Previn broke up with me

Do you remember that guy who in seventh grade you had the biggest crush on? He was older and way out your league. He was friends with your brother, so you’d seen him at your house a couple of times. Each time you were terrified that he might notice you and you would have to talk to him, yet, in those casual glances where his eyes accidentally met yours, the butterflies in your stomach made you feel things that you were ill equipped to understand or describe. Each fleeting glance you shared made you long to grow older and into a woman who could hold her own against such an unfathomable force. And you did. You caught his attention and for a brief moment you held it, but before it ever truly began it was over. The world seemed to play out in front of you in shades of gray, dull and dreary in comparison to the world of color that he alone could show you. You were devastated because for a moment, you had the man of your dreams, but were left with nothing.

For me, that man was André Previn.

At this point, I expect everyone that is reading this blog to be thoroughly confused. For those who know who André Previn is, you have correctly assumed that he was not friends with my brother, we did not go to middle school together and that I have never met him. For everyone else: André Previn is an eighty-six year old German-American composer that I quickly became enamored with four years ago during my freshman year of college. After hearing Ariel Halt win the Concerto Competition by singing Previn’s Honey and Rue, I was obsessed. I downloaded every CD of his music and sat for hours in the music library pouring over scores, feeling and loving the music he created because it touched me in a way that no other composer had. I flipped through the pages of the scores, never daring to check one out of the library, because I knew that I was not ready to sing his music – I was not a mature enough artist or technically skilled musician to turn the notes on the page into the music he desired – and so I waited.

Finally, I was ready. I learned every piece, except for one, that he wrote for soprano – knowing full well I would not have the opportunity to perform them. I reveled in the time I spent learning the strange intervals and negotiating the tuneful melodies barraged by an accompaniment determined to corrupt them. Yet I saved one, my favorite, for my final performance on the Hill Auditorium stage and my final shot at the Concerto Competition: The Magic Number.

Two months ago I dared to begin learning the notes which filled the twenty some pages of the piano-vocal score. I began to memorize, section by section, the 17 minute long piece. With no recording to prepare me for the sounds that the piano would make or how desperately it would try to pull me off pitch, I entered each coaching terrified and left with stars and circles covering my music but with a lightness and joy in my head and heart. For the first time in my life I had fallen in love with a piece of music.

Monday this world was shattered. I discovered that Previn had pulled all copies of the published orchestral score and so that performing The Magic Number with orchestra would be impossible. I was devastated. It was more than the stress of having to find, memorize and perfect another twenty minute piece with less than a month before the concerto competition, it was losing a piece of music that had become such a part of my life that I couldn’t imagine carrying on without it.

I am aware of how incredibly melodramatic I am being. Yet, there is a part of me that cannot help but long to hear the colors and textures of an orchestra playing The Magic Number, summoning up feelings that I do not know how to express other than by singing. But it’s over – the piece has been pulled from publishing and I have no choice but to move on. Previn broke up with me, so it’s time to start a new love affair.