Learning to love. How the poet Dana Gioia discovered his vocation through music.
An extract from "Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry"
Today I am very pleased to publish an extract from the poet Dana Gioia’s new book Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry. I started reading my copy as soon as it arrived and have enjoyed it very much indeed. Dana knows a great deal about opera, and has written several librettos, so he is the perfect author for this book. It also contains some memoir. Long-term readers will know how much I liked Dana’s last memoir Studying With Miss Bishop, so I am delighted to bring you the chapter from Weep, Shudder, Die which tells the story of how Dana simultaneously discovered his love of opera and his vocation as a poet.
Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry by Dana Gioia is released on 3rd December. You can pre-order it now.
The Common Reader has previously hosted guest posts about Andrew Lang, Salinger, and Don Camillo. Two of these were written by academics. If you are an academic who wants their literary research to have a public audience, consider writing a guest post for me!
Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
(The eternal feminine draws us upward.)
— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
When I was nineteen, I left Stanford after my freshman year to study in Vienna. I would like to claim that I embarked on this adventure to pursue my destiny, but I did it for a variety of bad reasons—including a girl.
I had come to Stanford expecting to find an intellectual home. For as long as I could remember, I had yearned to be among my own kind. Instead, I found an upscale version of my high school. The university had carefully screened out the people I wanted to meet. Of the twenty-one guys on my freshman corridor, seventeen had been student body president. The others were a black football player, a preppy from Exeter, a physicist (whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project), and me. The football player and I were the only ones whose parents had not gone to college. I liked the ex-presidents—being likable was what got them elected—and they liked me, but none of them were my kind of people.
Coursework never gave me any problems, but I often seemed to be the only one who cared much about the books we were assigned. Stanford undergraduates were dutiful students, but they were too well-balanced to care about the arts and letters. In my first year I met no one who shared my interests. Surrounded by cordial people, I was lonely.
My instructors were uninspiring. They slogged or rambled through the material, but they were admirably demanding. They expected us to work, and we did. I dropped one course—in musical composition. After a few sessions, the professor met with me to ask about my preparation. He was pleased that I had twelve years of piano and five in woodwinds. When I told him that I had become fascinated by contemporary music in high school, he stiffened. He asked what composers I admired. With great pride—or perhaps vanity—I replied that my favorite living composers were Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Michael Tippett, and William Walton. “Stravinsky is gut,” he said in his Teutonic accent. “The others are Quatsch!” I had just learned that word in German. Quatsch meant nonsense, something too silly to be worth anyone’s attention. “You must study Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio,” he declared. As he extolled their virtues, in particular their commitment to total serialism (the organization of all musical elements, including rhythm, dynamics, orchestral color, and pitch to a twelve-note series), I decided to find another course.
I liked many things about Stanford. I was especially enchanted by the calm beauty of the place. Stanford then was an uncluttered Romanesque-Revival campus set in eight thousand acres of mostly empty woodlands and sloping foothills. Santa Clara Valley was not yet Silicon Valley. It was still full of pastures and orchards. There were already a few changes. A giant radio telescope dominated one hilltop, but underneath it were grazing cattle.
I had never lived near open land. I had never lived anywhere that wasn’t overbuilt and ugly. I walked for hours in the oak groves, lost in thought. The landscape filled me with joy. Yet I was never entirely at ease. Stanford’s demi-Eden left me feeling alien and unworthy. I was an interloper. Amid such unaccustomed beauty, what else could I have done but fall hopelessly in love?
Hopeless romance expresses itself best in needless melodrama. On the last day of my unhappy freshman year, I discovered that a girl I had a desperate crush on was going to Europe in the fall. I did some quick research and discovered I could apply my California State Scholarship to a program Stanford ran in Vienna. I could study music there. I had already done a year of German. I was not a person who did things impulsively. Or so I thought. I just signed up. I wanted her and I wanted out.
My parents barely inquired about my change of plans. No one in my family had gone to college. They had no idea what it involved. Still overjoyed that I had made it into Stanford, my folks asked few questions about a world they found enigmatic. We had relatives in the Navy and Merchant Marine. They were always going overseas. Why not me?
