Daddy Baritone
As the baritone sang, I scanned my students’ faces, seeking confirmation that his artistry—the mighty vulnerability of his tone, the canary light he casts into his own darkness—was affecting them in the same way it had always moved me. I wanted this moment, this music, this song to speak to their hearts, where the purest forms of truth reside. I wanted them to get out of their heads, to forget facts and figures, dates and definitions. I wanted vibration to be the only knowledge. I wanted them to hear what it sounds like for a man in power to be just, for a father to cradle the whole world in the arms of loving song. I had grown particularly fond of some of them. Chloé, an aspiring vocalist, warm-voiced but pitifully soft-spoken; trumpeter Gabby, bold and easy on the surface, less assured underneath; Truman, a visionary without direction; Max, cynical rock-and-roll guitarist, out of his element in this course on the earnest music of the nineteenth century, but going along for the ride. We were, all of us, poised for transformation, the students in their youthful promise, the professor in his tumultuous middle-age.
Outside the classroom window, harsh, late-winter gusts blew the long, thinly spiraling seed pods of a giant northern catalpa tree into sharp-angled alignment with its sturdy branches. Inside, our ears were basking in the warmth of a human voice enveloped by the lush resonance of an orchestra. The baritone was Piero Cappuccilli, one of the supreme interpreters of Giuseppe Verdi’s music. The opera, one of many by Verdi with a baritone title role, was Simon Boccanegra, the story (based on real historical events) of a big-hearted man who, lured into a position of power through the ambitions of more brutal men, becomes the victim of a political assassination. For more than a decade, La traviata had served as my Verdi example in this course. Painted in primary colors, impeccably crafted, that iconic opera is musically and emotionally accessible, unfailing in its rewards to novice listeners. But my heart was telling me that I needed something new, the jolt of a fresh perspective. Strong as we may stand, there is never much sense in resisting the winds of change.
Set in Genoa, on Italy’s northwestern coast, Simon Boccanegra evokes from its opening notes the tints and moods of the sea and the air above it. Everything is rippling waves, shimmering light, skies of constantly morphing shades. But inside the walls of the ducal palace, political intrigue darkens the hue. In the riveting Council Chamber scene that concludes the first act, Boccanegra—the Doge, Genoa’s political leader—calls for the plebeians and patricians to put an end to their ferocious history of violence: “Plebe! Patrici! Popolo dalla feroce storia!” In the culminating line of this speech, which launches a stirring ensemble number in which the assembled citizens react variously to the Doge’s entreaties, Simon changes tactics, from stern admonition to heartfelt pleading. The reluctant head of state now shows his true colors: “E vo gridando pace, e vo gridando amor”-–“I cry for peace, I cry for love.” Can’t we all just get along, survive together? This was the passage I needed my students to hear.
While the nurturing appeal (a quotation from the fourteenth-century Italian humanist Petrarch, the real Boccanegra contemporary) calms the political uprising in this moment, Simon’s softness is ultimately his undoing. His first line in the opera, as he greeted his friend, Paolo Albioni, had been “Un amplesso!” The words literally mean “An embrace,” but when the opera is staged, they convey something more like “Get over here and give me a hug!” By the opera’s end, the same Paolo has murdered the Doge with poison. Neither the affectionate gesture nor the early-morning waves that caress the city’s shore in the opera’s Prelude can quell the violent urges of men. Along with encountering Cappuccilli’s miraculous talent, here was the broader lesson I wanted my students to learn. Patriarchy harms everyone, even the patriarchs.
I fell in love with Simon Boccanegra because of a particular recording. It is my ultimate desert-island disc, made live at Milan’s La Scala opera house in the mid-1970s, a golden age for Verdi singing. Supported by a sensitive reading of the score by conductor Claudio Abbado, the performances are without exception extraordinary: José Carreras’s seductive tenor forever on the verge of breaking with emotion; Mirella Freni’s assured soprano a radiant and noble counterpart; Nicolai Ghiaurov imposing and fierce in the bass role of Jacopo Fiesco, elder statesman of a noble family opposed to Boccanegra’s rule; versatile bass-baritone José Van Dam expertly conveying a sense of false integrity as the traitorous Paolo. But none of these stars shines as intensely as Cappuccilli in the title role. In every part of his baritone voice, but especially at the top, where Verdi asks the most of him, Simon’s humanity is etched in exquisite detail.
