The Queen's Throat

I love. I love opera. I love opera queens. So I love Wayne Koestenbaum. But his book The Queen's Throat, while heavily sprinkled with hilarious operatic jewels, manages nevertheless to be tedious, theoretical and tricky, in a Roland Barthes kind of style I call origami prose. Within this genre a simple fact may be transformed into a star, then a boat, then perhaps a thousand cranes: Right before your very eyes, a miraculous mutation that cannot be denied. The Callas chapter is crucial, but what really got me going was the very first chapter, about opera queen hysteria itself. With it's 'Pillow Book' disclosures, including the author's inexplicable feelings of exultation when in the presence of Anna Moffo's voice; gossipy allegations (Rosa Ponselle as lesbian diva); porny manifestations; disembodied passions for arcane pursuits - recording-related trivia, for instance; or an ardently encyclopaedic knowledge of matters concerning the voice - and an occasional throat-clearing confession; yours truly was continually reminded of many of his own formative experiences - the occasion, for instance, of my very first opera, Verdi's Otello, in Forth Worth, Texas, soon after my parents' violent divorce. I was particularly interested in the murder/suicide dénouement. I was also reminded of my early 'gay' opera friends (Jerry Frankel, Rene Ricard); of my annual Maria Callas birthday party on December 2nd; of the Maria Callas cocktail I invented (two part Greek ouzo, one part Italian bitters, three parts American Sprite); of my 'retired' opera friends whose records are in storage; of my loud listening habits (louder than a Neapolitan is good decibel level); of my soprano's attack on certain diva-defining words ('Il Fantasma', for instance, at the beginning of Lucia's mad scene); of my own single-note replay fetish; of my distancing myself from the queenly love of women; of my own code of never knocking on a diva's dressing room door; of my first record I ever bought (Callas' last Tosca, and I got Andy Warhol to sign the jacket because it looks as if he had done it); and of my addiction, my case history of onanism through the ear, my displaced eroticism. (See what I mean about origami prose?) In addition of course, there's my body (opera queens tend to be out of shape since they don't have actual sex - she says); my fear of expert opera policemen, of the connoisseur (after I put down Zeffirelli for having cut the most poignant scene from his film version of Verdi's Otello - the Willow Song and Ave Maria - Robert Pincus-Witten said it was OK, that he didn't blame him, because it reminded him of Gilbert & Sullivan's sentimental garbage...o dio!); or my frightening experiences at record stores (for a while I worked at the Tower Records Annex on Lafayette Street so I could round out my collection, only to have my secret stash raided by queenish thieves); or my dislike of Wagner (deep throats, no trills); my very passionate, personally aimed bravas to sopranos taking ensemble curtain calls; or my lasting friendships made while leaning against the standing-room rails (the Wilkins brothers); not to mention my repeated realisations that opera has the power to warn you that you've wasted your life - a power shared with all amazing art. Then there was my first Saturday morning dress rehearsal at the Met, of Zeffirelli's production of Tosca, which was also an important early date with my Lisa, an abiding ex-girlfriend (we were still whispering as the curtain rose, and were admonished by a queen a few rows up: 'Shut up! This is not a restaurant!').

Unlike the author of The Queen's Throat, however my initial interest in opera was vocal not sociological. My most formal vocal training occurred during my teens, by means of my vast and exclusively Motown collection of recordings, usually in front of our full-scale bathroom mirror - Texas' state bird is the mockingbird. But when I was in my early twenties, I stayed with another ex-girlfriend, the mad queen Elsa, in a small and remote Spanish village. Almost every morning or afternoon I went through my ritual of taking the sun next to the pool, with a bottle of wine and The Tale of Genji by my side - I had just returned from art school in Kyoto - along with a tape player and the only two tapes Elsa owned, of Callas' bel canto mad scenes. We ended our vacation on Ibiza, and at the airport I read that Callas had just died in Paris. I wept. She and the music had already entered my soul. Operatic soul was for me the internally hybrid result. A person such as myself, in other words, can really understand how and why, when an interviewer in the 60s asked Leontyne Price who she thought were the truly great voices of the day, the diva responded 'Well, there's me and...there's Aretha.'

