Sweets to the sweet

You may recall, cher public, that a few weeks ago La Cieca challenged you to identify the blurbs for that new picture book (James Levine: 40 Years at The Metropolitan Opera, and yes, it’s available on Amazon!) Where was I, oh, yes. Anyway, La Cieca supplied three of the back cover blurbs and you were supposed to guess who said what. But what La Cieca didn’t tell you was that the whole quiz was pretty much an exercise in futility because the blurbs are so excruciatingly generic that anyone, really, could have said any one of the blurbs about just about any book ever written, or, for that matter, about any product or service ever offered for sale, barter or trade.

But, since you all played along so nicely, here are the identities of the blurbistes in question.

“This generous, big-hearted valentine of a book…” was contributed by “Terrence McNally, playwright and librettist.”

“This marvelous book…” sprang from the pen of “Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto”

and “This fabulous book is a brilliantly orchestrated and utterly enthralling tribute…” is the work of a man who need never fear running out of adjectives, “F. Paul Driscoll, Editor in Chief of Opera News.”

Now, by now you may be thinking, after three such carefully-crafted encomia from three such serious thinkers—and not a media whore in the bunch!—then, surely the contents of the book will follow suit. Well, depending on how sensitive you are to detecting heavy-handed sarcasm, you’d be exactly right.

Okay, it’s a coffee-table book, so the point is the photographs, and they are plentiful, beautiful and well-selected, if never revelatory. (Should a picture book be revelatory? You tell me.) I mean, we’ve all seen that shot of Caballe on the Vespri staircase before, so that’s not exactly news, but there are full-stage images of the Everding Tristan and the Ponnelle Fliegende Holländer, plus a stunning photo of Renata Scotto as Vitellia, looking as if her frontal lobe is about to pop through her wig lace out of sheer meanness.

But there’s text too, and, even as coffee-table books go, the content is strictly decaf. Everyone is just so goddamned nice all the time. Every experience Levine discusses was both delightful in the moment and halcyon in retrospect; every tribute from every singer fits into a narrow template: “I love and venerate Jimmy because he immediately realized I was a great artist and encouraged me in my greatness to transcend the merely great and to become sublime.”

To which “JL” replies, “From the first day I met [Signorina Whomever] I could tell she was destined for greatness. Then I told her one little thing that absolutely changed her life, and ever since she became sublime she has been thanking me the past 20 years. Oh, how we laughed!”

And then maybe the singer will come back for a parting, “No, Jimmy, YOU!”

I was going to quote some verbatims from the book, but I honestly have to tell you that it’s all so vapid you really wouldn’t believe I didn’t make it all up. So I’ll leave it at this: all these pages and pages of “It was swell… it was wonderful… really good!” left me thinking that working, or even coexisting with James Levine must be very much like the following:

httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EA867BF37D680441