Midnight Mozart

She’s probably been heard by more people who didn’t know who she was than by those who did. And in a way, that’s appropriate—there is something almost otherworldly (that’s the word everybody uses) about her singing. Also, she must have been the soprano’s soprano—she has a technique that allows her to sing stupendously close to the edge of cracking. She gets just to the border of control, at that moment when the voice is almost frighteningly beautiful.

It’s a voice that should be heard alone in an elaborately classical room in a secluded castle at midnight. Instead, it was a voice that got rebelliously broadcast to a whole mass of prisoners standing in the jail courtyard in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” And it’s the one scene, I would wager, that has stuck into everybody’s imagination. As Morgan Freeman says in the voiceover, “I don’t know what those Italian ladies were singing and I don’t want to know….”

Her name was Gundula Janowitz, and she was singing with Edith Mathis—also a knockout Mozart singer. Janowitz—we’ll leave Mathis for another day—was born in Berlin in 1937, but was raised in Austria. And she got to the top of the musical world very early—in her twenties—and stayed there until 1997, at which point she retired from singing lieder (she had retired from opera in 1990). And fittingly, she seems to project a rather remote, rather introspective demeanor—there’s nothing overplayed, nothing emoted. To some, she’s stolid, wooden.

But there’s a quality in Mozart’s music that, to me, is so unusual that it verges on the unique. There are moments in everyone’s life when time stops, when you face some wrenching truth, something that you have avoided even as you have seen it clearly coming on. Your marriage is dissolving—no surprise, it was built on a lie, it was never good to begin with. That cough you’ve been worried about, that your wife has been nagged you about? You’ve seen the X-Ray today, and the grey amorphous shape that you know is not benign. Your dream—a life made of music and of making music—will never arrive; your ruinous audition this afternoon shredded any chance you had.

They are moments of both agonizing pain and a kind of numbness; they’re certainly moments when the focus narrows, when the truth becomes a lazar, burning into your soul or heart, singeing off the extraneous and trivial tissue, boring in to the bone. You’re alone with your pain, and you seek solitude as being the least wrenching state possible.

Mozart gets those moments, he captures them, and when sung right—they must be devilish—the listener almost feels embarrassed. They’re so intimate, so personal, that you feel you’re intruding, almost being a voyeur, just by being there. You want to flee; you’re also trapped.

Now then, why is that five minutes of Mozart in what was a rather long movie the scene that everybody remembers? And what else is there, in all the operas of Mozart? Was that aria—called the Sull’ Aria—the best?

The answer is that there are a number of arias that have that same soul-wrenching quality. Perhaps the most famous is the aria “Soave sia il vento” from Cosi fan Tutte; here it’s time to come clean, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you anything about this aria, as far as how it works in the plot, except that it’s clearly about a parting. “May the wind be gentle”—it’s a wonderful image. Who needs to know anything more? Again, Janowitz is unnerving ethereal here—this is a voice coming from the spirit world. Perhaps it’s the voice Mozart heard when he wrote the music.

Sinking even further down to the darkest of despair, there is the aria Ach, ich fuhl’s, from Mozart’s Magic Flute. It’s a work composed a year or two before Mozart’s death, and it was a hit. And here, yes, the words are important.

Has there ever been an opera without the soprano falling in love with the tenor? Yes, but they're exceptions, not the rule. And here we have Pamina singing to Tamino, the hero who has of course fallen instantly in love with her, just by glimpsing the cameo that the Queen of the Night has given him. This happens in opera.

But wait—there’s a twist, thank God, otherwise the opera would be over in fifteen minutes and we could all go out for dinner. Tamino has decided to join the sacred brotherhood of Pamina’s father, and now Tamino has been forbidden to speak. And so he doesn’t respond to Pamina. “Write her a note,” you cry!

Guys? This is opera. Pamina, of course, will have to sink into anguish and contemplate death, so stricken is she by her lover’s silence. It’s hokey, yes, but listen to what Mozart through Janowitz does to it. Oh, and here are the words…. 

Ah, I feel it, it has disappeared

Forever gone  love’s  happiness!

Nevermore will come the hour of bliss

Back to my heart!

See, Tamino, these tears,

Flowing, beloved, for you alone!

If you don't feel the longing of love

Then there will be peace in death!

literal translation by Lea F. Frey (blfrey@earthlink.net)

Right—these are definitely better words to sing than to speak. But how chilling when sung!

Janowitz also nails one of the most famous of Nozze di Figaro, the Dovo Sono of the Countess Almaviva. Here the proud countess has suffered at the hands of her cruel, unfaithful husband, and finally sings:

        

Where are the lovely moments

Of sweetness and pleasure?

Where have the promises gone

That came from those lying lips?

Why, if all is changed for me,

Into tear and pain,

Has the memory of that goodness

Not vanished from my breast?

Ah, if only, at least, my faithfulness,

Which still loves amidst its suffering,

Could bring me the hope

Of changing that ungrateful heart!

Word-by-word translation by Jane Bishop, bishopj@citadel.edu