When I arrived in Vienna three months later, in the fall of 1970, my putative romance was over. (Her doing—sigh—not mine.) Sad, lonely, and still a teenager, I had emotions to burn. I seethed, I slumped, I yearned. Some new passion was inevitable. I hoped it would be a girl.
I moved into a windowless room the size of a closet in a dreary Studentenhaus, run by Caritas, a Catholic charity. For months, I subsisted on a diet of solitude and self-pity. I made no friends. I hid in my room with a German dictionary reading Rilke, Brecht, and Goethe. (German may be the only language in which the poetry is easier than the prose.) I wasn’t sure if I was waiting for a new life or just killing time.
No one visiting today’s affluent and cosmopolitan Vienna will easily imagine the shadowy gray city I found in 1970. Vienna was still recovering from World War II. Injured veterans worked in newsstands and cigarette shops. Amputees begged in the train stations. Blind men tapped wooden canes along the sidewalk; at intersections strangers helped them cross the street. Every evening, around the corner from my residence, a dozen bedraggled prostitutes waited in doorways for clients. No longer wholly impoverished, the city was still barely getting by. Thrift, caution, and anxiety were everywhere apparent.
Having just arrived from 1960s California, the land of endless sunshine and optimism, I wandered the dark streets and alleyways of the fallen imperial capital in a state of astonishment. I had stumbled into the film noir setting of The Third Man. An Angeleno abroad for the first time, I had never experienced the weight of history. A neutral country caught between Eastern and Western Europe, shorn of its empire, defeated in two murderous wars, complicit in the Holocaust, uncertain of its future, Austria clung to its glorious past with affection, pride, and desperation.
At the distance of so many years, I can’t reconstruct my exact state of mind. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. On my restless walks through the narrow cobblestone streets of the old city, I observed the trauma of people on the losing side of history. I hardly noticed how capably they had rebuilt their shattered society. I viewed their world through my own melancholy.
Vienna was an insular and self-contained metropolis. The city had its own way of doing everything, and those forms were meticulously observed. In Viennese parks, no one was allowed to step on the grass. Small formalities were important. Only minuscule tips were expected in cafés or taverns, but they had to be given in a particular way. Just walking down the street presented mysteries. Who were the small, filthy men carrying odd-shaped brooms—chimney sweeps, it turned out. Why did some men and women wear coats with green lapels? They were Tyroleans. Even the clothes looked different; not only the tailoring but the fabric had unfamiliar weaves and patterns. I let my hair grow long because the local barbers gave cuts that seemed boxy and bizarre to an American eye.
The food was varied and delicious, but it was drawn almost exclusively from the countries that had once made up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were morning and afternoon breaks for coffee and pastries, although some men had beer and wurst for their mid-morning snack. Language was a barrier. It wasn’t just that few people spoke any English. The German was also a problem. The Viennese spoke their own dialect, Wienerisch, which was distinct from standard German. In every detail of daily life, an American experienced an overwhelming sense of foreignness—something no longer possible in today’s generically international European capitals.
I arrived intending to be a composer. My residence was full of student musicians, both Austrian and foreign. On one floor there were three practice rooms each with a Bösendorfer grand piano, as well as a small recital hall with a fourth piano. I spent hours each day practicing and composing without any supervision while I also took courses in German and music. I had proficiency in three instruments but distinction in none. When I heard the other students rehearse, my heart sank. I would never be that good. I had training in music theory. I had taught myself basic orchestration. I had been composing since high school, but I had never put my whole energy into music. In Vienna, I realized that I was just an amateur. My love for music was greater than my talent.
Vienna had an extraordinary musical life. It was the one luxury the city could not live without. There were two major opera houses (plus a chamber opera company), two symphonies, numerous concerts, nightly recitals in several locations, and sung masses on Sunday often with small orchestras. The movie theaters played opera films on weeknights. Classical music, especially the Staatsoper (“National Opera”), had the prominence there that major league baseball did in the U.S. I went to concerts and recitals several times a week, mostly to hear modern music. Many performances were free. Even the prestigious venues sold standing room—available an hour and fifteen minutes before each performance. I paid thirty-two cents to hear the Wiener Symphoniker and sixty cents at the Staatsoper to stand under the imperial box. (There were even cheaper tickets to stand in the balcony.) A restless teenager, I was as comfortable standing as sitting. I saw modern ballets and operas, but I avoided the standard repertory. I found traditional ballet too precious, I suffered through Les Sylphides three times so that I could see Petrushka after the intermission.
