I remember being in Chicago back in the day, listening to an FM rock station. After a bevy of alternative rock, the DJ suddenly put on the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands. I'll never forget that moment. We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that? Here was music making its own case. It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked. And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock. The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than. It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day. And maybe that's the way great music should be heard. Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approa...
So, I’m a novelist. I write sci-fi. (Terra Firma is out now, by the way… just sayin’. 😂)
I know nothing about music except that I sure like to buy it, consume it and devour it.
Otherwise, I’m the opposite of Shaw in his famous—some would argue infamous—days as a music critic. Shaw joked that when people approached him and handed him a score, he would hold it upside down and pretend to study it. That’s Shaw being Shaw, of course, the wit always lurking beneath one of the greatest critical minds ever.
Me, on the other hand?
I would hold the score upside down actually thinking that was the way it was supposed to be read.
And I can assure you, no wit would be intended.
Like Sergeant Schultz: “I know nothing! Nothing!”
When it comes to the technicalities of music, that’s pretty much me. And I’m too lazy to learn.
Sad, I know, but there’s no help for it.
Fortunately, music strikes me as perfectly capable of making its own way in the world, even into hungry, know-nothing ears such as those belonging to yours truly.
You’ll recommend a piece of classical music to someone, for example, and occasionally get the response:
“I didn’t study that in school.”
As though the music itself remains trapped somewhere behind the fossilized world of lectures, textbooks and final exams.
But music has its own calling card.
That argument even finds its way into Terra Firma, amid all the horrors. Critics are needed and greatly appreciated—especially The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, whose history of modern classical music, The Rest Is Noise, is nothing short of fabulous—but at the end of the day, the music eventually has to confront you.
YouTube.
Spotify.
Apple Music.
iTunes.
Not to mention all those vinyl and CD shops still afoot.
Someone can point you toward the door. Someone can tell you why you ought to walk through it.
But eventually you have to listen.
And vote:
Yay or nay.
A recommendation, after all, is just that.
Which brings me to Piotr Beczala.
Beczala is my favorite lyric tenor because he reminds me of such old masters as Nicolai Gedda and Jussi Björling—two lyric tenors who possessed both heft and that extraordinary moonbeam sheen to their voices, a quality that, in the upper reaches, reaches for and finds the stars.
I hear something of that in Beczala.
His way around the repertoire is always smooth and elegant, and even in a monster work like Wagner’s Lohengrin, he finds his way into the heart of the character not through the muscular shouts we sometimes associate with heroic Wagnerian singing, but as a hero of genuine mystery and spiritual glow.
And Beczala’s Lohengrin is hardly some isolated triumph.
His performances in the role have become celebrated around the world. When he and Anna Netrebko first took on Wagner’s Lohengrin together in Dresden, the result was a sensation. Later came Bayreuth—Wagner’s own shrine—where Beczala again made the role his own, in a production whose recording would receive a Grammy nomination.
Major critics took notice as well. Even when reviewers at publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times had decidedly mixed feelings about everything happening around him in a recent Met production, Beczala himself was showered with praise.
But then, after all the criticism, analysis, awards, nominations and learned opinion, there is simply—
the voice.
That is ultimately where all my amateur philosophizing collapses.
I hear it.
I want to hear it again.
And this isn’t even the first time you’ve heard him tonight, if you’re keeping score. Earlier, over on Terra Firma, his voice was already there—threaded through Berryann Priss’s memory of Venice, courtesy of Puccini’s “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca.
Puccini earlier. Wagner just now.
We might as well complete the trifecta.
Verdi.
So rather than bury Beczala beneath another thousand words about Wagner, let’s put my argument to the only test that ultimately matters.
Listen.
Not Lohengrin this time—something earlier, more exposed. Where Wagner asks for mystery, Verdi asks for nerve.
I’m going with his performance of “Celeste Aida.”
Here is Verdi asking the tenor for heroism and tenderness, strength and lyric beauty, and here is Beczala doing what made me notice him in the first place.
The voice rises.
The heft is there.
But so is the light.
That moonbeam sheen.
You don’t have to take my word for it.
In fact, you shouldn’t.
Listen.
I want to say more about this fabulous artist at some point. There are recordings to explore and performances to revisit. Beczala is one of those artists who keeps giving you reasons to return.
But for now, it’s back to worlds and endless possibilities.
Still, it was fun to put the Earth-destroying aliens on hold for a moment to say something about a most extraordinary voice and artist.
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