Like most singers, I’ve occasionally been called upon to sing for the dead. When I first moved to NYC as a young singer, I found a job as the contralto soloist at Saint Vincent Ferrer Church on the Upper East Side, known as “Our Lady of the Cadillacs.” Shortly after, I got a call to come in on a broiling summer day to sing a funeral. It was one of the hottest Julys on record, so we four soloists were grateful not to have to rehearse beforehand—because we already knew the piece: the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah; in his will, the deceased had requested that it be sung as the recessional at his funeral. Sweltering in our burgundy polyester choir robes—which felt like permanently odoriferous saunas—our quartet solemnly entered the massive church, prepared for a large crowd of mourners; but no one was present except the priest, pallbearers (hired for the occasion, apparently), a scowling organist, and, of course, the deceased lying in his open-face coffin. The first corpse I had ever seen. The service consisted of the priest saying only a few words, asking, on behalf of the dead guy, for permission to enter the Lord’s heavenly realm.
The organist dutifully played the introduction to the Hallelujah chorus from his music score, but since it was a brand-new copy of Messiah, it would not remain open and flat, so in order to keep the pages from turning, he was constantly smacking it down on the music rack, while, of course, playing with both hands and feet, all the while uttering curses, as we started to sing.
By the time the pallbearers had exited the church, rolling out The Body (a coffin mounted on a Go-Kart!), we had gotten only as far as “For the Lord God Omnipotent…” every phrase punctuated by the organist’s “Shit! Shit! Shit!” as he swatted and slapped his score. Of course, we wondered: Did we have to finish? I mean, if a tree falls in the woods…. By the time we reached “The kingdom of this world,” in the now-deserted cavernous sanctuary, I noticed that the tenor was trying to control his laughter. How unseemly, I thought, how disrespectful. But then I saw that the soprano had totally stopped singing because she couldn’t stop giggling, while the bass was doubled-over. Now left singing a solo, I soon caught their contagion.… We never did reach the end of the piece. But we were paid handsomely. Hallelujah!
The deceased was a stranger, and there were no friends or family gathered, so I didn’t think much about our quartet’s appalling little descent into Handelian hysterics. But the next stranger’s service haunted me for weeks.
In the early 1990s, I received a phone call from a lawyer informing me that a person named Mark had left a sum of money in his will for me, as payment for me to sing at his memorial service in Boston. “Surely,” I said, “you must have me confused with someone else. I don’t know this Mark.” The caller persisted: “Mark specified in his will that he wanted you to sing Brahms’s Opus 91 at his service.” Hmm, I said, “That’s quite specific! In fact, I sang that piece on a concert in Boston a few months ago.” “Well,” the caller said, “he must have heard you then and decided that that’s what he wanted sung at his service. He had planned his own funeral and memorial service down to the minutest detail, as he had AIDS and knew that his death was imminent.”
So I agreed, and flew up to Boston on Mark’s dime. A total stranger.
My singing of Brahms Op. 91 took place at the beginning of the service. This time, clothed in a somber black dress and accompanied by a pianist and a violist, I had no trouble being solemn for the 12-minute duration of the two songs, their texts full of longing and resignation. After I sang, I settled in for the rest of the ceremony, which included numerous eulogies and more musical offerings.
I would have loved to have known Mark. Clearly, he cared for music in a serious way. A friend of his read Mark’s journal entries from the weeks before he died, covering everything from his abject fear of pain and death to his wondering whether he should buy toilet paper on sale at the supermarket but the offer was only for those 24-mega-roll packages, and he didn’t think he’d live long enough to use it all. I got to meet Mark’s lovely family. RIP, Mark. I wish I could have known you.