I loved hearing operatic music, but seeing full operas on stage was confusing. The stiff acting and staging added little enjoyment. The language barrier prevented me from knowing what was going on. As a senior in high school, I had won a statewide essay contest. On the trip to San Francisco to receive the award, I used part of my prize money to buy an orchestra seat to see Die Walküre with Regine Crespin and John Vickers. I loved parts of the music, but I was mostly bored. I could not experience the long work as theater. A few months later I saw Falstaff in Los Angeles with equal bewilderment. I liked modern opera, probably because I usually heard it in English.
Soon after my arrival, I decided to come to terms with the operatic Mozart. To do it properly, I bought the Staatsoper’s cheapest box seat for Le Nozze di Figaro. I found myself in the back seat of a box for five with only a partial view of the stage. My companions were an elderly quartet—three heavyset women in ancient gowns and a white-haired man in a threadbare tuxedo. He must have been married to one of the women; I couldn’t tell which. For them, it was a grand occasion, a birthday or anniversary. They treated one another with elaborate courtesy. It was very sweet. If any woman stood, the man sprang from his seat to move her chair. Then he made a little bow.
Le Nozze is a long opera. I could only see one corner of the stage. I soon had no idea what was going on. If I stood for a moment to get a glimpse of the action, my box-mates reacted with horror. I’m embarrassed that what I remember most about the evening was how much the four old Wieners smelled. Few Viennese had bathrooms in their apartments. People visited the public baths perhaps once a week. In my back seat I was less conscious of Mozart’s genius than the heady mix of body odor, heavy perfume, and mothballs. I was an antiseptic American shocked by the atmosphere of Mitteleuropa. I left convinced that operas with powdered wigs and waistcoats were not for me. I would stick with modern music.
I would have stayed smugly in that benighted opinion had it not been for—what else draws men upward?—a girl. She was an American exchange student. When we met a few weeks later, she suggested we go to the opera. She was an attractive, intelligent, and determined young woman. As soon as we bought tickets for La Bohème, I realized her determination included a plan for our future. We would go to the opera, and I would fall in love.
Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry by Dana Gioia is released on 3rd December. You can pre-order it now.
Her plan worked. I fell in love that night but not with her. She had found good, cheap seats for a new Zeffirelli production. My music professors had been unanimous in dismissing Puccini. The mention of his name made their lips curl in the same sneer they gave to Rachmaninov and Sibelius. I had never heard much of Puccini’s music beyond a few famous arias—mostly Miss America contestants singing “Un bel di.” I expected something sentimental and obvious. I was unprepared for a masterpiece. At first, I was surprised by Puccini’s masterful orchestration. Then the first great lyric scene began. By the time Rodolfo introduced himself to Mimi, I was in Puccini’s thrall:
Chi son? Sono un poeta. Who am I? I am a poet.
Che cosa faccio? Scrivo. What do I do? I write.
E come vivo? Vivo. How do I survive? I live.
In povertà mia lieta In my happy poverty
scialo da gran signore Like a great lord, I squander
rime ed inni d'amore. My love poems and rhymes.
When the final curtain fell, I knew the young lady and I would never go out again. When you’re aimless, it’s best to drift alone. But I couldn’t have imagined a better first date. To my own astonishment, I had fallen in love with opera. The experience had the suddenness and finality of destiny. Opera had always been there, waiting for me to sit in that seat on that evening.
Vienna had already introduced me to another intoxicating pleasure—drinking. I had been a priggish drinker before Europe. At a party I would cautiously nurse a beer all evening. I had seen too many drunks and drug addicts. In Vienna I learned to relax with fellow students in the city’s picturesque taverns and wine cellars. I needed Austria’s civilized attitude toward wine and beer. Alcohol has been a gift and never an addiction.
