Callas told us
How Maestro Serafin
Pushed the tempi hard
How the words tumbled out
With fierce emotion:
Her lineage was always true.
These old voices
Sharply etched
The cylinder rumbling beneath
Catch the story and the throat:
We sit at ringside
Awash with a visceral ache
And sense it all:
The shame of Radamès
The pain of Aida
The patrial might of king and father
Haunting the bitter peace
That hovers beyond Amneris.
How are these secrets delivered?
Sincerity? Proximity?
Tradition?
Do the old singers
Like the wisest shaman
Stand betwixt life and death?
They gift the rigour
Of these old stories:
Love and betrayal
The sacrifice
That slices through
The terror and the pride.
We are beyond ourselves
Yet harnessed to inescapable verities:
Doomed humans
Crying aloud
In god’s stark firmament.
In singing
As in inexorable breath
Life’s decisions are costed.
Gar Jones - April 2014
notes:
see: John Ardoin, The Callas Legacy, Fourth Education, Duckworth, 1995, p. 184
listen to: https://www.amazon.com/Introuvables-Chant-Verdien-Verdi-Rarities/dp/B000051W4C