INTRODUCTION TO THE OPERATIC EAR
M.C. Gardner
I’ve known Greg Stanford for four of the five decades that he recounts in these pages. Although this volume is brief Mr. Stanford’s knowledge of opera is voluminous—his preference, however, is for auditory and attendance over its reportage. It is only in pestering him in the off-season that this collection has appeared at all. If not operatic, it is most certainly an excellent recital—and aesthetic excellence (whatever its scope) the world can ill-afford to ignore.
I became a fan of Greg Stanford’s Operatic Ear on a bus ride. The bus carried myself, Greg and a half dozen other auditors of Mozart’s Idomeneo. It traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue from Washington DC’s Kennedy Center in the 1970s to a Vienna Court in the 1780s. Greg held his own court at the rear of our conveyance and discoursed on the evening’s many virtues and lamented a few of its regrettable ills. During our journey he threw-in a moving biography of the evening’s composer to bolster his claim of Mozart’s position in a select pantheon that admitted only a celestial quartet: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. I was in general agreement with him on the first three of those four. What was to become a preeminent friendship was predicated on an extraordinary immersion into the fourth of the masters named.
A radio program followed our attempt to listen to the Wagner’s Ring over a twenty-four-hour period. It was a weekend of musical wonders–I had been baptized in the Rhine–Wagner joined my pantheon to the strains of the Gods’ entrance to Valhalla—the complete Wagner oeuvre was intimately explored in the months that followed. A select few on that bus have yet to deboard — it was a mystical transport — musical dilations continue that magical ride at AnotherAmerica.net & in the pages that follow.
M.C. Gardner is a playwright, biographer and the chief editor of AnotherAmerica.net. His 2 volume compendium, Whitman’s Code: A New Bible is published by Patcheny Press.