Week 10: 'All of a sudden you'll hear the sound.'

Wonderdate: 1981

Wondered into being by: Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Wonderspan: 4 min

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.  In fact, you'll need to turn it up.

Good morning.  You are in love with another's song and long to hold onto it to hear it again and again.  This must be Paris.

And so it is.  In the 1981 film Diva, a young postman, Jules, is rapt with the song of African American opera singer Cynthia Hawkins.  She has never allowed anyone to record her sing but he lets his love make a thief of him.  While she performs the aria from Catalini's La Wally, he secretly records her (shadowed by 'le cool' Taiwanese gangsters who will give the film its plot by trying to steal and sell the tape).  Overwhelmed by the beauty of her song, he is undone.  At the end of the film, Jules plays the recording to Cynthia in her dressing room as part-confession, part-gift.  She is shocked, feels violated by his theft, then falls under the spell of the moment.  They find themselves holding each other, dancing gently to her music.

La Wally is an opera about love as necessary and impossible as Jules'.  When Wally's father tells her she must marry the man he has chosen for her rather than his enemy (whom, of course, she is in love with), she resolves to flee and sings the defiant lament heard in this aria.  Translated into English by Enzo Michelangeli, its opening stanza is this:

Well then? I'll go far away,
as goes the echo from the pious bell
there, amid the white snow;
there, amid the golden clouds;
there, where hope is, hope,
regret, regret, and sorrow!

In Diva, Cynthia Hawkins' character is played by real-life opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, whom we are about to hear.  Her full, bassy voice fills the aria with the passion and it literally cries out for.  Other renditions, even though beautifully accomplished, can seem thin by comparison.  And here they are, Jules and Cynthia:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTLF9TIx6lE

(it makes me cry)


Extra...

When he finds just the right spot at dusk to sing for his love, this performer is so accoustically adept that his song seems to come from within the air itself... and he is in his season right now for those with ears to hear and eyes to see...

• http://vimeo.com/12026944

Meanwhile in Antarctica, scientists are drawn in to the weird, white-noise singing of waddell seals and lie flat on the ice to get that bit closer to what is just beyond reach:

'You think in your mind that you're on land and all of a sudden you'll hear the sound coming up through the floor, you'll hear the shucks and the whistles and the booms that come and you realise there's a whole world underneath you.'

Thanks to Sunniva T for suggesting this one (from Herzog's film)...

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlrcbKlW4Tw 

This Monday morning we are in love with another's song!