subject: Gianni Truvianni's "New York's Opera Society" Chapter 36 [print this page] Gianni Truvianni's "New York's Opera Society" Chapter 36
The musical portion of the party ended at about midnight, after which we got to the part of the soire where those guests who still had not taken their leave went into the drawing room for cognac, coffee or simply one for the road. There is something about sitting around the living room, having a drink while waiting for the last guest to leave that never fails to make people reminisce about those times and days which are long gone.
By that time our celebrity guests had all gone with the only ones who were still present, apart from those who lived in our apartment (my sister having gone to bed at 10 pm) were my opera friends, Anna, Vladimir and his Russian wife; Svetlana. It being her who unlike her husband was not a piano player but an opera singer; who was already a rising star in New York's opera scene.
Svetlana was a woman of medium height and slim build with waist length blonde hair in her early 30s. She had big emerald green eyes that always let one know what or who she was aiming them at, a mouth that was proportionately large (reminding me of my own) and a nose that was small enough not to distract from those eyes of hers that showed the beauty of her artistic spirit.
Vladimir and his wife Svetlana, who did not speak English well enough to carry on a conversation on her own; making it necessary for her husband to have to translate some of her words were the center of the conversation. They talked about life in Russia, the differences between what was happening now and how life had been in the former Soviet Union. Gosia and Anna also talked about their country and compared the differences between the Poland of today and the one that existed before the fall of the Soviet Union. Brad also had many things to say about the subject; his family being from Hungary; a country that like Poland had also known the Soviet system all too well. Brad naturally had never lived in Hungary but had had occasions to visit the country of his ancestors and told us about how on one of his visits to Hungary, his grandparents told him of the 1956 uprising and how is was crushed by the Soviet regime.
Though I had read a lot on the subject and knew more than my fair share about communism and the totalitarian system that had been established in C.C.C.P.; I still found it educational to hear what life had been like in the Soviet Union from people who had actually lived in a system that the course of time had simply vanished. After all, it was one thing to read of such things but it was a different experience to hear them when told by people who had actually lived them. Now, thanks to what I had heard from Brad, Anna, Gosia and what I was hearing from Svetlana and her husband, I could for the first time in my life begin to imagine what it must have been like to live in a country or in a system where one needed papers called "ration cards" to buy products such as meat, sugar, toilet paper and other basic necessities.
It was strange and though I had no cause to doubt what I was being told, as I had even read it for myself, I still could not fathom having to get not only a visa but permission (which could be denied without justification) to travel from one part of one's country to another; not even mentioning what difficulties going abroad must have required. My parents even had a word or two to say on the subject, as they had heard stories from relatives of theirs; whom they had visited in the D.D.R.
It was an oddity because Svetlana and Vladimir were talking about all the suffering they had seen and gone through despite the positions held by their respective families, who were members of the communist party; in the former Soviet Union with a certain sense of nostalgia. As for myself, I was seeing for the first time how it was that some people like talking about the hard and even sad times in their lives as much if not more than the good times. I did not understand or perhaps I could not feel the why but I imagined it was easier to talk about those moments in ones life once they were in the past. It was as if the passage of time had taken out some of the bitterness from those moments.
I found this conversation to be of great interest for a few reasons, one of them being that history is a subject I can never get enough of, specially if it was told to me by people who spoke of it from personal experience or that of their relatives; who had passed on their stories.
Conversations are in many ways like rivers that flow and during their course change path, sometimes heading in a completely different direction. It making this conversation eventually go from everyone talking about hard times that came as a result of communism to their childhoods. It being then that this exquisitely sensual lady, Svetlana told us of her hometown; Saint Petersburg (called Leningrad at the time of her birth) and what it was like growing up there.
Her descriptions made it easy for me to visualize her doing all those things she said she did, like how she cried on her first day of school or how she and her older sister; Olga would quarrel over who got to wear mommy's favorite hat when ever they went to grandma's.
I don't know what it is about a person describing his or her life as a child that always aroused interest in me; specially if that person's childhood took place in another country. I was moved almost to tears, when listening to the romantic way she told us of how her long suffering grandmamma (as Svetlana called her) had to take her to her ballet lessons and wait for her; while she went through those strenuous hours of exercises that left her completely exhausted.
