"Matinées" Text and Notes

MATINÉES

to David Kalstone

[Notes follow the text.]

A gray maidservant lets me in
To Mrs. Livingston’s box. It’s already begun!
The box is full of grown-ups. She sits me down
Beside her. Meanwhile a ravishing din

Swells from below—Scene One
Of Das Rheingold. The entire proscenium
Is covered with a rippling azure scrim.
The three sopranos dart hither and yon

On invisible strings. Cold lights
Cling to bare arms, fair tresses. Flat
And natural aglitter like paillettes
Upon the great green sonorous depths float

Until with pulsing wealth the house is filled,
No one believing, everybody thrilled.

Lives of the Great Composers make it sound
Too much like cooking: “Sore beset,
He put his heart’s blood into that quintet . . ."
So let us try the figure turned around

As in some Lives of Obscure Listeners:
“The strains of Cimarosa and Mozart
Flowed through his veins, and fed his solitary heart.
Long beyond adolescence [One infers

Your elimination, sweet Champagne
Drunk between acts!] the aria’s remote
Control surviving his worst interval,

Tissue of sound and tissue of the brain
Would coalesce, and what the Masters wrote
Itself compose his features sharp and small.”

Hilariously Dr. Scherer took the guise
Of a bland smooth shaven Alberich whose age-old
Plan had been to fill my tooth with gold.
Another whiff of laughing gas,

And the understanding was implicit
That we must guard each other, this gold and I,
Against amalgamation by
The elemental pit.

Vague as to what dentist and tooth “stood for,”
One patient dreamer gathered something more.
A voice said in the speech of birds,

“My father having tampered with your mouth
From now on, metal, music, myth
Will seem to taint its words.”

We love the good, said Plato? He was wrong.
We love as well the wicked and the weak.
Flesh hugs its shaved plush. Twenty-four-hour-long
Galas fill the hulk of the Comique.

Flesh knows by now what dishes to avoid,
Tries not to brood on bomb or heart attack.
Anatomy is destiny, said Freud.
Soul is the brilliant hypochondriac.

Soul will cough blood and sing, and softer sing,
Drink poison, drink her joyous last, a waltz
Rubato from his arms who sobs and stays

Behind, death after death, who fairly melts
Watching her turn from him, restored, to fling
Kisses into the furnace roaring praise.

The fallen cake, the risen price of meat,
Staircase run ten times up and down like scales
(Greek proverb: He who has no brains has feet)—
One’s household opera never palls or fails.

The pipes’ aubade. Recitatives—Come back!
—I’m out of pills!—We’d love to!—What?—Nothing,
Let me be!—No, no, I’ll drink it black . . .
The neighbors’ chorus. The quick darkening

In which a prostrate figure must inquire
With every earmark of its being meant
Why God in Heaven harries him/her so.

The love scene (often cut). The potion. The tableau:
Sleepers folded in a magic fire,
Tongues flickering up from humdrum incident.

When Jan Kiepura sang His Handsomeness
Of Mantua those high airs light as lust
Attuned one’s bare throat to the dagger-thrust.
Living for them would have been death no less.

Or Lehmann’s Marschallin!—heartbreak so shrewd,
So ostrich-plumed, one ached to disengage
Oneself from a lost love, at center stage,
To the beloved’s dazzled gratitude.

What havoc certain Sunday afternoons
Wrought upon a bright young person’s morals
I now leave to the public to condemn.

The point thereafter was to arrange for one’s
Own chills and fever, passion and betrayals,
Chiefly in order to make song of them.

You and I, caro, seldom
Risk the real thing any more.
It’s all too silly or too solemn.
Enough to know the score

From records or transcription
For our four hands. Old beauties, some
In advanced stages of decomposition,

Float up through the sustaining
Pedal’s black and fluid medium.
Days like today

Even recur (wind whistling themes
From Lulu, and sun shining
On the rough Sound) when it seems
Kinder to remember than to play

Dear Mrs. Livingston,
I want to say that I am still in a daze
From yesterday afternoon.
I will treasure the experience always—

My very first Grand Opera! It was very
Thoughtful of you to invite
Me and am so sorry
That I was late, and for my coughing fit.

I play my record of the Overture
Over and over. I pretend
I am still sitting in the theater.

I also wrote a poem which my Mother
Says I should copy out and send.
Every gratefully, Your little friend . . .

Notes

Published in

Poetry, 114:2 (May 1969): 72-76;

The Fire Screen (NY: Atheneum 1969).

Collected Poems. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (NY: Knopf, 2001).

(From Jack W. C. Hagstrom and Bill Morgan, James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009).

Sonnet 1

In a roughly iambic rhythm, Merrill employs rhymes and near rhymes in an abba, cddc, pattern in the octet, and in the next four lines, efef, and then a full rhyme gg in the concluding couplet.

From Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015). "The bitter truths of 'Matinées' are framed by opening and closing sonnets that depict the poet’s first visit to the opera, including Merrill’s pastiche of his younger self’s thank-you note to his host, Mrs. Livingstone (a half-serious tribute to the Southampton matron who welcomed Hellen in her house after her divorce)." (423

Das Rheingold: Richard Wagner's opera, the first in the cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Metropolitan Opera Synopsis.

three sopranos: In Das Rheingold the Rhinemaidens who guard a treasure of gold.

