Music and Memory, Part 18: Dreams Dashed

I got a letter in the mail today -- a real one -- from my beloved friend Soprannie.  She writes of attending a production of Le nozze di Figaro, an opera in which she and I once performed together: 

I missed [some] parts because I was busy weeping silently as my husband held my hand.  Mostly in Act II, that perfect, beautiful thing.  I try to feel lucky that I got to be a part of that gorgeous music -- twice! and once with a dear friend.  Ah, we were so full of hope.  I remember [my voice teacher] saying to me, when I called her, tearful, from [an audition tour in] Germany, "You're not the first girl to get her dreams dashed". . . . It was . . . the first time I have gone to the opera without thinking, "that could be me some day . . . " Instead, I thought, "that will never be me."  

But it is OK, isn't it?  I think so.  We could have kept striving and striving and still never hit the big stage.  My friend R. [a gifted baritone] is a great reminder of that.  He's doing well -- a few small directing gigs, constant choral work (New York Philharmonic, American Symphony Orchestra, etc.), occasional step-out [solos] with ASO, a few opera gigs at regional houses around the country . . . but at 45 he is still couch-surfing, single, and hoping for a B-house gig.  I don't envy him.  Usually.  Mostly.

Soprannie is one of the best musicians I know.  In some way, I think I immunized myself against the depth of her present grief, having preempted it by leaving opera, focusing on the rare recital repertoire that became my specialty, and getting my doctorate in voice performance.  Sometimes I think those were all dodges, ways to avoid a fate that is shared by the vast majority of singers who graduate from conservatories and voice programs at American universities each spring.  There are thousands of them, young singers who are talented, well-trained, and hungry, and I estimate that there are currently only around a hundred or so American singers making a living as soloists in opera.  About ten or fifteen of them are famous; the rest you'll never hear of, but they're working.

A couple of years ago my comboxes played host to a rather vicious woman who saw to it to remind me that the arts were for "those who have talent," myself, presumably, not included among them (this same commenter urged Dawn Eden to drop me from her blogroll after interpreting an emoticon I had used in my own combox as proof of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  If I were made of tougher stuff, I would tell you truthfully that this didn't make me cry for months, or send me to the confessional about seven times just to make sure I hadn't somehow unintentionally committed such blasphemy, but this was not the case).  I can only assume that this reader, who is perhaps by now plying her own talents elsewhere, didn't know many classical musicians personally.  In the layman's world, is there really the idea anymore that if you're good, you make it, and if you don't, that's proof of your lack of goodness?  The professional and academic classical music world is the world in which I've been brewed, steeped, and simmered for almost my entire life.  My friends -- singers, conductors, instrumental soloists, orchestral players -- are not getting work, and in case there was any doubt, many of them are musicians of the highest level.  I subbed on a couple of church gigs on Long Island, for instance, with one of the best conductors I've ever worked with.  Another friend, a cellist who was acclaimed for his performances of new music and played a few gigs with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was shunned by other classical musicians when he started subbing in the pits on Broadway shows after his children were born; a few years later, the scorners were approaching him, hat in hand, to ask how they, too, could get sub work on Broadway.  A kick-ass oboist I know is working for a bank; a truly great pianist moved to Vermont in order to place his autistic son in a better school, and did financial consulting work from home when he could get it, mostly borrowing, as he told me, from "the bank of Mom and Dad."  I know of at least one marriage that has ended as the result of there being simply no work in classical music.  This is bitter indeed for "those who have talent," and who have spent their entire lives learning to speak the language of beauty in order to share it with others, to help others to wash, as Picasso put it, the dust of the everyday from their souls.

Little girls who sing with preternatural vocal (but not musical) maturity on national television will work, in the sense of getting Vegas acts with lots of costume changes and making lots of money.  But they will miss the chance they might have had to enter into the enchanted realms of art, of beauty, of poetry, of music.  It's a pity that the world values classical music so little, and values classical musicians even less; every true musician I've ever known has wanted only to share their joy in that "holde Kunst," as Schubert and the poet von Schober put it -- that wondrous art that transports the hearts of the suffering in their darkest hours to joy, to companionship, to the knowledge that God exists and that they are not alone.