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Last night, at about 3am, I was still up trying to meet my deadline on the book, and I jumped over to CNN and saw that Pavoratti had died.
I am not, particularly, an opera fan. Of all the culture I was exposed to as a child, this was not part of it. It was something my father derided as being full of fat angry women and something my mother probably thought too complex for her. Later, when my father was charmed by the Three Tenors, she would confess to me that she was fairly sure it was schlock, and that is always my mother, stuck in a gap of her own making (or her own lack of will) between taste and skill.
My own experience of opera is limited and largely laid at the feet of Gilbert & Sullivan (light opera, I know) and Baz Luhrmann (let us save the amplification debate for another day, please). But it is, nonetheless, something that has creeped into my interests, something that I allow myself to be curious about even with the ignorance and fumbling I come to it with. For this is television of another age, the origin of the ballet, the mythology of whores. Even if you don't like it, opera matters.
All of this is to say that Pavoratti was not at all something of my experience. He was someone on TV my father would watch for thirty minutes here and there on holiday PBS broadcasts. But he was also someone dear friends of mine adored, that one (perhaps two?) confesses as an early, if not first, crush. And, thanks to Kali, he became our visual model for Rodolphus in Descensus, so much so, that I felt indignant at the New York Times for saying how odd his occassional sex symbol status was. There is much to rant at in that, but this isn't that post.
Those of you that stay up late in quiet houses know how strange it is to have news the sleeping do not, even if the news doesn't effect your life. Even if it does: I remember the Soviet coup and my father getting up at five to tell me what a bad person I was for staying up all night. But we don't know who has the nuclear codes, and then he made breakfast.
When I was a child and celebrities died, my mother would say she was sad, and my father would scoff. I didn't understand either of them, and she said it would be like David Bowie dying, but we all know David Bowie isn't a mortal human and we don't really need to worry about that. I mean _really_. But the interesting thing is that my mother will be sad, deeply sad about this, the loss of a man from a world that didn't interest her and that, I think, she believes simply musn't interest her (such things are easier in the home I grew up in).
I was shocked last night, by how deeply sad Pavoratti's death made me, how close to tears. And I thought of my mother with her peculiar appreciation and fannishness, and the innocence of that, and oddly, of opera.
Pavoratti will be missed.
I am not, particularly, an opera fan. Of all the culture I was exposed to as a child, this was not part of it. It was something my father derided as being full of fat angry women and something my mother probably thought too complex for her. Later, when my father was charmed by the Three Tenors, she would confess to me that she was fairly sure it was schlock, and that is always my mother, stuck in a gap of her own making (or her own lack of will) between taste and skill.
My own experience of opera is limited and largely laid at the feet of Gilbert & Sullivan (light opera, I know) and Baz Luhrmann (let us save the amplification debate for another day, please). But it is, nonetheless, something that has creeped into my interests, something that I allow myself to be curious about even with the ignorance and fumbling I come to it with. For this is television of another age, the origin of the ballet, the mythology of whores. Even if you don't like it, opera matters.
All of this is to say that Pavoratti was not at all something of my experience. He was someone on TV my father would watch for thirty minutes here and there on holiday PBS broadcasts. But he was also someone dear friends of mine adored, that one (perhaps two?) confesses as an early, if not first, crush. And, thanks to Kali, he became our visual model for Rodolphus in Descensus, so much so, that I felt indignant at the New York Times for saying how odd his occassional sex symbol status was. There is much to rant at in that, but this isn't that post.
Those of you that stay up late in quiet houses know how strange it is to have news the sleeping do not, even if the news doesn't effect your life. Even if it does: I remember the Soviet coup and my father getting up at five to tell me what a bad person I was for staying up all night. But we don't know who has the nuclear codes, and then he made breakfast.
When I was a child and celebrities died, my mother would say she was sad, and my father would scoff. I didn't understand either of them, and she said it would be like David Bowie dying, but we all know David Bowie isn't a mortal human and we don't really need to worry about that. I mean _really_. But the interesting thing is that my mother will be sad, deeply sad about this, the loss of a man from a world that didn't interest her and that, I think, she believes simply musn't interest her (such things are easier in the home I grew up in).
I was shocked last night, by how deeply sad Pavoratti's death made me, how close to tears. And I thought of my mother with her peculiar appreciation and fannishness, and the innocence of that, and oddly, of opera.
Pavoratti will be missed.