In the Council Chamber scene, for instance, on the accented second syllable (“dan”) of the word “gridando,” my students heard Cappuccilli execute a hair-raising crescendo on a single, long-held note. But there is so much more going on than a mere rise in volume. It requires immense breath control and vocal technique simply to sustain the elongated syllable on a note sitting high in the baritone’s range, let alone to change the nature of the sound, to nurture it, keep it alive, moving, vital, so that after several seconds the vowel is completely different from the one with which the note began. Listen to any other baritone singing this role, even such celebrated interpreters as Tito Gobbi and Leonard Warren, and you will hear nothing like this tonal metamorphosis. Cappuccilli’s cry—shattering, all-encompassing, all-revealing—is the sound of a soft man’s vulnerability in a crushing world. Standing inside of this sound, I process the complexities and contradictions of what it is to be a man. My own world, like Simon’s, would soon be upended. His cry was my instruction manual. The only permanence, it told me, is change.
Looking around the classroom, I saw what I had been hoping for: a glint of moisture in Chloé’s eyes, Gabby’s mouth slightly agape, Truman’s eyebrows raised, Max elevated by an uncharacteristically straightened spine. As always with opera, it was not the words that elicited these responses. For they are merely words, available to anyone to use as sincerely or insincerely as they please. Instead, the force that invaded us was the sound of the singing voice. I wanted them, in this sound, to imagine a world in which men raised their voices for good, where peace and love were valued above all else, where engagement with art made a difference. I do not believe I was asking too much.
While I waited for Cappuccilli’s cry, I had stolen a glance at the catalpa. When its leaves came, they would be broad, bright green, oversized hearts. The magnificent canopy, bursting with irregular curves, would resemble a formation of puffy clouds, a group of moss-covered boulders, a strange, shaggy beast. When I walk past it in full bloom, the tree always stops me in my tracks. I cannot resist its shape. Letting my eyes move across its forms, my body sways, precariously balanced, on the sidewalk. Cappuccilli’s oceanic vocal surge elicits the same sensation, bringing to mind the description of empathy by the Victorian-era writer Vernon Lee (pen name of Violet Paget), who suggested that when we use such phrases as “the mountain rises” or “the ceramic vase swells,” we are projecting onto stationary objects a movement that occurs within our own bodies. The mountain does not rise; the vase does not swell; the tree does not resonate. Rather, our eyes circle, lift, and dive to meet these forms, our necks stretch, our limbs elongate, our chests and our ears expand. Responding to the operatic voice, something within me changes. I breathe, I bloom. For a moment, I believe.
Riding the wave of their admiration, rekindling my own, I shouted above the recording, “Imagine your own political leaders crying out like this for peace and love! Imagine believing them! Imagine being inspired by them!” Hope was in the air. Cappuccilli was feeding it to us. It tasted of decency. It suggested that it was possible for men to embrace and embody new truths. Barack Obama was the President of the United States of America. The long age of brother against brother was coming to an end. America would turn a corner. Chloé would come into her voice. Gabby would conquer her demons. Truman’s path would open wide before him. Max would put it all together, recognize that no knowledge is superfluous. I would learn to trust men, to accept them, to love them. I would become a more loving man myself. None of us saw on the horizon Donald Trump and all of the rejuvenated hatred that he and his wicked political allies inflicted upon our nation. Our view was obscured by hope.
I wanted them, in this sound, to imagine a world in which men raised their voices for good, where peace and love were valued above all else, where engagement with art made a difference. I do not believe I was asking too much.
Six weeks later, on the night before the semester’s last day of class, my mother died, without warning, in her sleep. I had been out late, getting into bed around the same time she was dying in hers. Truman and Max had invited me to their band’s show, the last of the year before summer break’s separation. I stood alone at a high-top, dive-bar table, happy to be witness to their creative merry-making. I had thought of my mother briefly as I ordered a scotch at the bar; it was her go-to drink, and I had adopted it as my own. I’d spoken to her briefly a few days before, shared the news that I had been promoted to Full Professor, the last of my professional hurdles. Instead of delight, I heard suppressed sobs. “Mom,” I laughed, “you should be happy!” Later, when she was gone, I understood what the cries meant. I no longer needed her. If only I’d had the charity to tell her how much I did.