Callas is Tina Turner. Montserrat Caballé is Mahalia. Marilyn Horne is Gladys Knight. Kathleen Battle is Diana Ross. Jessye Norman is Nina Simone. Bel canto is the soul music of the 19th century. Italian opera, to my ears, is quite simply hotter than German. Put a sister in Richard Strauss, however and you've got silver soul on ice: Leontyne Price's rare recording (RCA) of Die Frau ohne Schatten is just that. Mozart was to be sure more than adequately Italianate but, even so, Callas the extremist rarely crossed that line - 'Donna Anna,' said she, 'is a bore.' It was, unfortunately, out of Callas' respect for the domain of her friend Schwarzkopf that she avoided Strauss: No Salome.

But Caballé did her. In fact she saved the day in the most perfect production I've ever seen, Robert Wilson's Salome at La Scala. Originally planned as an Eva Marton concert vehicle, Marton dropped out when she got wind of Wilson's production designs. Thus did Caballé appear in the premiere performance, making her entrance from within a huge black cloud of Versace tulle.

This was the last opera Andy Warhol saw. Knowing that Andy was a retired opera snob (queens, perhaps paradoxically, like to suspend all judgement from time to time, whereas Andy was given to complaining 'Why go to the opera now?' and how 'There aren't any great singers any more'), I persuaded him to seen Salome while in Milan for his Last Supper vernissage. 'It's only about an hour and a half,' I assured him. So, on the day of the opening of his Last Supper exhibition, he arranged to see it for 'just five minutes on the way to dinner.' He saw it all. After the performance, the artistic director of La Scala asked Andy to consider doing an opera production himself. 'Gee I don't know,' he said. Fred (Hughes) considered it: Lucia? No, I said, La Fanciulla del West - it's a spaghetti western: 'Oh Great!'

And now for operatic soul. In the summer of '77 I found a pile of records on the sidewalk at Vandam & Sixth in SoHo, and I rescued a highlights recording of Il Trovatore with Price, Richard Tucker and Leonard Warren (soul maior!). I wore out the aria D'amor sull'ali rosee. Years after that, as I was driving a taxi one cold December evening, I listened to Price sing this very aria on a Friday night broadcast of Kurt Herbert Adler's gala farewell performance. As I wheeled down the hill near the U.N. on Second Avenue, I saw a couple waving for me. The lady was in fur with a gold turban. She was Leontyne Price: 'Oh Dio! La Forza del Destino!,' she said, 'Out of the thousands of taxis in New York City!' As we all laughed I told her the coincidence of this aria being my first. 'Ah yes, my dear, those were the good ol' days.' Then, when she said where she was going, I had to tell her that that was exactly where I'd found the record. 'Oh Dio,' she said - it was where she lived - and began to sing along with the radio all the way downtown. When we neared her house, she said 'Driver do keep on going - there's a three minute ovation coming up!' After we circled her block, she asked me not to leave. She went indoors and returned with a Christmas-wrapped new recording (Verdi heroines!) of her own. As I lowered the window, she could still hear the radio applause: 'See my dear, I told you it was three minutes.'

Our coincidences continued. Eventually, I opened a gallery in western SoHo, indeed on Vandam and Sixth, and cater-waitered for a few months. At a benefit at Lincoln Centre with over a hundred tables, it fell upon me to pour wine at hers. 'Remember me,' I asked, 'I'm your favourite cabdriver' - 'the broadcast!', she screamed, and took my arm. When I went on to explain how our coincidences were continuing, about how I had just moved to where I had originally found the record, for instance, she exclaimed, 'We must get together. We can have the most divine blockparty.' That was pretty soulful, I thought.

After the summer of '77, upon returning from Spain, I met often with my friend Jerry Frankel, a handsome Yalie composer and Bernstein protégé, who was accompanist for Renata Scotto, and had also seen Callas' last recital at Carnegie Hall. We spent hours together singing and listening to Jerry's favourite on record moments - everything from Callas' dropping octaves in Nabucco and Don Carlo, to Roberta Peters' Ma in Una voce poco fa... He said it sounded like a soprano farting. I loved Jerry. Jerry told me I should make a record. He introduced me to the Met standing-room line every Saturday morning, which is where we got tickets for Birgit Nilsson in Die Frau..., which Jerry thought was the most sublime opera ever. Jerry was also the first person to take me to leather bars. He was such a romantic operatic character. He died of AIDS. At one point, when he had lost his sight, he responded to a concerned inquiry by irrepressibly remarking that 'vision is overrated.' The thought of Jerry, in L.A. then, alone and listening to his recordings really saddens me. My records are in storage.

Now I know what Andy meant. 'Why opera now?'