On my first interview with a prospective client in the Flatiron district here in NYC, I was to meet with not only all the company’s VPs here in Manhattan, but via speaker phone with editors and art directors working at their headquarters in upstate New York.
I was interviewing for a full-time job as Creative Director of their Bilingual and Spanish divisions. That meant the in-house employees would have to route the material produced in English to R studio T so we could implement the Spanish layers. Everyone seemed charming. Everyone was more or less accepting of the plan—except one, lovely but somewhat hesitant female voice, who said to me on the phone: “We worry about surrendering.”
Funny she mentioned that. Earlier that day, I had been listening to Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, a favorite of mine. This opera has one of the most difficult, legendary arias, although it’s technically a simple rondo.(1) At the climax of the aria, Zerbinetta, a soprano, sings her inconditional devotion to all lovers: “ . . . hingegeben war ich stumm!” which in English means “I surrendered without a word.” Not to compare love with work
—or apples with oranges—but this sounded like a red alert to me. I think it was a happy musical accident! I never got the job so she, the unknown, nervous Beckettian mouth from Binghampton, never had to surrender.
—Raúl Rodriguez, Abingdon Square Park, 11.13.2018
(1) Zerbinetta is the “lite” character of the opera when compared to Ariadne, the title role, who is dense and tragic, lamenting that her lover Theseus abandoned her. She tries to cheer Ariadne up by singing a lovely aria, Großmächtige Prinzessin. Although Kathleen Battle was unsurpassed in that role for a while, my favorite performance now is by the French soprano Natalie Dessay. The recording in our library features her as Zerbinetta (Deborah Voigt is Ariadne, Giuseppe Sinopoli conducts the Orchestra of Staatskapelle of Dresden). Check also a YouTube version of her Zerbinetta in modern, almost punk costumes. She’s hilarious.