Today, I’d like to begin with some words about my longtime friend and colleague Peter G. Davis, who died on Feb.13. I was first acquainted with Peter in 1964, when High Fidelity Magazine, for which I’d been writing for five years, acquired the venerable Musical America, where Peter had been working. He soon began contributing the occasional review (he worked for HF/MA’s parent company, Billboard, during this time, as well), and within a couple of years succeeded to the post of HF’s Music Editor. This was when I got to know Peter better, since my copy passed through his hands, and we had many stimulating exchanges about the works and performers under discussion, as well as general goings-on in the musical (especially operatic) world. He edited with a light hand, but very attentively, and when he questioned something, it merited questioning.

Peter began reviewing for The New York Times in 1967, moved over there in 1974 as Sunday Classical Music Editor, and in 1981 went on to New York Magazine, where he was to hold the post of Music Critic for 26 years. In 1997 he published his richly informative The American Opera Singer/The Lives and Adventures of America’s Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Doubleday), which, together with Oscar Thompson’s 1937 The American Singer: 100 Years of Success in Opera (which it extends and, in part, displaces) gives us our most thorough, judicious, and entertaining account of that subject. Our paths continued to cross over that time, and when he left New York in 2007, we stayed in touch, most enjoyably over lunch or brunch at our favored Upper West Side bistro, Café Luxembourg.

Of course our tastes were not identical, but we were always in broad agreement about operatic matters, especially with respect to directorial assaults on the integrity of works and the general decline in the expressive power of classical singing. That perspective pretty much disappeared from the New York journalistic narrative with Peter’s departure from the beat. I wish there were a way to capture Peter’s default personal tone. It was always quickly responsive, but wry, and amusedly fatalistic about the state of affairs, whatever that might be. It was a tone that didn’t often get into his writing, which was direct and incisive; I don’t think a reader would be likely to conjure Peter’s personality accurately from his prose. For those of us who knew him, on the other hand, a tiny, quick dart would sometimes shoot past from the prevailing gentleness of manner, as reminder of his professional self.  

Peter’s health suffered a number of complications in recent years. It became difficult for him to negotiate the stairs to what would have been his quite ordinary top-floor brownstone walkup apartment had he not years earlier secured the air rights above it and constructed an eyrie that made it into a duplex—records and scores in orderly array along the walls—to which he was confined after a stroke a little over two years ago. He was sustained through all the travails both there and at their second home in Connecticut by the devoted caretaking of his husband, Scott Parris. I was fortunate to have an extended phone visit with Peter just a week before his final hospitalization, reminiscing at length about events and people long gone by. Although his speech was sometimes blurred, all his mental sharpness and talent for concise, dry assessment was very much intact. Happily, that characteristic impression, unimpaired, is mine to take onward with me. 

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My original thematic rationale for today’s article was, I thought, sound. As with my catchup comments on the Kubelik Meistersinger two posts back, I would look at two recordings of a certain age that had been in my “listen soon” pile for too long, and which pled for consideration together on three grounds: 1) each is of a fringe-of-repertory opera dating from the “autumn of Italian opera”^(I) years; 2) the composer of one (Riccardo Zandonai) was a pupil of the composer of the other (Pietro Mascagni); and 3) each stars a revered interpreter of just such works, the soprano Magda Olivero. On the sidelines, if needed, were two more rare works by these same composers in recordings long owned—but neglected—by me. For reasons noted below, that idea has fallen short of expectations. But the Mascagni work, Iris, has proved well worth exploration, and Zandonai will still hang about in token form.

The above-named article, together with some memorial words and a couple of updates, originally scheduled for today, will be published tomorrow, Sat. Mar. 13.

CLO