Sonnet 2

The octet is rhymed abba, cddc, and the final six lines in tercets: efg, efg

Cimarosa and Mozart: Two composers famous for their comic operas. "Cimarosa [1749-1801] was a prolific composer whose music abounds in fresh and never-failing melody. His numerous operas are remarkable for their apt characterizations and abundant comic life" (Britannica Biography).

For a brief biography of Mozart (1756-91): Britannica Biography.

Sonnet 3

Rhyme: abab, cdcd, efg, efg.

Dr. Scherer: "German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) occupational name for a sheep-shearer or someone who used scissors to trim the surface of finished cloth and remove excessive nap, from German Scherer, Yiddish sherer, agent derivatives of Middle High German scheren ‘to shear’" (Ancestry.com).

smooth shaven Alberich: The dwarf who steals the gold guarded by the Rhinemaidens.

speech of birds: the Forest Bird in Siegfried (the third opera of Der Ring des Nibelungen, of which Das Rheingold is the first) gives information about the gold to Siegfried in the speech of birds. Metropolitan Opera Synopsis.

Sonnet 4

Rhyme: abba, cdcd, efg, feg.

We love the good: A humorous distortion of Plato. In Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima states that when we love we love the good and "want good things to be ours forever" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Langdon Hammer writes, "This view of human nature is based on Merrill’s knowledge of his own nature, of his desire not for 'a wise ruler,' but for someone weak and just possibly wicked. The flesh, he knows, settles into its red velvet seat ['shaved plush'], hugging its creature comforts" (James Merrill 423).

Comique: Opéra Comique, theater in Paris.

Soul will cough blood and sing, and softer sing: A variation of W. B. Yeats's line from "Sailing to Byzantium": "Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing." In La Traviata (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis) a young courtesan who is ill with consumption dies in the final act. In La Bohème, young Mimi dies of consumption in the final scene (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis).

Anatomy is destiny: From Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912): "The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual . . . . One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: ‘Anatomy is destiny.’" (Text of Freud's Essay.)

Drinks poison: In the final scene of Verdi's Il Trovatore, Leonora drinks a slow acting poison and dies in the arms of her lover Manrico (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis).

Sonnet 5

Rhyme: abab, cdcd, efg, gef.

The love scene (often cut). The potion: An allusion to the final "Liebestod" (Love-death) scene of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. They fall in love when they drink a love potion they mistakenly think is poison (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis). Magic potions also figure in Wagner's Gotterdammerung (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis).

Sleepers folded in a magic fire: The domestic incidents in this sonnet contrast comically with those in many operas. The "magic fire" may refer to Wagner's Siegfried and the magic fire that surrounds Brünnhilde before Siegfried awakens her. (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis.)

Sonnet 6

Rhyme: abab, cdcd, efg, gef.

Jan Kiepura: 1902-1966, Polish opera tenor and film star, who sang the role of the Duke of Mantua in a 1939 Metropolitan matinée (Paul Jackson, Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met (Amadeus Press, 2003).

His Handsomeness Of Mantua: The Duke of Mantua in Verdi's opera Rigoletto (1851).

At the conclusion of the opera, Rigoletto's daughter dies from the dagger thrust Rigoletto intended for the Duke (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis).

Or Lehmann’s Marschallin: Hammer writes that the opera Merrill "was most affected by, beginning when he was a teenage regular at the Met and Lotte Lehmann [1888--1976] appeared year after year in the role of the Marschallin, was Richard Strauss’s Mozart-inspired Der Rosenkavalier. This work, Merrill later declared, 'all but made me who I was.' What influenced him in particular was the attitude of tender, ironic resignation embodied by the Marschallin, the wife of a never-seen field marshal, who at the climax of the opera, in a sublime, soaring trio, accepts her age and gives up her considerably younger lover Octavian so that he can follow his heart and join hands with the equally young and innocent Sophie (76) . . . . . For young Jimmy, the work constituted 'a bittersweet, faintly homosexual, wholly survivable alternative to my dreams of immolation and all-consuming love,' which had been stoked in him by Wagner’s apocalyptic Ring. Over time, Merrill applied the moral lessons of Der Rosenkavalier’s plot to new life situations as they arose. But when he came to it as a teenager, the opera resonated with his family drama. The Marschallin’s grand home was easy to transpose onto the Orchard. He could see his father in the absent field marshal . . . while the Marschallin herself was crossed with his image of his mother." (76-77)

Sonnet 7

In a roughly three-stress meter, with the tercets in the middle of the poem, the rhyme scheme is abab, cdc, edf, gegf.

For our four hands: Merrill's piano music in his house in Stonington included works for four hands. (See the link in left margin to Merrill's music at Stonington.) In A Memorial Tribute to David Kalstone (New York? : s.n., 1986), Alec Treuhaft wrote Kalstone's "favorite piece as a participant [was] the Schubert Fantasy in f minor for piano-four-hands." (The unpaginated Memorial pamphlet is in Special Collections, Washington University Libraries.)

Lulu: Opera (1937) by Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885--1935) that employs the twelve-tone technique of composition. "Lulu is the drama of a young woman who sexually and emotionally dominates a wide range of willing victims, both male and female. Herself a victim of society, she seems to embody all the frightening aspects of the human condition, a combination of primal instinct and distinctly modern amorality" (Metropolitan Opera Synopsis).

rough Sound: The atonal sounds of Berg's opera may be considered "rough," and the Sound is also Long Island Sound, the location of Merrill's home in Stonington, CT.

Sonnet 8

In a halting trimeter, the sonnet is rhymed is abab, cdcd, efe, eff

Mrs. Livingston: See note to Sonnet 1.