“Leise flehen meine Lieder durch die Nacht zu dir”
A moment ago I was starting to close off the call when Mom asked “But what about the song you were going to play for me?” She had been waiting all afternoon, alone in her room, in her wheelchair next to the phone. Shut off from the world in so many ways, without the gift of eyesight, she meditates, and recalls. Visits have been rare during the summer months, the staff is reduced to the minimum, and my poor brother Ron has had to stay away with his horrible summer cold, fearing contagion. But she hadn’t forgotten the music I had spoken about yesterday, a wonderful online share from Craig Rutenberg that we all agreed was beyond mere words…
“Oh, all right! Let’s do it.” I fumbled to revv up Youtube with one hand, to put in the key words Schubert, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. The time machine was in place, this improbable modern marvel of holding a home handset in Paris to the speaker of my smartphone, the duration of four miraculous minutes, bringing to life in LeRoy, New York not just Schubert, but Franz Liszt – the arranger of the setting – and the incomparable pianist and composer whom Jacques and I had admired just tonight in a stunning live broadcast on Medici.tv from Russia starring Denis Matsuev in the 3rd Concerto; but also for just a short moment the re-creation of a lifetime’s memories. For me, and especially for my Mom at age 100.
The Schubert song ‘Ständchen’ is my foundation, and my roots with it are imbedded deeply. I’ve sung it with pleasure since those first years in Boston (my beloved teacher Mark Pearson gave me my first score of Volume 1 which he had bought from Ré Koster when she retired), then for an important audition in 1977 at Graz, Austria, where Metropolitan Opera diction coach Nico Castel himself commented and asked where I learned to sing with such perfect German diction (with John Moriarty in Boston of course!). But Mom also knew it well, and it brought back for both of us those years when I was as a teenager being driven each week to voice lessons in Rochester, of moments of struggle, of uncertainty, but also of yearning and of joy. This is where the recorded interpretation by Sergei Rachmaninoff excels so exquisitely.
At this moment, as the stars show luminously in the midnight sky, time seems to have stopped. Schubert has once again brought us all a moment of comfort, of rest. “Komm, beglücke mich… beglücke mich…”
(The picture I’m sharing was taken yesterday behind my apartment, in the Jardin Anne Frank).
