On the 100th anniversary of his birth, here’s “Isaac Stern, Life’s Virtuoso,” a documentary that aired on PBS’ “American Masters,” back in the year 2000. The narrator is Meryl Streep.
I believe that’s Franz Waxman at the piano behind the end credits. Stern worked with Waxman on the Joan Crawford-John Garfield melodrama “Humoresque” (for which Waxman arranged his “Carmen Fantasy”). Stern’s hands can be seen in the film whenever Garfield’s character plays.
Months ago, I posted here to share news about a documentary that is in the works about Florence Foster Jenkins, the society matron and patron of the arts, whose singing was so appallingly off-target as to achieve a kind of eccentric sublimity of its own. The documentary’s reenactments are to feature Joyce DiDonato. I marveled that there would be three films about Jenkins coming out in so brief a span. (A fictionalized French film, “Marguerite,” obviously inspired by Jenkins, was released in the states earlier this year.)
The post generated surprisingly little interest, but since the Meryl Streep film has taken wing, if you will, Jenkins pieces have been appearing regularly in periodicals and online. Here’s something that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this week. It’s not the first piece to posit that Jenkins may not have been as oblivious as all that; rather, she may have been in on the joke, a kind of Margaret Dumont of the recital circuit.
Of course anyone who has heard her recordings, collected on the album “The Glory (????) of the Human Voice,” is familiar with the outlandish name of her accompanist, Cosmé McMoon. Who was this man? And what kind of surname is that? You can learn more about him here. (If you’re REALLY interested, there’s more in the reader comments at the bottom of the page.)
Truly, there are enough enigmas surrounding Jenkins to inspire the kind of insatiable fascination generally reserved for the Kennedy assassination and the Loch Ness Monster.
They say that bad news comes in threes. But who would expect THREE films inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins?
Florence Foster Jenkins, if you don’t know, was the Philadelphia matron and patron of the arts who began mounting vocal recitals in 1912, when in her early 40s. Despite her dubious sense of pitch and rhythm and seeming indifference to the nuances of breath control and the proper pronunciation of foreign languages, Jenkins shot to fame on the unintentional hilarity of her performances.
Her swan song was her “finest” – a recital at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 1944, that achieved a kind of transcendence through the sheer scope of its awfulness. Jenkins was 76 years-old.
Some find her recordings funny – and to an extent, they undeniably are – but it is difficult to not feel a little embarrassment for her and a touch of pity. If not for the fact that she was so blissfully oblivious, that is. This could have been the role of a lifetime for Margaret Dumont (who actually trained as an opera singer).
The most high-profile of the three films is one starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant and directed by Stephen Frears (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Queen” and “Philomena”).
A 2015 French film, “Marguerite,” is now making the rounds in the U.S. on limited release.
You may have seen my post yesterday about Yo-Yo Ma on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It just so happens that Colbert paid tribute to Ma in 2011, when the cellist received a Kennedy Center Honor. Watch it here:
Happy 60th, Yo-Yo Ma!
PHOTO: Ma with fellow Kennedy Center Honorees (clockwise) Meryl Streep, Neil Diamond, Barbara Cook and Sonny Rollins