The call from my brother-in-law came just as I was beginning to dream. Disoriented, devastated, I left town with Jessie and the kids in early-morning darkness to join my father and siblings hundreds of miles away. I cancelled the last day of class and returned a few days later only to administer the final exam. Afterward, the students invited me into a group hug, sixteen bodies in a tight circle, a semester’s-end amplesso. I was moved by this acknowledgement of sympathy, but I was also in shock, and it would linger. For months afterward, stretching to more than half a year, I experienced debilitating grief. I had lost my strongest advocate, the person who had loved me more unconditionally than anyone ever would. In the empty air around me, I would hear my mother’s sing-song voice, light and airy, incongruous with her body, which had grown heavy with age. From Polish children’s songs to popular American standards, her singing, and even more her telltale humming, was the antidote to my father’s strident bass, a voice that could never hold a tune. In our first, brief exchange after my mother’s death, my father had choked out the words, “You were her hero.” He knew that she had also been mine, and that he had not. Admitting it felt tragic, an imbalance of nature.
Where does a love for opera come from, and why does mine maintain such a hold on me? I grew up in a milieu of raised voices. Men shouted at the television, at each other, at women. We were a family of fighters, my father the instigator, myself and my brothers the ones easily incited to riot, my mother and sisters the frequent, but not sole, victims. At times, it skirted the borders of violence—hands clenched, objects hurled, threatening gestures made. Worrying that neighbors could hear our raging arguments through the open windows, I would run around the house, making a performance of it, slamming them shut. “I hate this family! I hate you!” One time, as a teenager, seeing that my father, chasing me, was preparing his thick hands to strike me, I grabbed his hand and, interlocking my slimmer fingers with his, snapped it back, spraining one of his fingers. Earlier, in my youth, my father had taken his belt, “the strap,” to my backside because I called my female cousins “lesbians” when they locked me out of the room and would not let me play with them. “Where did you learn that disgusting word?” he bellowed. “At school,” I cried in helpless innocence. “About the nuns.” Even at home, the Church, my father’s and my mother’s refuge but my scourge, could get at me. The stridently anti-clerical Verdi, hero of Catholic Italy, scorned it, too.
But like many fighters, we were also lovers, none more so than my mother. We regarded the family bond as sacred. And despite the conflicts, we were also a family to be drawn to, admired, even envied. Passion is a double-edged sword. I’ve carried this with me into my adulthood, my fatherhood and husbandhood, both marked by their shares of easy affection and impassioned conflict. Perhaps this is why opera pulls me in, why Verdi is my magnetic north, why I love his baritones the most. Their voices transform raging masculinity into art. Call it sublimation, if you must. Call it escape. I call it survival.
Like many of Verdi’s operas, Simon Boccanegra features an extended baritone-soprano duet. In theirs, one of those musical numbers I will never get enough of, Simon and Amelia Grimaldi, a young noblewoman of Genoa, discover that they are father and daughter. Amelia reveals that she was orphaned, cared for in infancy in Pisa by an old woman named Giovanna, and eventually adopted by the Grimaldi family and brought to Genoa. Simon, when he had been a sailor, had had a child with a Genoese noblewoman, Maria Fiesco, but her family disapproved of the match and they were forced to abandon the infant girl, send her away to Pisa. Simon had visited the baby occasionally, but he had lost track of her after Giovanna died.
The truth of their relationship is gradually revealed across several contrasting musical sections, with plain-speaking banter initiating the conversation, followed by more probing dialogue gaining in intensity, then a moment of dramatic stasis in which each character wonders separately, in introspective lyricism, what these strange facts might add up to. When Simon finally shows Amelia a locket holding a portrait of his beloved Maria, she recognizes her mother from an identical locket of her own, and the duet enters its final, climactic phase. Here, rapturously calling one another “figlia” and “padre” for the first time, they sing identical melodic phrases. It is a standard operatic device to convey agreement, coming together, love. Left alone on stage at the duet’s conclusion, Simon sings one final, tender “figlia” over a heartfelt falling-octave figure. Music-box harps twinkle nostalgically as he projects himself into a future colored anew by a lost daughter’s love. The bold interval of the octave, a wide-armed musical amplesso, conveys his determination to make the most of their time together from this moment forward. The harps mark his remorse over the years they have lost.
When I had children, the depth and quality of love I felt for them was a revelation. I had known a son’s love for his mother, but I had never imagined the equation in reverse. In my college years, I would proclaim that I hated babies and never wanted children. But the truth was, when a friend gave birth to a child in our senior year, I was among the first to volunteer three mornings a week to care for the infant while she was in class. I would bounce the happy boy on my knee, take him for walks, make cooing noises while showing him off to friends. I had the instinct then, without recognizing it, as was true of so many aspects of my identity. As soon as I married, I was eager to start a family. My biological clock ticked more insistently than my wife’s. By the time the youngest of our three children came along, my bond with them was stronger than the one I had with her. Soon enough, they would be caught in the crossfires of our conflict.
