Indiana Jones & the Paris Opera Basement

Andrew Porter has died at the age of 86. Obituaries here and here. Some of us of A Certain Age™ may remember skipping the cartoons and going straight to his reviews in The New Yorker (he was Alex Ross's predecessor there). We may also remember his intermission lectures on the Met Opera broadcasts, back when they did that kind of thing. For an opera-obsessed teenager, he was a big part of the cultural landscape. For a kid trying to learn how to write, his was the voice of accessible scholarship. (Not that any of those skills were ever acquired, of course, but it was a level to which one could aspire.) 

His singing translation of the Ring, picked up for Wagner class in freshman year, is still here, thumbed through often times enough that it is now held together by rubber bands. Notes in the margins contain corrections -- it does take a certain amount of geeky attitude to be a teenage Wagnerite -- but not without recognizing the translator's mas ninja skills in getting the lines to match up with the beats, and the words to match up with the leitmotifs (yikes), all without the English side gnarling up into some ungodly, unsingable mass. 

Most of all, though, every time we talk about a five act Don Carlo -- or Don Carlos -- which we do a lot here in our corner of the blogosphere, we're talking about his work. We're talking about him in the basement of the Paris Opera, prising apart pages that hadn't been seen since Verdi himself was in the room with them, and reconstructing a score from parts rejected not because they weren't any good, but because the demands of mass transit are immovable. 

That story will be in every obituary of Andrew Porter, because it was the centerpiece of a career more eventful than most. This was evident two summers ago, at Caramoor's Verdi in Paris Day. After a lengthy roundtable discussion in a hot stone courtyard on a 96° afternoon, he was still charmingly open to being button-holed by people as enthusiastic as he still clearly was about the complex history of this opera. I joined the klaatsch half way through, and it isn’t exaggerating to say that his eyes were filled with the memory of it, and he spoke about it as if he were there right then, in the Paris Opera archives, old volumes in hand, and not standing in the shade of a tree near a portable water cooler in the hinterlands of Westchester.

Then, because my mas ninja skill is in ending conversations before they’ve begun, I asked him a question he couldn't answer. Ten points to Gryffindor!

Do not allow this man into your discourse...or your country.