I cannot say the same thing about opera. It quickly became a far more alluring intoxication than alcohol. A few days after La Bohème, I went to see Don Giovanni—standing room, of course. Cesare Siepi and Sena Jurinac sang that night. I soaked it up. Whatever barrier I had experienced earlier vanished. I saw it again a few days later. I began going to the opera twice a week and then three or four times a week. I went to Volksoper to see different repertory, including Porgy and Bess with an African American cast that included William Warfield. By then I had a few friends. I convinced them to come to the opera. Each of them came once. Not all pleasures need to be social. I enjoyed a luxury of seeing the same opera repeatedly in the same season with different casts. It is an indulgence I’ve never been able to afford in America. Going to the Staatsoper three times a week cost me less than two dollars.
The physical productions in Vienna were uneven. The scenery of Don Giovanni consisted mostly of canvas backdrops. The Magic Flute had a beautiful and elaborate set. The music, however, was consistently superb. The Vienna Philharmonic was in the pit, and the regular singers would now seem like a gala cast. Along with Siepi and Jurinac were Wilma Lipp, Anton Dermota, Gundula Janowitz, Giuseppe Taddei, Peter Schreier, and Wolfgang Windgassen. For special performances, Franco Corelli, Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, René Kollo, and other stars would arrive. I haven’t written much about singers because that subject lies outside my focus, but let me state the obvious. Opera exists only through the skill and artistry of singers. I didn’t understand opera until I saw great singers perform it.
During the days I immersed myself in German. It was the language of both my studies and of the city around me. I began to dream in German, which I found unsettling. Now that English had little to do with both my daily life and dream world, I heard it differently. My native tongue acquired a magical power, evoking powerful memories and imaginative associations. I began reading poetry obsessively and bought overpriced paperbacks of modern verse at the city’s one English-language bookstore.
I had always liked poetry, but I had never studied it seriously. I certainly had never thought of myself as a poet. I filled two small notebooks with verse. I liked playing with language. The little academic instruction I’d had treated the poem as a written text to be analyzed visually on the page. That approach seemed backwards. It was the sound of poetry that attracted me. It wasn’t a mute and immobile art like a painting or sculpture. Poetry was a kind of song—it was sound moving through time. The printed page was just a score waiting for a performance. As I worked in my notebook, I noticed that most of what I had learned about music applied to verse. A rhythm could make an ordinary sentence memorable. A phrase could take the expressive shape of a melody.
Occasionally, I wrote a good line by accident, but I never wrote a passable poem. Failure didn’t bother me. I was a kid feeling out the keys of a piano. Music had taught me that mastery took years of study and effort. I had loved the art but not the effort. But poetry was different. The prospect of undertaking that enormous effort excited me.
One day I woke up and knew I would be a poet. The moment was without drama. My vocation arrived quietly as a fait accompli. I didn’t choose the art. It chose me. I simply assented. If I felt anything, it was relief. I hardly understood what the decision meant, but I knew it was permanent. Since then, I have rejoiced in it and have cursed it. I have never doubted it.
Vienna taught me many things. The most important was the futility of planning the future too carefully. I came to Austria as a composer. I left as a poet. I didn’t abandon music; I followed it to somewhere unexpected. It brought me into poetry by a different avenue from my contemporaries. And that, as one poet observed, can make all the difference. Stranger still, years later poetry led me back to music as a lyricist and librettist. Hofmannsthal’s Marschallin is right, Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding. So many things you strive for—like love—suddenly fail. Then some unexpected gift—like opera—appears in its place. Even bad luck has its advantages. It makes room for serendipity. I lost two girlfriends but found the Muse.
Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry by Dana Gioia is released on 3rd December. You can pre-order it now.
I loved all of the Zeffirelli productions I have seen--Tosca, La Boheme, Otello, and Aida. I trust you know that the new Met Tosca was booed by the audience for its obscenity and bad taste. The Met had to scrap it and revive the Zeffirelli production. Critics often hate the realism of Z's productions, but nowadays most of us rejoice to see an opera presented without gross directorial distortions.
I am no scholar of R.P. Warren's work. I've read nearly everything he wrote, and I heard him speak half a dozen times. If I had to venture an intuitive guess, I would say that Warren's mature religious vision was a vague sort of Christianity based in his response to the natural world. One might call it a sentimental Christianity or Christian brand of pantheism. Leaving the South and settling in intellectual New England made him a sort of Transcendentalist Unitarian--such as Longfellow or Emerson.
delightful read