For years, the youngest would frequently call me “mommy.” Then she would correct herself: “Mommy? No. Daddy?!” I started referring to myself as “mommy-no-daddy.” I liked the different meanings one could pull from this impossible arrangement of words. It was like a little air bubble of my true self rising to the surface. I was, in this locution, not your typical man. I found it agreeable to think of myself as a mother. A mother-man. A father, like Simon, who mothers. The baritone voice, too, occupies an in-between space, caught between bass and tenor, wanting all the glory of high notes as well as the gravity of the low. Today, several years into a relationship with a boyfriend, still married to their mother, who has a boyfriend of her own, my children call me, more simply and with mischievous good humor, “girl.”
Twenty years before my mother died, I left my family home and my lifelong comfort zone of the east coast with no plan to return. I would be a thousand miles away, earning a PhD for who knew how many years. Projecting my mama’s-boy heart into the future, I began to mourn already the loss of my mother. The morning I headed out, I said my goodbyes and pulled out of the driveway only to find myself turning in the wrong direction at the first stop sign and taking myself to the nursing home where she worked. She had left very early that morning, and we had had only the briefest of sleepy goodbyes. The short scene had not been enough. I required a multi-stage duet.
At the reception desk, I asked what floor my mother was working on that day, took the elevator up, and snuck quietly around the floor, peeking at the various nurses’ stations to determine her location. She saw me before I saw her; when I did, her eyes conveyed all the understanding I needed. I burst into tears, a man in my mid-twenties, and let her hold me in her arms. Figlio! Madre! One of my mother’s colleagues approached us, concerned that I had shown up to report some family tragedy. I had to pretend to laugh. “Everything’s fine,” I said with a weak smile. “I’m just moving far away.” There was no point in lying. Our bond was too strong, the separation too painful. After she died, my older sister told me that our mother had commented many times on how meaningful my visit to her that morning had been. As a father, I’ve aspired to be loved so much, even as I know what pain that love must also carry.
My mother was visiting family in Chicago when she died, attending her older sister’s memorial service. Hers was a death at a funeral. She passed in her sleep, after a night spent in the loving glow of family. We all spoke about how appropriate it was that she, a devoted caregiver to the elderly, was not made to suffer. My sister reported that as they went slowly up the long staircase at the end of the night, my mother said to her “I can hear my sisters calling to me. It’s my turn.” Perhaps she had been feeling the chest pain already and was pushing through it, or perhaps she was speaking generally, having no idea what was coming within a few hours. My sister remembers asking her “Are you afraid of death?” and my mother responding with an assured “No!”
After the call, I rode the six dreadful hours in the back of our minivan, collapsing into my older sister’s arms as soon as I spilled out of the side-panel door, and spent the next two days grieving with my siblings, cousins, and father. One cousin, a doctor, had pulled some strings to keep my mother’s body in the house, in the bed where she had died, long enough for us to get there. When we arrived, they led us up those same stairs she had climbed the night before, down the horrible hallway and into the room, with its smell of death, familiar to my mother, but not at all to me. She appeared to be at peace. My sisters got into the bed, lay by her side, holding her hands, stroking her face. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She looked still alive. Instead, like Simon, who in the opera’s Prologue comes unexpectedly upon the dead body of his beloved Maria, I could only cry out in agonized shock. We stood in a circle at the foot of the bed, weeping. “I was drinking scotch at the moment she died,” I blurted out, not knowing if it was a non-sequitur or the most profound thing I could say in this hellish moment. Leaning towards the bed, I barely brushed my fingers against the tips of her own. Two bodies I didn’t know what to do with.
It was awful having to leave after only a short time together, but we had jobs and school to get back to. My mother’s funeral service would be a month later, in our home town in Pennsylvania. My sisters and father would bring the ashes back with them in the car, someone else now sitting in the seat she had occupied on the drive out mere days before. About an hour into our drive back to Minnesota, we stopped at a highway rest area. Jessie and the kids went inside to use the restrooms while I waited outside, leaning against the car in the busy parking lot, breathing in the fresh April breeze, feeling the tepid sun on my face. Looking across to the next row, I saw an older woman, around my mother’s age, doing the same. She turned, and her eyes locked onto mine. Then, unprovoked by anything I had said or done, she called out to me across the parked cars, “You look just like my son!”
