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...
Before the grim, worried faces on the Terra Firma cover, before the prospect of a highly evil, overwhelmingly powerful alien race launched them into pitched combat where three days would decide the fate of Earth, there was life. There was work. There was routine.
And then—there was love.
Berryann Priss—the Berry, the Target, the Ma'am who ends up leading the little band of warriors who are all that stand between life as we know it and slavery and destruction—was not only an MI6 stalwart and an OBE recipient. She was also a loving mother and devoted wife. Away from the prying eyes of neighbors who knew nothing of her murderous work, she was a woman of deep and powerful passions.
And so, when confronted with the ultimate evil, her mind was involuntarily transported back to another time, another place: Venice, on her twenty-fifth anniversary, to that evening when all the stars were shining, and to the song the gondolier sang in his gentle baritone: "E lucevan le stelle" ("And the stars were shining…") from Puccini's Tosca.
She was lying in the arms of her husband, Dexter, and as she listened to the gentle slapping of the waves against the boat, she felt as if she might take wing then and there—she and her beloved Dexter.
It was the greatest love story in the whole world.
Books might be written about it. And, indeed, isn't this where all sparks of love bend toward, as lilies hunt for the sun in the morning? Every love is the greatest. Every romance is epic. And so:
E lucevan le stelle,
ed olezzava la terra,
stridea l'uscio dell'orto,
e un passo sfiorava la rena.
Entrava ella, fragrante,
mi cadea fra le braccia.
("And the stars were shining,
and the earth was fragrant.
The garden gate creaked,
and a footstep brushed lightly across the sand.
She entered, fragrant,
and fell into my arms.")
Dreams. Delicate dreams.
Marlowe, with outstretched wings, soars into the heart:
"O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars…"
The gentle stillness. Summer breezes caressing. The stars shining. Two people wrapped in the exquisite delusion that such moments might somehow last forever.
Then, without warning: horror. Mind-bending. Life-altering. The kind that wrenches body from soul and forbids dreaming forever.
There is little wonder that Dr. Priss surveys the landscape around her to see just who among them can take it—who can swallow that bitter pill.
For everything that had come before on Earth, the evil proclaimed, would not be prologue at all.
It would be abolished.
Wiped out.
Memory itself would be forbidden.
And so it was from dreams and hopes that Dr. Berryann Priss was thrust into the blackest of nights—nights filled not with dreams, but nightmares.
And somewhere behind those grim eyes remained Venice.
Dexter.
The stars.
And a song.
(Note: Piotr Beczala, in my opinion, is the greatest lyric tenor now before the public. His Tosca, his Lohengrin (especially the performance with Anna Netrebko) outshine recent takes on those masterworks. Alas, opera fans are nothing if not passionately picky about their singers and their operas, so consider this an open invitation to argue with me about it. Meanwhile, enjoy this explosive performance.)
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