Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I could have lived that life forever — college towns paying on arts subsidies, midsized cities building cultural capital by bringing in obscure first-rung talent at third-rung prices. It was enough for me. With sound pouring out of us, night after night, I had no other needs. But Jonah wanted more. Onstage, he could sing:

Ah me, how scanty is my store!

Yet, for myself, I’d ne’er repine,

Tho’ of the flocks that whiten o’er

Yon plain one lamb were only mine.

But offstage, his eyes caught every glimmer in professional music. Careers were taking off all around him. Teenage André Watts soloed with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. “Jesus, Mule. What does he have that you don’t?”

“Fire, edge, passion, speed, beauty, power. Aside from that, I play just like him.”

“He’s a halfie, too. Hungarian mother. Tell me you couldn’t pace him. You can do everything that guy does.”

Except soar.But Jonah was one of those people who assumed everyone could soar who chose to step off the cliff.

Grace Bumbry led his list of career obsessions, especially after Die schwarze Venus scandal broke at Bayreuth. We heard her interviewed for German television about the hubbub. “Jesus, Mule. She speaks better German than both of us put together.” Jonah hung a stunning photo of her on his closet door. “At last, an opera star as sexy as the roles she plays. Carnegie at twenty-five. Met debut at twenty-eight. I’ve got four years, Joey. Four years, or I’m history.”

But that fabulous woman was miles from anyone who attracted Jonah in real life. She was the polar opposite of the woman whose memory he drew on every recital night to drive his harsher passages into dissonance. Since his break with Lisette, we were off the party circuit, working as we hadn’t worked since being named America’s Next Voice. Jonah was pulling himself inward, culling, smoothing, focusing, building a revenge by the only means he had.

For all his hunger, Jonah was smart enough never to push Mr. Weisman. Our agent knew more about the music business than the two of us ever would. He knew how to start a rumor, feeding it week after week. Our bookings multiplied. We sang in cities I thought would never let us sing. We sang in Memphis, as far south as we’d yet gone. I was sure we’d be canceled, all the way up to the moment we walked out onstage. I kept looking into the hall, waiting for my eyes to adjust, to see the audience’s hue. They were the same color they always were.

Memphis blurred into Kansas City, the Quad Cities, St. Louis. We walked down to Beale Street, where the baby Blues was left out howling in the rain. The street felt self-conscious and short — two blocks of music bars looking like a theme park, the Colonial Williamsburg of the one true American art.

Like America, we had to be discovered again and again. Mr. Weisman, a patient conductor building a long crescendo, edged us back to our hometown for a cleverly orchestrated theatrical revelation. Over months, he laid the groundwork for our breakthrough. He booked us into Town Hall for early June. We paid expenses ourselves. Ticket sales wouldn’t defray more than a portion of costs. We scraped up what remained of Mama’s insurance legacy and gave it to the hall managers. Not enough remained for more than perfunctory advertising. Jonah wore the thin, crazed smile of a gambler as he handed over our check. “One blown entrance and we’ll have to look for real jobs.”

We blew no entrances. The Schubert had gone better out west, and the Wolf never reached the intensity it had on his greatest nights. But his Town Hall concert stood above anything Jonah had achieved. Right before the curtain, my brain spun with adrenaline. But Jonah never looked so calm, so expansive as when desperation was on him. To me, the stage lights of Town Hall felt like interrogation lamps. Jonah walked into them beaming, scouting the auditorium like an adventuring boy.

We’d gone back and forth over the program, waffling between safety and danger. We started with “The Erl-King.” We needed something certain to open with, and we’d done that piece so many times, it could have galloped along by itself after throwing both of us. Then, with Goethe as a bridge, we went with Wolf’s three Harfenspieler settings, every pitch in those complex textures a dare to disaster. Then we did three of the Brahms opus 6.

“What’s the link?” I asked during the planning.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the link?’ Wolf hated Brahms’s guts. They’re joined at the hip.”

That was connection enough for him. In fact, Jonah mapped out the whole recital as an enormous arc of death and transfiguration. Part one was our retreat from the world into aesthetic solitude. Part two was a full-blooded race back into the mess of living. His Brahms brought down the first curtain with that last word on nineteenth-century beauty. We led the audience back from intermission by resurrecting “Wachet auf.” Jonah had the idea that this old chorale prelude — always performed with a wall of singers — would make the perfect solo. The tune’s sailing self-evidence was my brother’s birthright. “Zion hear the watchman singing.”

In his inner ear, Jonah heard the watchman call so slowly, it sounded like a bell buoy in the night. At his tempo, those four pitches topping the opening triad turned into the universe’s background radiation. Most listeners never know how much harder it is to make a soft sound than a loud one. The breakneck tear will always upstage the legato sustain, but the latter is harder to pull off. Slowed to stopping, Bach’s huge, expanding hover held more terror for me than any other piece in our concert. Jonah wanted my prelude to unfold so gradually that the audience would forget about his chorale lines until his next shocking entrance. We passed our parts back and forth, swapping figure and ground. His nine stark phrases flowed over my intervening elaborations like ice sheets across a forgotten continent.

From glacial Bach, we jumped off into our trio of Charles Ives show-stealers. We did them in flat-out New World roughness. He turned the last, “Majority,” into a hooting lark. By the time the audience rolled back off their heels, they were too deep into raucous Americana to be alienated. Jonah pegged the persona of the pieces so perfectly, we actually drew laughs and whistles as we pulled up at the end of the bygone parade.

Then we sprinted to the finish and sent them home humming. He wanted to do a crossover, partly to show he could and partly to do at least one number we’d never done in public. “Good for our moral character. Gotta keep you fresh, Giuseppe.” The two of us arranged “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” sprinkling it with all the crazed quotations we could remember our parents singing as counterpoint to the hackneyed song. Our gimmick was a steady accelerando, slow enough to seem wayward at first, but winding up, by the last verse, with Jonah riding through the syncopations so fast, he wrapped his lips around the syllables only by miracle. Out of pure nervousness, I goosed it even more than we meant to. But Jonah shot me a dazed smile of thanks during the applause.

We closed with “Balm in Gilead.” The audience wanted him to finish with some aerial tenor feat, strange, difficult, and dazzling. He gave them the simplest tune he’d ever sing, pitched smack in the fattest part of his range. The choice mystified me. Mama had sung the song when we were young, but no more often than she sang a million others. Only at the concert did I figure it out. He’d picked the song for Ruth. But Ruth wasn’t there. Da was front and center, next to the patient Mrs. Samuels. Ruth’s seat next to them was empty, and only I knew how much her absence rattled him. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” He sang tentatively, testing to see if it were still true. By verse two, the verdict seemed a toss-up. He ended in a place beyond judgment, his singing itself the only thing close to a proof of that promise.