Robert S. Coren writes: And of course it's true that, in a literal and chronological sense, all opera does start with Monteverdi. But I don't think that's what Arnold (whose opinion I share) meant.
No, I know that. (I'm just remembering that How consistently and constantly referred to Richard Strauss's sublime masterpiece as Adriana auf Naxos, which caused me to imagine a production of Ariadne auf Naxos with yet a third element in the mix: that of a soi-disant humble actress thrown into this weird conglomeration of Greek tragedy and commedia dell'arte. Ah!)
Arne: Anyone who ever had the opportunity to get driven by How in his truck (at speeds approaching the sound barrier) got to hear: 1) Monteverdi's Orfeo...
Robert: I love this image. Although the idea of Monteverdi in a speeding truck... well, unless his truck was unusually quiet (unlikely) and he had a super sound system (less unlikely), he could hardly have done it justice.
He just cranked the volume up to the limit. One day when I was up in Littlerock visiting How for a three-day weekend a couple of years ago, he decided that we just had to go to Bakersfield (~Bumfuck, Nowheresville) for lunch at Benji's, one of Bakersfield's many fabulous Basque restaurants. So we got into the truck and took off. It was a hot day, as I recall, and a hot day in the Antelope Valley is a hot, hot, hot day. So we had the windows rolled down. Anyway, How popped his tape of Orfeo in the tape player and cranked the volume up and off we went. The image of Howard that is sort of the image of him that I will carry with me until I die is from that day. We were zooming across the Antelope Valley at 80 mph with the windows down, Monteverdi's Orfeo booming on the tape player, and How gesticulating wildly as he told me all about the Grange movement and its weird 19th century revival of ancient Greek agricultural rites.
Lunch was magnificent, of course, but then meals with How were almost always super-charged events. I was introduced to Picon Punch (yum!) and Basque food (yum!) and to a Bakersfield that I had never even imagined existed. Oh yes -- once we got within radio-distance of Bakersfield How turned off the tape and put on a Basque-language radio station. Anyway, he gave me a tour of the town and we ended up at a large antiques store where he found the perfect chair. And then we headed back via some small backroad with lots of switchbacks. I fell in love with the tiny town of Tehachapi, which How told me resembled parts of Provence. As we were making our way back we listened to Les Negresses Vertes and The Gypsy Kings, and then How put on his compilation tape of Allison Moyet, Jesus Jones, and Annie Lennox. I don't remember what we were talking about exactly, but at one point on this small little road while zooming along at 80, 85 miles an hour, How drifted the truck over into the wrong lane. (He liked to look at people when he talked to them. He was intensely visual.) Anyway, we both noticed the 18-wheeler barreling down on us at the same time. In a magnificent gesture How swerved us into the right lane at the last minute averting what would have been a pretty spectacular head-on collision and laughed, and then he remarked that it would have been an ironic way for him to die.
Arne: Fuck.
Robert: Yes.
The last CD How listened to was Mozart's Exsultate, Jubilate, Kroenungsmesse and Litaniae Laurentanae.
Shit.
