Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The first American staging of The Visitation went west, to the San Francisco Opera. They mounted their premiere with a tenor named Simon Estes in the leading role. They performed the expressionist drama just across the Bay from where Huey Newton and the police had had their shoot-out. Every staging of a work is a new universe. San Francisco was farther from New York than Kafka was from civil rights. The West Coast critics adored the show, and it launched Mr. Estes, several shades darker than my brother, on his distinguished, singular career.

Not that Jonah’s career stood still. Only time did that. Our second record came out, and for weeks afterward, I waited, flinching. I didn’t give a damn about critics or sales: I wanted the whole thing to sink without notice. Jonah heard me holding my breath and just laughed. “What is it, Joey? What evils have we unleashed on the world this time?”

A month went by, and nothing happened. No earthquake from our own trivial tremor. The Kerner Commission released its report on the violence across the country: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.” But this time, even the cities where our record sold well remained quiet.

Gramophonemagazine reviewed the new LP, proclaiming that a man so young and callow had no earthly right to sing Schubert’s wintry trip “until he’s within earshot of that season.” The reviewer was that great judge of vocal talent, Crispin Linwell. Linwell’s review was so dreamily brutal that it touched off what passed, in classical musical circles, for a street brawl. The controversy fed on itself, and the record got written up in more big-city dailies than I thought possible. A few outraged protectors of world culture hid behind the Linwell name and dismissed Jonah’s effort as at best premature and at worst impudent. A few other writers, themselves too young to know what they were wading into, found Jonah’s youthful rethinking of the cycle as thrilling as it was spooky. One reviewer, reviewing the battle as much as the recording, pointed out that Jonah Strom was only a few years younger than Schubert was when he wrote the thing. When these reviewers talked about the singing at all, they tossed around the word perfection as if it were a mild reprimand.

The first to mention race was a writer in the Village Voice. The proper way to serve up Schubert was hardly that paper’s stock-in-trade. The reviewer admitted up front to being a jazzer who could listen to lieder only under the influence of artificial enhancement. But Schubert, the writer said, wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the white cultural establishment was trying to skewer a gifted young black singer not because he was too young to sing the masters but because he was too uppity. The reviewer proceeded to list half a dozen European and American white singers who’d tackled the work to acclaim at ages even younger than Jonah’s.

I showed the piece to Jonah, expecting rage. But when he got to the end, he just cackled. “Is it him? It has to be. The smart-aleck style? The bit about being able to listen to lieder only while stoned?” I hadn’t even checked the byline. Jonah handed me back the issue. “T. West! Who else could it be? Thaddy boy. That white Negro bastard.”

“Should we call him? I’ve a number for him from…awhile ago.” Old broken promise. But Jonah shook his head, reticent, almost scared.

T. West’s accusation blew our little winter’s journey wide open. Crispin Linwell was all over himself in a Gramophone response, hotly denying that race had anything to do with the way any classical performance is received. He’d worked with tens of black artists and even hired one or two. The papers that ran follow-up squibs generally made the same claim: Race simply wasn’t an issue in the concert scene. Talent was all. The monuments of classical music were color-blind, never troubling with such ephemera. Anyone who wanted to could worship at the altar.

“That’s what your father and mother believed,” Jonah said, and kept reading.

An editorial in the Chicago Defender thanked the white cultural establishment for being so color-blind: “And it must be so, for the cultural elites to be able to look out on classical music audiences and declare that race is not an issue when dealing with eternal verities. But then, nobody can see much color when the lights are down so low.” Even this editorial didn’t talk about Jonah’s singing, except to declare it, for whatever the phrase meant, “a constant astonishment.”

For weeks, our record sold as well as if it had been released on a major label. We got letters telling us to stick to jig music. We got letters — militant, enthusiastic — from faceless, raceless listeners who told us to keep reviving the dead stuff, forever. But by then, who knew what music anyone was hearing in our sounds? I hated the notoriety, and still thought that once the fuss blew over, we could return to the realm of simple performance. Right up to the last, I imagined such a place existed.

But the Linwell flap also seemed to break our curse. I’d been braced for riots, our repeat punishment for trying to stop time again. This precious little tempest, played out in small-circulation magazines catering to a dying art, was all the riot our recording would touch off this time. I was a slung-assed fool. I felt the size of my vanity, the old animistic belief that the world lived or died by what cracks I stepped on.

Then King was killed. He died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a few blocks south of Beale Street, the day after he went up to the mountaintop. That voice for reconciliation met its only allowable end. He’d been leading a strike by garbage workers and now he was over. How long? Not long. I heard the news on FM radio while cleaning the apartment. The dazed announcer broke in on the highlights from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He forgot to fade the music down, instead just clipping it off and tearing into the garbled news. He didn’t seem to know what to do next. Going back to Donizetti was impossible, even though it was one of Dr. King’s favorites. The silence grew so long, it made me wonder if the station had gone off the air. In fact, the announcer had simply walked away, into the station’s record library, to root around for the right eulogy. For whatever private reason, he settled on William Billings’s crude, haunted originary wail, “David’s Lamentation”: “Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”

I shut the radio off and went out. It was already evening. I turned, by instinct, uptown. The streets seemed so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, though most of the passersby must already have known. I walked at random, looking for Jonah, hurrying to tell him.

The firebombs started in Memphis, an hour after the shooting. By the end of the week, 125 cities were at war. The fires in Washington burned worse than they had since 1812. The Battle of Fourteenth Street required thirteen thousand federal troops to suppress it. The city set a curfew and declared martial law. Chicago’s mayor ordered his forces to “shoot to kill.” The governor of Maryland announced a lasting state of emergency as a quarter of Baltimore burned. In Kansas City, police lobbed gas canisters into a crowd enraged by the decision to keep schools open through Dr. King’s funeral. Nashville, Oakland, Cincinnati, Trenton: uprising everywhere.

Four straight summers of violence: The revolution had come. And Jonah and I stood by watching, as if from mezzanine boxes at a matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Our concerts in Pittsburgh and Boston were canceled and never rescheduled, casualties in a conflict where music wasn’t even the smallest thing at stake. How could a little song and dance compete against the country’s supreme art form?