Barzakh and art as resistance

Just after noon on November 6th, 2024, I beeped myself into the Ghent opera house and trudged up a flight of stairs with my head lowered, trying to hide my red eyes and puffy face.

The previous day’s piano dress rehearsal had gone very well. Later, we’d had a farewell dinner for Amandine, our rehearsal pianist whose role in the production ended that day. It’s an unusually friendly group of colleagues here, and our conversation over frites and fragrant Belgian beers had ranged from the project to our personal lives to politics—specifically what was at stake in that day’s US election. (I’m the only American here, but no one could avoid thinking about it.)

I put myself to bed early, woke in the middle of the night, and checked the results. Frantic anxiety came first, then numb shock. Eventually, when it seemed the unthinkable had become the inevitable, grief closed over me like a silent black wave.READ MORE

Fior di Diavolo

Strongly founded! A marble tower! 

With those words, arms splayed in a stock gesture of defiance, I launched into Fiordiligi’s first-act aria on a makeshift stage in the winter of 2004. That production, a Così fan tutte (in English) organized and performed by a bunch of over-caffeinated Harvard undergrads, gave me my first opera role—and my first taste of what it might be like to let music this thrilling channel through me while everyone else had to stop and listen.

It was heaven, it was a mess, and it was deeply formative. That Così, more than anything else, pushed me into serious singing training after college. It’s a miracle I got the chance at all; I was a choir nerd, not an opera queen, and my listening habits leaned toward polyphony, Bach, Weezer, Stravinsky, Joni Mitchell. I had no inkling of how legendarily difficult people considered the role. But my friend Jim, conductor of Dunster House Opera, knew I had a sneaky way with coloratura, and one day he pulled me into a practice room with a stack of scores. We sight-read through a dozen iconic Mozart arias that afternoon, and Come scoglio was by far the most fun: I blazed out the high notes and honked out the low, wiggled through the crazy triplets with abandon, and laughed in delight at the absurd melodrama. It was settled.

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