Italy is one of the few foreign countries I have ever visited. To think about it now, the loveliest country in the world, the heart of music and culture, under siege as never before since the Black Death, makes my heart sink. I had a thought as I was riding in the car today: Why don't I do something different, post a "smackdown" of various singers interpreting the same song? What a great idea as a diversion from all this hell. But my mind had other ideas. Before I even realized what I was doing, I was downloading different legendary tenors singing my favorite operatic aria, E Lucevan le Stelle. Puccini, perhaps the ultimate Italian composer. When I began to listen to these men sing, each with their own soul-baring interpretation, I began to realize it was both tribute and farewell. I don't know how many opera singers and artists of all kinds are sick and dying of this horrendous thing, this reaper of souls, but I know the arts will be gutted like everything else in Italia. But I post these singers anyway, praying for their welfare, because I don't know what else to do - and even though I gave up on praying a long time ago.
Okay then. So, singers. We've been talking about, thinking about singers, some unusual singers from the past, and some strangely beautiful contemporary singers who seem to grasp and pull the distant past back into the present moment. But this is even more immediate. Gigli. I don't have Gigli recordings, though perhaps I should. When you hear him, you know where Domingo and Pav and the gang get all their tricks (and also from Mario Lanza, the most underrated tenor of all). But no one else could express the exposed, terrifying vulnerability of the human soul in quite this way. This is my favorite tenor aria, and he sings the hell out of it. The haunting stare from the portrait and the slightly broken translation only enhance the performance. Exceptionally beautiful voices make me cry: I once sobbed my way through an astonishing concert by Renee Fleming, Michael Maniaci's unexpectedly vibrant male soprano recently made me burst into tears, and this - oh, this - this Gigli! When I discovered and played it, I was reduced to rubble. The great singers are instruments that express human pain as nothing else can. Yes, joy - rapture - all these things too, but it's the pain we really need them to express, because we can't - can't even find a word for it, though if we try to escape it, we leave an arm or a leg behind.
