(Editor’s Note: The following article will appear in the book, “Encounters in the Arts” by the columnist. To order copies, text 09065104270 or email: artsnewsservice@gmail.com)
Long before I started to cover the performing arts actively, I saw a film whose absurd highlight I thought could only happen in the movies.
This movie has an outrageous opera scene where stage sets disentangled at the time people were all agog over opening night.
But in another highlight of the movie, this well-endowed soprano was after a hunk and she was shown riding, a la rodeo, over her love object, the young man helpless on the floor. She was hitting her high notes while astride the man in utter abandon.
A diva essaying the role of Lady Godiva?
I suppressed my amusement as I relished this scene for all it was worth and innocently told myself, “This can only happen in the movies.”
Many years after I saw this movie – at which time I became deeply immersed in the performing arts – I now
think the movie was rather tame in portraying Eros in the arts.
When an international wire agency glossed over traces of dried semen backstage (and even on the curtains) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I wondered, “Could wild things actually happen in the temple of the arts?”
More than a decade of covering the performing arts has convinced me that people in the arts are as human and vulnerable as those inhabiting the fashion world, politics and the movies.
Which means anything can happen before and after the rehearsal and performance of a Brandenburg concerto, before an opening night of Tosca, after a cast party of The Bald Soprano and after music scores are kept after an evening of Mozart’s Requiem.
As I now reflect on the local cultural landscape and the personalities that inhabit this world, I conclude that
not all the filmmakers in the world can capture the daring, the excitement, the jealousy, the envy, the rivalry,
bitterness and the ecstasy that people in the world of the arts go through.
The love stories between a man and a woman, between men and women in the arts are really enough to
keep Regal and Seiko busy.
For instance, I admire this couple who defied Manila’s social conventions in the forties and the fifties by leaving their spouses to heed the call of love.
The woman is a famous coloratura soprano and the man is dashing tenor with the build and possibly the voice of Alfredo Kraus. Both are dedicated artists, and after their teaching hours they will let me hear earlier
recordings of their Traviata duets together, and for once I realize what ignited that passion. It’s the common love for music and possibly the hopelessness of each other’s fruitless marriages.
In one of those quiet moments as I listened to her Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, the soprano
would confide how her own marriage broke up. The husband wasn’t interested in her singing, he was nowhere around on opening nights and, to make things worse, they didn’t have a child of their own. The diva, in one of those poignant moments that I reserved for my memoir, confided she was incapable of bearing a child. She had a defective ovary, so she said. I thought that was providential because she was destined to be a handmaid of the arts. After all, she wasn’t destined to be the Goddess of Fertility.
Performing artists, by virtue of this artistic choice, normally decide on a definitive affair with the arts.
Ballerinas avoid pregnancies at certain phases of their careers with an eye on Swan Lake or Giselle. Divas avoid this too on a year they intend to invade La Scala or the Metropolitan Opera with an eye on La Traviata or Tosca.
Tenors shun the good life (i.e., drinking, late nights, junk foods) just to be fit for La Bohéme or Othello. Many
forgo marriage to avoid conflicts between marriage and career but when careers nosedive and one of the few curtain calls ensue, performing artist are often obsessed with just being “normal” persons.
A Filipina diva who had a world-class career was quoted as longing to have a baby by the time she became
the country’s most reliable interpreter of art songs, it was too late to fulfill that biological wish.
By now, you should know what artists go through, torn between art and life.
Those who decided to abandon art for a while to raise children find themselves trying to revive that career soon after their children started settling down themselves.
Artists in this category often figure in Tales of Love and Rivalry, Hate and Bitterness as graphically shown in the confrontation scene in the movie The Turning Point, which is about a failed dancer and a celebrated one.
I know a semi-retired pianist who had a sweet profile until certain events brought out her other bitter self. She has three other friends, pianists all, gave up a career for a husband and children, and on one clear shining day they decided it was time to revive their careers after sacrificing them to love and marriage. They started by first having small musicales, then duo concerts and by this time they had acquired a measure of self-confidence to try a provincial outreach program encouraged by their friends and mentors.
The one in the tight circle of friends became a cultural administrator. As such, she had to tone down her career-revival plan to be content with serving other artists, most of them critically acclaimed ones. At this time of her life as she watched celebrated artists perform, she realized she could have been one of them herself had she been as brilliant and prodigious as them.
Soon her sweet profile gave way to silently scheming one, and this she would not admit, not even to her husband. She started to block bookings by saying those dates had been taken by other lessees. When she found out another administrator was reviving a long-dead orchestra, she started jogging with potential sponsors and warning them there was no point in reviving dead horses.
