Wayne Koestenbaum & *Cleavage* (on the Schwarzkopf question) (Nazis, Goebbels, Elisabeth's dark past)

I'm the only person in my family who can't play an instrument. We didn't have a drawing room or many guests over, but we did have a baby grand (guaranteed--one of my father's great bargain buys) at one point in our zigzag fortunes. I felt sort of idiotic. My mother saved me with this insight when I was in my early twenties. Sarah listens to music so carefully it's as if listening were her art form. (A paraphrase but pretty close.)

She was right. I was consumed with listening to music, all of it, though she was referencing classical, especially art songs, the singing of which was her pleasure.

I have been topped and easily, however, in listening, by poet and essayist Wayne Koestenbaum. In Cleavage (Ballantine Books), a collection of essays on clothing fads, icons gay and otherwise, celebrities and celebrity interviews, books, reading, more, more, he sweeps me off my feet already ill-balanced on the musical staff.

I write of only one beautiful and reflective essay, "Listening to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf." I first heard recordings of soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing lieder at my German friend Alois' in San Francisco. Alois loved Bach especially, but no lover of music classical can bypass art songs. They are the Chekhov short stories, the Indian miniatures, the small perfect gems of music. Alois grew up gay (Catholic) in Nazi Germany, and was on his own from age 13 in wartime Europe. He scoffed at Schwarzkopf, calling her Shriek-koff, though he owned many of her records.

At age 18, I was a sponge. If Alois said, it was true. And compared to Anna Moffo or Elly Ameling or Maria Callas there is something not entirely pleasant about her singing, and, as Koestenbaum points out, she has a covered voice--too controlled.

What I didn't know about was her German childhood. Her young talent was nurtured by the Nazis. She wasn't necessarily a "hater," but she was a favorite of Goebbels--something she had to contend with ever after, in the public eye. The darkness is in her singing.

This essay becomes quickly a chronicle--how Koestenbaum, a German Jew born in the U.S., integrated the totality of Schwartzkopf into, into what--his affection and dislike; his soul and Satan's bum. Like that. Here is his description of the voice and phenomenon of Schwarzkopf.

I am preoccupied with the Schwarzkopf question only because her voice has presented me with an ambiguity ever since I first heard her sing the Verdi Requiem in the 1964 Giuliani recording. Her voice, with its sublimely projected vowels, and its air of a world that will never be marred or crimped or diminished, asks me whether I live fully and honestly enough, and whether I have too quickly shut the door on lost experience. Her voice asks whether I have paid attention, whether I have been sloppy, whether I have obeyed the score, and whether I have served the music, even if I can't guess what the music means. Her voice demands that I make a stricter reckoning of my own life and see if it measures up. Her voice shames me into wishing I were cleaner, sweeter, and more concise.

That's good listening.

Be my diva, sweetheart: 65 and counting

When I was young I wanted to be a gay icon. Maybe it was a plausible fantasy for a yet-to-be-tested bi-sexual. Maybe my heterosexual selfhood believed that offered the likeliest male attention I'd get. Maybe it was something I should have followed through on. The fellow I lived with for five years in my twenties scored (scored, not bought) front-row Bette Midler tickets, knowing I worshipped her. I often felt I should have been born gay and male, a thought that strikes me as silly now that I accept the mutable slinkiness of sexuality and gender.

My parents were not homophobic so I didn't have excessive attitudes about gay men, although my sisters' taunts about being a lesbian terrified me. Judee Sill, later one of the shining lights of music and a lesbian, was one of my sister's friends, someone I knew when I was nine-years-old, so even there, contact had been made. When things got beyond ugly at home (the divorce) (I was about eighteen), I was shipped up to San Francisco, where I had a sort of Margaret Cho experience.

Unlike Cho, whose parents managed a bookstore in S.F.'s Tenderloin, and who lived among the loving (or not), brave (or not) and sometimes self-hating flamboyance of gay San Francisco in the seventies, my dear friends were, um, cultured.

I stayed with Alois, who still owns a house in the Haight. He was German (Catholic), had been a gay boy in Hitler's Germany. I'm still not sure of the details, but he was escaped from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in Yugoslavia when he was thirteen; he wasn't there because he was gay. Boys were being shot as he escaped. After the war, his uncle told him to get out of Germany, and he ended up in San Francisco where he opened a coffee house of the real food, real conversation sort only possible in the late fifites and early sixties.

It was the Coffee Cantata, named after Bach's cheery musical number. Alois gave me a bed in his apartment (he rented out the first floor of the house), fed me incredible and very European whole foods, and resounding music (my father's classical tropes didn't include the great church music).

Alois had sold the Coffee Cantata by the time I lived there - its new crass owners moved it to Union, made it the coffee house equivalent of a fern bar - but Alois was Alois. Cultured, brilliant with languages, European for crissakes - and gay. One of the household's many running jokes was "he invented it." "Leonard Bernstein? Sarah, he's so gay he invented it." And so on.

If Michale Montlack, editor of the newly released My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, were to ask Alois who his diva was, Alois might consider Elly Ameling, a pure soprano who interpreted leider purely though not exclusively. Or, hey, he might choose Suzy Ormand, the financial dyke wizard. (Who knows.) My intention is to suggest my sense of diva as a gay term, yes, and also as an accessible example of female power and vulnerability.

Who would I choose? Are Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller - two heroes - divable (diva-able?)? Laura Nyro is. Agnes Martin? Emily Carr? Dorothy Day (pictured)? Certainly Judee Sill. Unfortunate though her statements about Palestineans were, Golda Meir is a woman I find stunning. Among the divas in the My Diva anthology are Helen Reddy, Joan of Arc, Julia Child, Princess Leia, Liza, Grace Paley.

It's a nice, okay, poignant feeling, to sit here and think about women I admire, to consider who is a heroine, who is an icon (a word my friend, poet Patricia Spears Jones, wants retired), and who is a straight-ahead "diva." It's heart-expanding to think about women men admire. I want more women admired. I want more.

My Diva: http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4584.htm