A SONG, A DEATH

“Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

For Song Saturday, a beautiful song by Lucio Dalla, “Caruso” sung by Lara Fabian, an Italian/Belgian singer who trained as a classical lyric soprano before becoming a pop idol.



Caruso
by Lucio Dalla

Here where the sea sparkles,
And where the wind blows forcefully,
On an old terrace above the gulf of Sorrento,
A man embraces a young woman
Who has just wept…
Then he clears his voice
And begins anew his song:

“I love you so very much,
So very, very much, you know;
It’s a chain by now
It’s a heat in the blood
Inside the veins, you know…”

He looks at the lights shimmering on the sea
And brings to mind the nights there in America.
They are only the fishing lamps
And the sparkling wake of the boat on the water.
He feels the pain of the music,
Stands up, away from the piano;
But as he sees the moon emerging from behind a cloud,
Even death seems sweet to him, then.
He looks at the girl’s eyes,
Those eyes, as green as the sea,
From which a tear falls
In which he believes that he might drown.

“I love you so very much,
So very, very much, you know;
It’s a chain by now
It’s a heat in the blood
Inside the veins, you know…”

What power there is in lyric opera,
Where every drama is false!
A little make-up is all it takes
And with a little acting,
You can become someone else.
So everything becomes so small,
Like the nights there in America…
You turn and you see your life disappear
Like the wake of the boat on the water…

“I love you so very much,
So very, very much, you know;
It’s a chain by now
It’s a heat in the blood
Inside the veins, you know…”

One of my aunts in Greece died this week. She was 88 years old and she had recently had a bad fall. They did not tell us of her death until after the funeral. Distance and time separate people, families are split, our lives become propelled by so much forceful acceleration that it becomes hard to stop, take stock of things and do something before it’s too late.

My aunt represented another time and place for me, so distant that even her death has made little difference to my idea of her as living history. The last time I had seen her was several years ago when I had visited Greece and I had been surprised at how much she had aged and had become smaller, more fragile than what she seemed when I was a child. She had looked at me then with pride and had laughed when I was telling her of our life here in Australia. We drove out into the countryside and visited a place that I remembered from infancy, one of the earliest memories of mine form the 60s. How the place had changed and yet the spirit of it was the same. Because she had been there, both times?

She was the last left of my father’s eight siblings left alive and now only my father lives.
Vale, auntie…