Sunday Blast

                                                  This Ain’t Right!
 
            Several weeks before this pandemic struck I was on the phone with my Yale classmate and dear friend, Roger Schachtel.  We were lamenting the loss of several of our cohort --- six had passed away since  July, four of whom I had been quite friendly with during our school years (one was Roger’s freshman roommate).  Since members of the Class of 1971 were now 70 or 71 or 72, we ruminated, we probably should begin to adjust to this notion --- that from this point on we would lose more old friends before our 50th Class Reunion in June of 2021.  Now, of course, we know that will be all too true and it’s simply “how high” will the numbers mount?

            What is untenable, however, is watching people younger than us pass away.  The Lovely Carol Marie and I were discussing the tragedy of parents outliving their children and how unnatural and just “wrong” that is.  Not having children, much of my life was devoted to “other people’s children,” my students.  So it was horrifying to get word last week that Vincent Lionti (“Vinnie” to everyone at Blind Brook High School in the 1970s) had contracted Covid-19.  Worse, we received word that he passed away yesterday.  It is impossible to describe how devastating that news has been.

            Vinnie Lionti was a soft-spoken, brilliant musician who was beloved in the Blind Brook community and I would defy anyone to find a person who would say an unkind thing about him.  Always thoughtful and humble, Vinnie was one of those students every teacher loved to have in class --- thoughtful, very bright, respectful of his classmates.  Maybe in a larger high school (Blind Brook only graduated about 100 students per year) he would have been categorized as a “band nerd” or some such thing.  At Blind Brook he was celebrated for his talent --- in a school that loved   and promoted “the arts” (as evidenced, I’d say, by my lack of success coaching basketball!).  Vinnie went on to Julliard and played with the New York Philharmonic before joining the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1987, where he was still a stellar member.

            The Lovely Carol Marie loves the Opera.  I am not a fan, particularly, but, back in 1989 when I was teaching at Bronxville High School and living on West 75th Street, one of my students asked if I wanted a ticket to the Opera on a Friday night in November.  Her parents couldn’t go and, for whatever reason, they offered  7th Row/Center seats.  I knew that Vinnie was in the Met Orchestra and accepted the tickets for Richard Strauss’s Die Frauen Ohne Schatten  (which, I knew from my high school and college German classes meant: The Woman without a Shadow --- whatever that meant!  And, btw, it reinforced why I still don’t like opera).

            The New York Times review of the production, by Donal Henahan stated:

“Die Frau’”does not appeal to all tastes.  It is totally without humor, despite Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s belief that his libretto would be a modern equivalent of Mozart’s “Magic Flute.”  Its symbols are depressingly crude.  Nor is the opera exactly a pro-feminist screed. . . .
 
Henahan did , however, single out the pit orchestra:
 
To a great extent, this laudable restraint owed to the seamless nature of Strauss’s score and to mesmerizing playing by the virtuosic orchestra.  Some things do improve at the Met: the pit band of the premiere 23 years ago simply did not play this well.”  (November 15, 1989)
 
          During the first intermission of the performance, I made my way up to the Pit and peered down, where a young woman was the only musician present.  I asked her if she could let Vinnie Lionti know that “Bil Johnson” was looking for him, at which point I returned to my seat.  Within minutes, Vinnie’s head popped up from the pit, scanning the audience.  I got up and can’t begin to describe how happy he was to see me --- a wonderfully heartwarming feeling for a former teacher.  We spent a little time catching up and wished each other well --- despite his lofty position as a violist for the Metropolitan Opera, Vinnie was clearly still Vinnie from Blind Brook.

           I may have seen Vinnie again at some Blind Brook Reunion but I have no clear recollection of that.  I only remember that meeting just over 30 years ago and recall how clear the connection was, as it had always been when he was a high school student.  Vinnie was still the warm and humble person I knew. (Here’s link from the “Operawire.com” https://operawire.com/obituary-metropolitan-opera-orchestra-member-vincent-lionti-dies-of-covid-19/ )
 
             This is the first loss I’ve suffered in this pandemic, and I can only hope it’s the only one.  Yet it is devastating and tragic --- and there’s something about it that’s unnatural and not right!  I am at a loss for words, so I will defer to a far greater writer than I, Maya Angelou, to express, to some degree, my sense of loss --- and my tribute to Vincent “Vinnie” Lionti.

When Great Trees Fall
Maya Angelou
 
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
 
 
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
 
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe,
briefly. Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,
suddenly sharpened,
examines, gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
 
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls
,dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
 fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
 of
dark, cold caves.
 
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration
.Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be.
Be and be
better. For they existed.
 
                                                   Stay safe and hold your loved ones near.