When another orchestra was about to be born with a young impresario taking the initiative, she told musicians to be wary with this eager beaver in the arts. What she can’t do, this young impresario can do. And what has her life accounted to? She has a beautiful home, a responsible husband, beautiful children, but she resents the success of young people in the very career she had wanted for herself, had marriage not intervened. But then, she would relish triumphant moments on the stage and off. By subtle coaxing, she became soloist in a Gershwin concerto in a Beethoven Triple concerto, and woe to the other soloists who wanted to play those pieces. On top of it, her foreign travels had become frequent in the name of cultural
exchange. A street in the far South is to be named after her close kin and she promptly whips up a travel voucher saying an outreach program is a must in that culture-forsaken southern city. Cultural power had never tasted this sweet!
If I can write about this category of artists now, it is because I didn’t understand them before and I didn’t
know their backgrounds until I was able to observe their public and private lives from a distance.
Certainly, it pays to know artists before they became famous and after. You get to know the real artists knowing how beautifully they cope with fame. It is the struggling ones and the not-so-successful ones who make artistic exercise difficult for people in the arts. It certainly pays to know people before and after they acquired their pompous titles. Because whether you like or not, artists are the components of artistic flame and hidden ambitions, not-so-subtly, and envy and greed, creatures of ego and pride that they are. There is a great deal of the past in artists-cum-administrators who make life hard in their cultural constituency.
I am as curious about these people as I am about the motivations of the much-publicized skirmish between
María Callas and Rudolf Bing, between María Callas and her mother, the least-talked about cold war between a soprano-teacher and her students, between a National Artist and one who didn’t make it as one.
Because no matter how impressive an artist’s résumé is or how impressive her credentials are, untold stories are waiting to be told why artists are obsessed and driven the way they are.
Some years back, I was aghast at the hours a pianist spent in a beauty parlor trying to look like Sharon Cuneta.
But she acquired that look and it’s the same picture she uses in her passport. She got married, I learned that her husband was a fan of Sharon Cuneta.
The hands of Eros and the strange ways they move in the arts circle are materials for other versions of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and Bitter Moon.
In the theatre world, many still cannot accept that the playwright can leave his wife for a month.
Just recently, a prize-winning musician confided that his wife left him for a woman but that is a cordial
separation. “The separation was good for me,” the musician said, “because we were quite open about it. My ex-wife’s problem was how to bring it up to her parents who she was sure would be shocked by the real cause of our separation.”
A prize-winning stage and film actress told me she was forced to marry at fifteen at a time when she didn’t
know what marriage was and what mothering was all about. Theatre for her became an obsession and a therapy for a marriage that didn’t work.
From another source, I learned why a former prodigy is no longer as passionate about her music as she used to.
She married a husband who was into jazz and violently jealous of her classical music and irritated by the rigorous rehearsals she put up with before a performance. In a fit of jealousy, he grabbed a hammer and struck the hands of his pianist-wife. After that incident, music-making had become traumatic for her.
I know many Jekyll and Hyde characters in the arts, some of whom have given me glorious moments after a concert and not-so-glorious ones in real life.
A conductor in whose beach house I occasionally listened to Pavarotti arias used to warn me about being
seen in the constant company of an art patron who fell out of favor with the Palace. The patron was close to the former President that got the ire of the First Lady for one thing or another. So the conductor said if I wanted to keep my job at the Cultural Center, I’d better stop watching concerts with that famous patron.
I didn’t heed his advice of course. The patron was real music lover and a good man. How he figured as a
businessman and a presidential crony was none of my business. We share the same passion for opera, we had helped some artists in distress and I like him for that.
A few years after the conductor’s warning, this art patron died. I didn’t realize how highly regarded he was
until I saw the prominent visitors who went to his wake.
On the second night of the wake, I decided to pay my dead friend a final visit, as I dislike attending funerals of people I am close to.
On this last visit, I walked from a street corner to a chapel where the wake was in progress. From afar I heard someone playing the violin. Must be one of his musician-friends, I thought. As I approach the chapel, the identity of the violinist became known to me. He was the person who warned me to be wary of the gentle old man when he was still alive. The violinist wasn’t such a bad man after all, I thought. The dead art patron had probably been generous to him and he was just trying to acknowledge his debt on the man’s last moments on earth.
But I told myself: how can you vilify a person when he was still alive and, in another breath, pay tribute to him with music at his hour of death?
To date, I still feel a strange shiver everytime I recall that incident at the wake.
I recoil at the possibility of my detractors hosting a musicale in my own wake! For the world of the arts is inhabited driven by ambition on one hand and a dose of greed on the other. Others are driven by an honest desire to make a difference; some, by a bizarre urge to show off.
Behind this agenda rage human urges beyond anybody’s control.
Love and lust, ambition and greed, resurrection and a genuine veneration for the arts mold the artist in a way still strange and unknown to many.
For the study of Bach and Beethoven, Chekhov and Shakespeare is intertwined with Jung and Freud, and the hands of Eros may strike before and after curtain call and long after the most captious critic has made his verdict on opening night.