Dominic Harvey, Faure: “Pie Jesu” (1980)
Churches have never been my thing. Not since age fourteen or fifteen when I told our minister Rick Mapes that I was willing to stay a member of his church as long as I didn’t have to believe any of the religious stuff.You can imagine the sermon I gave that next Youth Sunday! I spoke for ten minutes without ever mentioning the word “god.”
It hasn’t gotten better. I went to a college with a religious affiliation where I had to take a religion course in order to graduate. I chose Introduction to the New Testament. I got As on every paper I wrote, contributed enthusiastically to class discussions and wound up with a B for the course. When I asked the professor why, he said I hadn’t changed. “Haven’t changed!” I said. “I didn’t realize conversion was a requirement for the course!”
I did go to church to marry Esther and of course I loved it. It was her parents’ church –Missouri Synod Lutheran, one service on Sunday still delivered in Slovak. Esther had gone there too, only under a different minister. We were married the day after Christmas. The altar was framed by tall fir trees. Esther looked beautiful. I was giddy with happiness. As to the religious stuff, whenever it came up in the ceremony, I went along with it but zoned out.
Then why was I suddenly attending church with Esther in 1982, not regularly but often enough, a high mass yet, at Grace Episcopalian Church in Utica –incense perfuming the air, a great organ and two choirs, adults’ and boys’, and forever standing up, kneeling, then standing up again? Why were we there? Because Jeremy was singing in the boys’ choir. He wasn’t just a chorister. His last year, the year before his voice broke, he was Head Chorister and he was awarded the Rector’s Cross. We’re prejudiced but he had a gorgeous voice. I had to go to church to hear it, but church was the proper place for it.
Jeremy’s voice changed. No more boys’ choir for him, no more church for me. Unless you count attendance at family weddings and funerals.
Jeremy sang again in high school –soloed in the choir — and took voice lessons at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica. He was probably what? a junior then? He won a prize for singing and we went to the award ceremony to hear him sing the coat aria from La Boheme. He was in a couple of musicals too. He was thirteen in his first, an all-teen production of My Fair Lady. (Even the director was a teen.) The second was when he was in senior high. He played Mame’s nephew Patrick in Auntie Mame. Good voice, good stage presence. We have a video of that.
Nicolai Guiaurov, “Vecchia zimarra” (The coat aria) from Puccini’s La Boheme
MUSIC & ME 