My singer friend Michele Angelini extolls the endless virtues of moka pot espresso coffee, his favorite method. He has written about it again. Mike has unwittingly set off for me a series of memories, pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was for me the long, instructive summer of 1978.
Décor: the Island of Elba, Italy. September. We’re at the top of a gently rolling hill, overlooking fields of olive trees, endless rows of grapevines ready for harvest, distant umbrella pine trees that mark the horizon, and just a bright strip at the right of the glimmering bay of Portoferraio, the principal city.
I spent the entire month living in a small rented room on that hill, with an enormous flagstone balcony where I could get out and sunbathe, filling in those long hours before and after my daily voice lessons. A lesson a day for one month. No television, no radio, but the daily newspaper. It was only a relatively short walk across an ancient field of olive trees and by the ruins of a Medieval stone chapel to my voice teacher’s summer home, which was at the top of a neighboring hill.
My room had no kitchen that I can recall, so I learned to make do with a the barest essentials: first, a borrowed moka coffeemaker and a used camping gas burner, hooked up to a bright blue can of fuel. By trial and error I gradually learned to listen to the various degrees of preparation of the dark, aromatic coffee in that noisy but very reliable Italian system. It also had the charm of being previously owned, and the strong coffee was delicious, taken without sugar, thanks very much. Soon, I also managed to find a perfect demitasse cup to drink from, handmade by a local artisan.
Opening my little door to the terrace, I could slowly savor the tiny portion of coffee (memories of Sophia Loren in ‘Una giornata particolare’) outside in the already warm morning sunlight, the hot pavement a shock to my bare feet since I was usually dressed only in my turquoise Speedos, intended to artfully compliment my deep tan – the deepest and best suntan I’ve ever had. No one could see me, and for a while at least, the solitude was pure joy. I could lounge in the late afternoon under enchanting vines of wisteria and white grapes, accompanied in the still Italian air only by the distant sound of bees and other insects at work.
Giving nuance to the solitude, gradually there was also a feeling of loneliness. There was much self-doubt, which happens when you’re 28, single, when you’ve left your comfortable life as a grad student in Boston, when you’ve left behind a collection of beloved friends, and are about to plunge into the unknown. If I thought I would set out after this chapter to live and work in New York, I still had no idea how to put that into place. But I did have a dream, my scores, and about three 33rpm records with me.
I had spent the preceding six weeks in Graz, Austria, in a student program designed to enhance the career of future opera singers in German-speaking countries, called AIMS. That’s where I met Patricia Brinton, my new teacher. She lived in Paris, but kept a residence on the island, and even had a marvelous grand piano in her large, open-windowed sitting room there. Culturally appropriated Italian glamour. We got along well, and I relied upon her advice a great deal at the time. After AIMS, she had suggested that we work for one more month on a couple of my weak points.
I mentioned self-doubt. One night there, I decided to make a pencil sketch of myself, using the bathroom mirror. It was extremely realistic, and showed some revealing lines of care, and some sincere introspection, depicting my current state of mind. It was in a spiral pad I kept for many years, and it was an excellent drawing. I wish I had it now, but hastily threw it out during a move some twenty-five years ago, thinking it was “not flattering.” I also kept a daily journal. Both gone.
So there are no photos from that year, and there was no Facebook. So many memories that have naturally distilled by now, but their mysterious vapor does comes back at various moments. Summer remembrances of so many new acquaintances, chance meetings, zany rides on the back of a scooter in the wildly turning roads that zigzag that rustic but idyllic Italian island. Many of these are for me pleasant and wonderful, for example every time that by chance I come across a little moka coffee maker…
I recall the kindly old lady from Holland, a tourist who knew the Island well. She cared very much about my morning allergy attacks, and suggested that I close the Venetian blinds in the afternoon and only open them in the morning, the Italian method. That was new to me, the foreigner who opens wide to let in the maximum of sun all afternoon. It helped. Too bad Zyrtec was not on the market then. She loved to hear me practice.
Another unforgettable character was the lady who rented me that apartment, a dramatic soprano named Gisela. I wish I knew her last name, or where she sang in Germany during the opera season. She was a longtime friend of Pat’s. She was trying out a role that summer, and rehearsing with a recorded accompaniment of “Dich, teure Halle.” She insisted I give my opinion, so one afternoon she set herself up under her open doorsill: imagine if you please Mona Lisa standing in your doorway. With the brilliant Tuscany-like panorama behind her, she sang away, enthusiastic, with total abandon, with generosity, the exact character for this aria. She went through the scene many times, improving details with each attempt, and I’ll always cherish this gift as the first occasion I ever heard this joyous music by Wagner, and as if it were a premonition, I was to sing myself in ‘Tannhäuser,’ many years later.
I’ve written before about the visits to Elba that summer of the Herald Tribune music critic Henry Pleasants and his wife Virginia. The couple would spend a week or two there every year on vacation from London. I recall many evenings together at Pat’s house on the hill, chatting outdoors in the early evening over a glass of local white wine, with that spectacular view of the bay in the distance. We’d met at AIMS, and Henry truly enjoyed meeting young singers, and he gradually became a friend, so that summer I sang several times for him and always cherished his advice.
I can’t end this without mentioning the crucial phone call to Miss Lee Chella in Boston. Adelina Chella was a fun-loving person and businesswoman who sang in the choir I directed, and had already been helping me to finance my summer abroad. Overseas calls were not just rare in those days, but were expensive, too. Well, Pat set me up in her kitchen on the island for an important 15-minute call, during which I pitched the idea to Lee that she possibly support me for a few more months in Paris, if I were to return there with Pat, and to study three times a week. It was decided that day that Lee would put out another $500 a month for six months, and that’s how I came here.
Most of my allowance went for those lessons, so a cheap room was found for me on the Rue des Jeûneurs, in the 2nd arrondissement, where in fact just today I happened to be walking around. In the 42 years since then, the neighborhood has gentrified, to say the least, and become quite the place to be. Then, it was rather seedy but very central, and I was just happy to find an abandoned mattress on the street, and set up house with my handful of music scores, my little stack of vocal records, and mostly a lot of hope.
Soon, after my rich experiences in Austria working again with Eleanor Steber, and a glorious month in Italy, would come the first autumn chills of October, and I still didn’t even have a winter coat to protect me from the penetrating damp of Paris, just around the corner.
Nor did I quite realize of course that I would end up staying, and living here – since 1978; that I would start meeting the right people and getting work; that I would change teachers; and that Fate would continue to give me one incredible opportunity to sing after another.
Not to mention learning many more ways of brewing excellent coffee along the way.
Just lucky, I guess.
Addendum, Mike has just informed me of the correct usage in English: it’s a moka pot, not mocha as I had written.