Vocalist.org archive


From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Mon Apr 23, 2001  10:51 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] The Medium


On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 wadijedo@a... wrote:

> Karen,
> Hi, I was told that the song The Black Swan is sung by monica. I wanted to
> know why she is singing that song and what does it mean. Just a little
> background on it.
> thanks

Monica, who is about 16 and provides the "special effects" for her mother,
Madame Flora's (aka Baba's) phony seances, learned "The Black Swan" from
Baba as a child - it is ostensibly an "Old World" folk song or something
similar. The scene in which the aria is sung immediately follows a seance
in which Baba hears the voice of a dead child and feels the child's hand
on her throat: this is a first-time-ever event, and it shakes Baba up
terribly, to the point where in the aria scene she is in near hysterics,
raving against Toby, the mute boy she has "adopted". Monica sings "The
Black Swan" to calm Baba down. IN a way, its rather ghoulish words are
irrelevant - it's a case of "music soothes the savage b(r)east". IN the
opera, Baba actually joins in toward the end of the aria, harmonizing it
into a duet. The song does calm Baba down...until it is interrupted by the
distant sound of the disembodied child's voice that so terrified Baba
during the seance.

KM
=====
My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html

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-----
We're sitting in the opera house;
We're waiting for the curtain to arise
With wonders for our eyes,
A feeling of expectancy,
A certain kind of ecstasy,
Expectancy and ecstasy....Sh's's's.

- Charles Ives



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