morn,” from
Theodora,
which she made into an anthem of beatitude; Bach’s “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen,” which, in the uncomfortably haunting Sellars staging, she sang while attired in a hospital gown.
Such performances were the product not of intuition but of conscious craft. I asked the mezzo Rebecca Ringle, whom I met at Marlboro, to analyze how Lieberson’s voice worked. “Her primary gift was for phrasing,” Ringle told me. “It’s a good instrument, but she has great technique, and superstar, beautiful-human-being phrasing.” The vowels are very pure, Ringle observed, meaning that they sound much as they do in everyday speech, instead of being stretched out and distorted, as often happens in classical singing (“I am” becoming “ah ahm,” and so on). “When I saw the Sellars Bach cantatas in Boston,” Ringle said, “I was floored by one section that she sang quieter than I thought it would be humanly possible to understand, and yet I got every word.”
Loveliness was just the point of departure. She could also communicate passion and pain and a fearsome kind of anger. At City Opera, her Xerxes, so bewitching at first appearance, whipped around to deliver an up-against-the-wall tirade in “You are spiteful, perverse, and insulting.” There was a prophet-in-the-wilderness quality to her rendition of “La Anunciación,” her centerpiece aria in John Adams’s Christmas oratorio,
El Niño.
When she sang Benjamin Britten’s cantata
Phaedra
at the New York Philharmonic, she froze listeners in their seats with her high monotone chant of the words “I stand alone.” And as Irene, a leader of the martyrdom-bound Christians in
Theodora,
she made her voice into a kind of moral weapon. There is a DVD of the Glyndebourne
Theodora,
and the pivotal moment comes in the air “Bane of virtue, nurse of passions … Such is, prosperity, thy name.” In other words, money kills the soul. The phrase “thy name” is sung eighteen times, and by the end the voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword.
El Niño.
When she sang Benjamin Britten’s cantata
Phaedra
at the New York Philharmonic, she froze listeners in their seats with her high monotone chant of the words “I stand alone.” And as Irene, a leader of the martyrdom-bound Christians in
Theodora,
she made her voice into a kind of moral weapon. There is a DVD of the Glyndebourne
Theodora,
and the pivotal moment comes in the air “Bane of virtue, nurse of passions … Such is, prosperity, thy name.” In other words, money kills the soul. The phrase “thy name” is sung eighteen times, and by the end the voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword.
No modern singer rivaled her in Dido’s Lament. On a recording with Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque, she begins in a mood
of unearthly tranquility, joining notes in a liquid legato. The first iterations of the phrase “Remember me” are gentle, almost quiescent. But when the cry recurs, at the top of the range, her voice frays a bit, in a way that ratchets up the emotion of the scene. When the sequence is repeated, the first “Remember me” has a slightly weaker, more tremulous quality, while the last is suddenly bolder, more operatic. With utmost economy, she traces out the stages of Dido’s grief, ending on tones of radiant defiance.
of unearthly tranquility, joining notes in a liquid legato. The first iterations of the phrase “Remember me” are gentle, almost quiescent. But when the cry recurs, at the top of the range, her voice frays a bit, in a way that ratchets up the emotion of the scene. When the sequence is repeated, the first “Remember me” has a slightly weaker, more tremulous quality, while the last is suddenly bolder, more operatic. With utmost economy, she traces out the stages of Dido’s grief, ending on tones of radiant defiance.
Having run the gamut from angelic serenity to angelic wrath, this most complete of singers concluded her career with a very human demonstration of love. She met Peter Lieberson in the summer of 1997, on the occasion of the premiere of his opera
Ashoka’s Dream,
at the Santa Fe Opera. They fell in love and eventually married, and Lieberson began to write with his wife’s voice in mind. By reputation an expert practitioner of twelve-tone technique, Lieberson had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony. I attended one of his classes in college, and I remember that at one session he spent an hour or more delving into the Adagietto movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, savoring each bittersweet suspension and enriched triad. When Lorraine Hunt entered his life, that pursuit of harmonic pleasure came to the forefront of his work, although the music remained scrupulous in method.
Ashoka’s Dream,
at the Santa Fe Opera. They fell in love and eventually married, and Lieberson began to write with his wife’s voice in mind. By reputation an expert practitioner of twelve-tone technique, Lieberson had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony. I attended one of his classes in college, and I remember that at one session he spent an hour or more delving into the Adagietto movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, savoring each bittersweet suspension and enriched triad. When Lorraine Hunt entered his life, that pursuit of harmonic pleasure came to the forefront of his work, although the music remained scrupulous in method.
Neruda Songs
contains some of the most unabashedly lyrical music that any American composer has produced since Gershwin. It is also courageously personal music, the choice of Neruda poems seeming to acknowledge the fragility of Lorraine’s health. The final song, “Sonnet XCII,” begins, heartbreakingly, with the words “My love, if I die and you don’t—” The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major, and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hand of the singer who came from their ranks. The composer is holding her hand, too. The last word is “Amor.”
contains some of the most unabashedly lyrical music that any American composer has produced since Gershwin. It is also courageously personal music, the choice of Neruda poems seeming to acknowledge the fragility of Lorraine’s health. The final song, “Sonnet XCII,” begins, heartbreakingly, with the words “My love, if I die and you don’t—” The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major, and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hand of the singer who came from their ranks. The composer is holding her hand, too. The last word is “Amor.”
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