SHADOW AND LIGHT are the children who bring us to our knees. Even so, prayers can be short. There are times when what is called for is a song. We rise. With our fingers curled and our hands gripped together, we reach for the soprano’s highest notes. The register we achieve can shatter glass. Often moving and more often absurd, this is not theater, but opera.
My Mother’s Journals are an opera.
Age has given me arias. Opera is perspective, singing points of view. It amuses me. Opera in the absurd is excessive, chaotic with gilded clichés, where nothing is out of bounds. No gesture is too large, no circumstance too small to be sung over. Hysteria is within the human range of appropriate response. I am amused by opera because it makes my life seem calm by comparison. And opera is all about comparison.
The characters who inhabit opera love who is forbidden, murder who is good, and forgive who has wronged them. They transgress. They transmit their motives through plot and performance. And we are caught in the intricate web of a story spun through the magic of music married to libretto.
And when opera succeeds in reaching its highest calling, which is to move us, I know of no art form that can seize my heart so forcefully. On a winter afternoon in Hanover, New Hampshire, I sat with strangers in a full house watching Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss’s comic opera of errors. I found myself sobbing as the beautiful, aging Marschallin mused on the passage of time to her young lover, Octavian. I was not alone. Kleenexes were being passed discreetly.
“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum. “You haven’t acted on your desires. You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You’ve silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
What other domain in the arts could authenticate and master a word like falsetto? “The place where voice goes wrong…a useful pleasure with a bad reputation…the illusion of truth,” Koestenbaum says. He admires it as a “vocal masquerade.”
My Mother’s Journals are a falsetto, a vocal masquerade.
Opera is an artifice.
My Mother’s Journals are an artifice.
Opera demands we pay attention to the spectacle before us, “a grand arena of irreconcilables: music and text, grandeur and tackiness, the aerial and the carnal, the aural and the visible, the modish and the outdated, the living and the dead,” Tony Kushner says. “Opera ought to have died out…”
But it hasn’t.
My father accompanied me to Zurich, where we saw Richard Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten, known as “the Mount Everest of operas.” He said, “I can endure anything for four hours if it has a halftime.” There were two intermissions between the three acts.
The Woman Without a Shadow is a fairy tale, a singing archetype, written by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Consider it variations of a woman’s voice.
Here is the story. There are two women: one without a shadow, who lives in the Realm of the Spirits; and one with a shadow, who lives in the Realm of Humans. One is an empress married to an emperor; the other, a wife married to a man who dyes cloth.
The Empress has conceived no child and casts no shadow. If she cannot find a shadow within three days, her husband will be turned to stone. Red Falcon, the same falcon who struck her down when she was a gazelle (she was capable of shape-shifting in the forest), delivers this curse to the Empress while the Emperor is hunting. Captured by her beauty and fearful he will lose her, the Emperor keeps her in a locked cage.
The Empress is served by a Nurse, and together they descend to Earth to find her a shadow. Disguised as humble servants, they visit the Dyer’s Wife, who is unhappy with her husband, bored and unsatisfied by his sexual advances, which are never for pleasure but only for the hope of progeny. The Nurse seduces the Dyer’s Wife into a bargain: if she will renounce her future of motherhood and give up her shadow, she will be promised a life of riches and erotic adventures.
On the second day, the Nurse reappears to the Dyer’s Wife, with the Empress as witness. She conjures up visions of wealth and a ghostly lover in exchange for the wife’s shadow. The Dyer’s Wife embraces the lustful apparition, believing this is her path to prosperity and happiness. She is tired of her dull husband and pale life.
Meanwhile, the Emperor follows the Red Falcon into the forest, leading him to the pavilion where his wife and the Nurse are staying. He spies on them. The Emperor can smell the scent of humans on the Empress. Intermingling of gods and humans is forbidden. He becomes enraged and wants to kill her, but he cannot bring himself to harm the woman he loves.
Back on Earth, the Nurse gives the Dyer a sleeping potion. While he is asleep, she makes her final plea and last glittering offer of a life of pleasure to the Dyer’s Wife in exchange for her shadow. Time is running out for the Empress.
Conflicted by her choice, the Dyer’s Wife refuses. Guilt ridden by her fantasies, she wakes the Dyer to tell him what she almost traded away for a life of lust and luxury. Moved by his wife’s admission, the Dyer wishes to make love to her, but her disgust returns as she realizes that her husband still desires her only for future children.
That night in the forest pavilion, the Empress is tortured by her own guilt about the goodness of the Dyer and the Dyer’s Wife, about forcing them into this place of confusion and contempt. She has grown fond of the human couple as she sees their struggle. She cannot take the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow. She accepts that her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone.
On the third day, the Dyer’s Wife lies to her husband and tells him she has committed adultery. She denounces her future children, the very thing she knows he desires most, and tells the Dyer that she has sold her shadow for pleasure.