I remember the laughter that was heard in the room when she told us of how her grandmamma on many an occasion had had to do her homework while waiting for her to get through with her ballet lessons. There was a special humor, a feminine one that wasn't pretentious but gracious in the way she described how her grandmother would always complain about how she had to put up with those other women's gossip who waited in the same hall she did. Her description made it easy for me to picture an older lady, perhaps in her late 50s spending what must have seemed like endless hours among other older women; who for some reason I could see knitting sweaters for their grandchildren. I do not know what it was about the way she told her story but we, all those present took joy as well as sadness from it because she told it in a way that included us all; making everyone feel as if her story were in a way their own. I will never forget Brad's comment which followed his usual clever way of speaking "I have heard of sponsoring the arts through money but this is the first time I have ever heard of it being done through doing someone's homework and listening to gossip." which brought chuckles to our conversation.
The most touching yet saddest part of her tale was the day her teacher told her in the presence of her grandmother that she simply did not posses the talent to be a ballerina of any kind, not even a chorus dancer. It was as if those words by her ballet teacher had stuck with her all these years; those words which she seemed to have remembered by heart as she uttered them with more a sense of fondness for her teacher rather than resentment. Those words that went: "Svetlana, I like you very much and I see you work very hard and I admire you for it but because I like you I have to tell you the truth, though it maybe painful to hear and that is that you don't posses either the talent or the physical strength in your body to ever be any kind of a ballet dancer not even in the chorus, please understand that I don't like telling anybody what I am telling you now, specially someone who wants it and works as hard as you do but I must be frank with you.".
She claimed these words hit her like stab to the heart and that she tried to convince, almost beg her teacher with tears in her eyes to give her another chance; promising to work even harder. I could tell by her expressions that she was reliving that moment with the present knowledge that she went on to become a great singer, when her teacher asked her not to insist because she could see that with her it was not a matter of effort or lack of it but of something she could never work on and that being graceful body movements.
I found not only her story but the way she was telling it to be so tender while at the same time full of optimistic sorrow that I knew that someday we would be sharing the stage in roles as emotionally draining as Othello and Desdemona. She seemed to be close to tears, the kind that only come from finding out that one's dreams will always remain just that. She had enthralled me with admiration at the soft look on her face, the kind that arises from emotional pain mixed with joy and gives women the beauty that can only be brought out by something so powerful that can only come from the inner part of one's being.
Hers was in many ways a typical Russian story, if there can be such a thing. It was tragedy with a touch of hope amongst the grief that can be brought on at such moments in one's life. The hope in her story was represented in the form of her "babushka", who stopped her sighing by telling her that if one looses a dream one can always find another (something she eventually did) and hopefully it would be one that did not require her grandmamma to have to do her homework.
Eventually every river must reach the sea, as every conversation in our apartment had to end up on the subject of music and that is when we all praised Gosia and Vladimir for their wonderful displays of craftsmanship on the piano. Arturo went as far as to say that he had never heard any single student play like that and that it would be an honor for him to someday conduct him in an orchestra playing the same piece he had that evening. Vladimir repaid this complement with one of his own; saying that a conductor like him could only bring out the best in any orchestra he conducted. My mother who had been listening carefully as she always did added that a combination like them would impressive anybody.
As the conversation continued flowing its course, the subject switched to Russian opera which for some reason had never enjoyed the popularity of Italian or even German opera. The reasons were not the point of this conversation but what Svetlana was aiming to do. She longed to raise the esteem of Russian opera, so it could be on a par with Russian ballet. Svetlana even told us that she and her husband felt like ambassadors of Russian music and culture, which they felt needed to go through a renaissance; not only through out the world but in Russia itself. The topic of Russian opera was something that I could see was of great interest to my mother, who out of tiredness asked Svetlana if they could discuss this particular matter of great importance on another occasion. This being something Svetlana agreed to.
During the course of that evening I could tell that this young couple from Russia, who did not have children at the time had really caught the attention of my parents and vice versa; as they ended up inviting not only my parents but me to a dinner party they were planning to give in their apartment in lower Manhattan.
