Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The world had never made much sense to me, much less my life. But now it was Meyerbeer without subtitles. My sister would write me. She and her husband, after a tour of the militant battlefield, would remember themselves. They’d go and work for Dr. King. So I fantasized, most days, without ever daring to believe. But other days, performing fey hundred-year-old music for well-off folks who loved hearing two Negroes staying out of trouble, I thought Ruth must be waiting for a letter from me.

Mr. Weisman called Jonah a month after we’d finished recording. He had an offer from the Met. Jonah took the news over the phone, as if he’d known all along it was coming. “Great.” He might have just been offered half off on his next dry-cleaning bill. “What are they thinking about?”

Weisman told him. Jonah repeated the offer out loud, for me to hear. “Poisson, in Adriana Lecouvreur?” I shrugged, clueless. The opera was some vehicle for stupendous sopranos. Diva Drivel, we’d always called the genre. Neither of us had ever bothered to listen to it. “What’s the part?” Jonah called into the phone, his voice rising.

The part, Mr. Weisman told him, didn’t matter. My brother, at twenty-seven, would be singing on the same stage with Renata Tebaldi. He, a lieder singer with almost no orchestral experience, had wanted to break into opera. And the world of opera was willing to let him try.

Jonah got off the phone and interrogated me. I was worthless. We pulled the World’s Greatest Opera Librettos off the shelf. We ran out to the Magic Flute record shop and grabbed a remastered 1940s budget recording with a distinguished cast and listened to the whole thing at one go. The music ended. “You call that a role?”

I didn’t know how to handle him. “Other people have to break in, you know.”

“Other people can’t do what I do.”

“They start elsewhere. You could be singing out in Santa Fe. You could be singing at the Lyric in Chicago, or at the Boston Opera, or San Francisco.”

“Plenty of folks start in New York.”

“City Opera, then. The point is, you’ve never sung opera. And you want to break in at the top. You’re not going to star first time out.”

“Don’t need to star. Just don’t want to hold spears.”

“So take this one and make it shine. If they notice you, they’ll offer—”

He shook his head. “You’ll never understand, will you? There is no future in chickenshit deference. The collective thing. Start a little fish, end a little fish, only eaten. They see you servile, and that’s how they’ll see you forever. Who owns you, Joey? The chickenshit collective will, unless you refuse. That’s all they want: to decide who you are and what kind of threat you represent to the pecking order as they maintain it. The minute you let someone own you, you might as well go and off yourself. Your life— yourlife — is the only thing you ever get to decide.”

He told Mr. Weisman to tell the Met that Poisson was not, in his opinion, the right vehicle for his operatic debut. “A fucking insult,” he said to the dignified, old-world Mr. Weisman in his pinstripe zoot suit on the other end of the line. Jonah hung up. “They’re afraid my voice is too pure. They’re afraid I can’t fill a hall with my little lieder instrument. What does that sound like to you, Joey? I’ll tell you. My voice is too light, and I’m too dark. Poisson. Fuck them.”

Something in me lifted at the decision. Nobody turned down the Met and got another chance. We could go on doing the only thing we’d ever done. Somehow, we could make touring and festivals and contests pay. The Naumburg competition was coming up; he could win that one, if he had half a mind to. Something else would break for us. I’d wash dishes on the side, if need be.

But Jonah was right. The Met got back to him, and faster than even he could have imagined. His gamble seemed to pay off, to pique the interest of the musical powers. They returned with a vastly upped ante. He could have his vehicle after all. They wanted him for a grandiose center-stage showstopper. The Met offered him the lead in a brand-new opera by Gunther Schuller called The Visitation.

We’d once met Schuller, in Boston, when we were children. Years later, Jonah went through a third-stream phase, his enthusiasm actually lasting several weeks. An opera by the man was bound to be riveting. A North American premiere amounted to more self-creation than even Jonah could ask for. As gambles went, this one had his number.

“You must have pulled a real Svengali number on that Linwell,” Mr. Weisman said when he called with the offer. “What in the world did you sing for him anyway?”

“What’s the opera about?”

The libretto, Weisman explained, was spun off from a Kafka fable, transplanted to the underside of the contemporary United States.

“And the part?”

But Mr. Weisman didn’t know anything about the part. He didn’t even know the name of the character. Perhaps Jonah didn’t understand: This was the lead, in a premiere of a new piece by a major composer, a piece that had electrified Hamburg audiences for a whole year.

What was with all the questions? A singer could sing rings around Gabriel, score triumph after triumph at midsized opera houses, be sleeping with Saint Cecilia herself, and would still have to count such an offer as the lucky break of a lifetime.

But Jonah wanted to see a score before committing. It seemed a reasonable precaution. After years of struggling with borderline stage fright, I was reduced to terror even thinking about Jonah taking on something this size in front of that many people. Some part of me hoped that by asking for a score, he’d irritate the producers so much that they’d withdraw the offer. For that matter, the country itself might fall apart before the score actually arrived.

But the United States hung on for another few weeks, and Jonah got his copy of The Visitation to peruse. We spent a marvelous two days reading through it. I’ll have that pleasure to answer for, at day’s end. God forgive me, but I always enjoyed sight-singing. Jonah was a wonder to watch, breezing all the parts as I plunked out a two-hand reduction. The score had everything: serialism, polytonality, jazz — a wild grab bag of sounds, purely American. “Crazed Quotations,” Jonah said at one point, the two of us sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the piano bench. “Just like the folks used to play.”

And its story, Kafka aside, was pure American, as well. A young sensualist university student is arrested and forced to stand a surreal trial for mysterious crimes he has no knowledge of committing. He’s found guilty and then lynched. The man is never named. Throughout the score, he’s identified only as “the Negro.”

We read our way through, realization hitting early. Neither of us felt much need to talk about it. He’d probably made up his mind before the end of the first act. But we read all the way through without Jonah making any sign. I didn’t know which way to hope. When we got through the last system of staves, he announced, “Well, Mule, that’s that.”

“It’s good music,” I said.

“Oh, the music’s wonderful. A few real showcase moments.”

“It…might be important.” I don’t know why I bothered saying anything.

“ Important, Mule?” He circled for the kill. “Important musically? Or important socially?” He gave the word a pitch that wasn’t quite contempt. Contempt would have betrayed too much interest.

“It’s timely.”

“ Timely?What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Mule?”

“It’s about civil rights.”

“Is it? I knew it had to be about something.”

“It’s sexy.” The only word that gave him pause.

“There is that.” He teetered, as if considering asking Mr. Weisman to find out whom he’d be playing opposite. Then all compromise crumbled, and he was whole again. “No way. No way in creation.”