I froze, offering nothing in response. Who talks to strangers in rest area parking lots? Then I realized that my gregarious mother and father would have. One of their mottos, which they shared with their children in a delightful reversal of modern American conventional wisdom, was “Always talk to strangers.” Without another word, the woman gave me a nod and got into her car. When Jessie and the kids returned, I slipped into the passenger seat, stunned into awe by this uncanny voice, which I was, and remain, certain had been raised from the dead. A cry pushing through the firmament on behalf of peace and love. I love you. Everything’s going to be OK.
Opera has little room for mothers, at least not living ones. In nineteenth-century opera especially, mothers are either dead or unmentioned, and the women who do appear on stage—prostitutes, ingénues, devout opera singers—soon meet their end. This is another reason why Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra fascinates. For here is an opera that leaves its prima donna standing at the end. Perhaps Amelia has to live because she is alone as a woman, without even a single mezzo-soprano in the cast to serve as her maid, her sister, her rival. We can’t have a world without women entirely. Who would misogynists turn their hatred towards? In surviving, Amelia functions as witness to the death of her father, the Doge, the baritone who, in his death, occupies the position of opera’s ubiquitous dead woman. As a rare baritone good guy, Simon will never last in a bad guys’ world.
Simon Boccanegra begins in the same way as many of Verdi’s operas, and those of his predecessors, with an extended scene for men alone. Indeed, the opera’s thirty-minute Prologue is the longest stretch in all of Verdi composed for male voices only. Here, the men set a familiar, aggressive tone. But the second and third acts take place in a world of muted sounds. The opera’s tinta shifts; some crucial light has gone out. As it becomes clear that the operatic convention of the dead woman is going to be turned on its head, the atmosphere closes in on itself. The patriarchal imagination ruminates, and in the rooms of the ducal palace, a hint of decay pervades the air.
Simon collapses center stage. In the last of the opera’s many fine ensemble numbers, he is surrounded by his soprano-daughter Amelia, her tenor-lover Adorno, and the bass Fiesco, head of the rival family. Fiesco announces the Doge’s death to the citizens of Genoa, the offstage chorus, who respond, “Grant him peace.” But this nod to political history cannot mask the fact that Simon Boccanegra is, like all of Verdi’s works from his prime in the 1850s, a family drama, a parent-child love story. And so it is Amelia’s final word that remains in our hearts: a despairing “Padre!” the word’s two syllables set dramatically across a falling octave. The musical motive attaches itself to our hearts because we’ve heard it before, when Simon exclaimed “figlia” at the end of their earlier duet. Now, with his “daughter” replaced by her “father,” the downward direction of the octave takes on a new significance. It closes a door forever. From now on, Simon will speak to her only from the realm of the dead.
On a winter evening several years after my mother’s death, my oldest daughter walks into the house she grew up in. She lives close by, in her first post-college apartment, but she remains attached to the family home, its gardens and stained glass, its long back yard and cozy third floor, where we watch movies. A talented artist, she once made a sketch of its classic Midwestern four-square floor plan and had it tattooed on her leg. One Father’s Day, she printed a sketch of its facade on t-shirts for me and the whole family, the long line of white dental molding along the top of the front porch like a beaming smile. Shutting the front door against the bitter air, she smiles at me in the kitchen and says, “This is the music I think of as the sound of walking into my house.” I am listening, as I cook, to Simon Boccanegra. She doesn’t know what opera it is, exactly, but she guesses correctly that it’s Verdi, and she can hum along with long stretches of it, as she does for the next hour as it plays while we visit. As can everyone who has lived within these opera-soaked walls.
Laughing, I suggest that Simon Boccanegra must be one of my favorites because it has a daddy-baritone death scene. She nods knowingly, understanding my sentimental streak, knowing that opera has helped me to make sense of life, of death, of love. She remembers how terribly I mourned my mother’s death, how I struggled with loving my father, failed sometimes as a husband, foolishly resisted knowing and loving myself. She is aware that I worry about time passing, about her and her siblings getting older, my own inevitable death. Seeing me through these icy layers, she steps into the kitchen and draws me into an amplesso, and I lean into the thaw. After I’m gone, will she keep listening, carry her father’s music into her own future? Her pain sublimated into sound. A falling octave. The curves of a tree in bloom. The map of a family home. Survival.