In honor of Cecily...

I visited a website today and gushed all over the keyboard when I found that its owner was going to a performance of Verdi's Aida. I remember first listening to that masterwork during my freshman year at Crane. I was seventeen; I'd just started my vocal training in earnest, but I was dead-set against opera. "I'll sing any art song," I told my teacher, "but none of that opera crap."

But a conversation with my mother revealed a startling truth: my grandmother was named for an opera. I had just started to wonder about her, just started asking questions about her life. I never knew her. I was curious, and so I listened to Aida, searching for some connection, some way to have my grandmother speak to me.

She didn't speak. She sang.

Well, it was really Leontyne Price, but there was a message there. I listened to the most beautiful aria -- Numi, Pieta. Aida is an Ethiopian princess, captured and made a slave by the Egyptians. She has fallen in love with a young warrior, Radames, who returns that love. Radames is chosen to lead the next battle against the Ethiopians, and he prays for victory so that he can ask to marry the radiant Aida. As he leaves, Aida cheers with the rest of the Egyptians, praying that he will return victorious. And then she realizes what that victory will mean: the capture of her father, the Ethiopian King, and the destruction of her home. "Shall I wish him victory? Even now I see the blood of my brothers, staining his hands." So she changes her wish, asks the gods to burn it from her lips. She prays for Egyptian victory instead, until she remembers that Radames might suffer or die. In anguish, she prays for pity from the gods of her youth, knowing that what fate decides will mean the death of someone she loves. "Gods," she sings, "Have pity on my suffering. Have pity."

I can't tell you how that aria affected me (well, I guess I can -- and am). I was only seventeen, but I got it. Love moves us, sometimes in the completely wrong direction. Sometimes we fall in love with people we shouldn't. Sometimes we're not strong enough to meet the price of loving. Sometimes we commit terrible acts upon the very people we adore. It's passion that undoes us, and passion that saves us. We're human, and so very small for all of our swaggering. All we can do is pray for pity, pray for compassion and understanding. Pray for grace.

I think of that power, that prayer. I think of Aida singing, helpless with love, longing and fear. I think of amor fatal, tremendo amor. Fatal love. Tremendous love. I think of my grandmother, and I feel such pity.

But I also feel grateful. After all, she gave me my voice. She gave me such wonderful, terrible gifts.