The Nurse has succeeded. The Empress will have her shadow and the Emperor will be saved. But the Empress watches the drama. She sees their suffering. The Dyer has reached his limit and flies into a violent rage, attempting to kill his wife. The Empress throws herself between them, desperate to save them from each other, heartsick over the conflict she has created. She does not want a shadow stained with blood. The Dyer’s Wife, who has never seen this kind of passion flare from her husband, softens her heart. She tells him that she lied, that she only wanted to see if he cared. She did not commit adultery or sell her shadow. Just as the couple goes to embrace, the Realm of the Spirits and the Realm of the Humans collides. The Dyer’s house explodes and is swallowed up by the earth.
In the final scene of the opera, the Dyer and the Dyer’s Wife walk aimlessly in the Realm of the Spirits, unable to find each other. They are lost, plagued by love and remorse. The Empress and the Nurse arrive at the entrance of the temple, plagued with their own guilt and terror. They stand at the confluence of the Water of Life and the Threshold of Death. The Nurse fears that the Empress’s father, the King, will unleash his wrath upon her for exposing the Empress to the world of humanity. Simultaneously, the Empress feels the imminence of the curse about to turn the Emperor into stone. Her desire for a shadow has now endangered the fate of the human couple and of her husband. She severs her ties with the Nurse and pledges herself to the human race. She has been transformed by the couple’s suffering and is willing to forfeit her own life for theirs, meaningful and true. On Earth, she witnessed how even with pain, the freedom to love and live exists. In the Realm of the Spirits, she was imprisoned by the Emperor, who viewed her as his possession. Their extravagant life offered no freedom.
Just as the Nurse is banished to the Underworld by the Red Falcon for her duplicity and deception, the Empress is invited to drink from the fountain of the Water of Life by one of the Spirit Messengers. When she does, she is told that the shadow of the Dyer’s Wife will be hers and the Emperor will not turn to stone.
The Spirit Messenger hands her a gold chalice filled with the alchemical waters and urges the Empress to drink deeply. Above the sound of bubbling waters she hears the distress cries of the lost couple searching for each other. In a moment of sharp anguish and clarity, the Empress cries out, “I will not!”
The fountain vanishes, and instantaneously a shadow is cast behind the Empress.
The Red Falcon appears, and the curse is lifted. The Emperor is released from the bondage of stone. He experiences the force of his wife and sees her for the first time as an individual apart from himself. She has passed the trials imposed on her. In following her own heart and proclaiming the power of her own voice, the Empress finds her shadow and frees her husband from bondage.
The Empress’s selfless act of resistance, her refusal to drink water tainted with the blood of pain and corruption, has transformed her into an authentic human being. Courage gives birth to her shadow. Through her shadow, she has found her voice. With her voice, she calls forth integrity. The Dyer and the Dyer’s Wife are reunited. The voices of their unborn children rejoice. Harmony is restored.
The Empress and Emperor, the Dyer and the Dyer’s Wife celebrate the convergence of darkness and light. Peace is proclaimed. Jubilation abounds. Their shadows cast together create the Bridge of Unity.
My father was rapt. We both were. For more than three hours we were carried into this fairy tale. I saw myself in each of the characters: the controller and the controlled; the privileged and the oppressed; the woman without the shadow and the woman who didn’t honor the shadow she had. Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see.
Something began to resolve itself in me.
Each time the Red Falcon appeared, the fluttering of wings was expressed through the flute. Peter and the Wolf prepared me for this journey. As musical phrases reappeared, they became cairns to follow, leading us along the path of the story. The repetition of notes became a comfort, a place where I could stand in this invented world. A motif, discordant at first, eventually turned into a melody.
Strauss’s musical gestures were transformed into tonal poems, created and held in the long, sustaining notes of the characters’ arias and duets. Words dissipated into pure feeling. My spirit was soaring.
Would you believe me if I told you when I opened my mouth a bird flew out?
My father was equally moved. During one of the intermissions he told me in a rare moment that because of the power of Mother’s presence, he rarely spoke. No need. She covered for him. It was not until after her death that he really began to engage socially.
“People tell me I’ve become much more gregarious since Diane died,” he said. “I am more involved with our friends now.” He paused. “I’ve learned a lot from living alone. When I hear that someone has lost a spouse or child, the next day I just knock on their door. It doesn’t matter what I say. What matters is I am there.”
My father is more involved in our lives, as well. His voice is increasingly tender, a tone we rarely knew as children except through his actions. The same was true of our grandfather Jack. We really did not know him until after Mimi died.
Together, my father and I not only listened to the arc of Strauss’s heartbreaking and triumphant music, but we felt the full register of the human condition within ourselves. I wished I had held his hand, but I didn’t dare. The operatic voices painted with great intensity and conviction became the colors of passion and pain within Hofmannsthal’s ambitious libretto.
As the opera ended, we stood up in the loges of the opera house side by side, applauding wildly as the curtain closed.
My Mother’s Journals are an applause of white gloves, an encore each time one is opened.
Myths can make a reality more intelligible.
—Jenny Holzer
My Mother’s Journals are a myth.