On Wings of Song/Part Three

Summary

On his own in New York City for years, with Boa still in a coma, Daniel lives as a hustler—under a false name, to avoid being tracked down by Grandison. Social and economic turmoil make it hard to survive in the city without wealthy friends; Daniel is helped by Boa's aunt, who keeps his secret and finds him a home with the eccentric Mrs. Schiff, but he runs out of options and signs himself over to a humiliating life with a sugar daddy, the great singer Ernesto Rey. With Rey's help he finally becomes a singer—still unable to fly. When Boa unexpectedly returns to her body (briefly, before leaving again for good), Grandison finds them, bringing media attention that accelerates Daniel's career. Daniel debuts his greatest performance, during which he will either fly or pretend to fly; we'll never know which, as death comes for him in the form of a zealot from his past.

Chapter 11

I'm a temp myself

In 334, Disch used "temps" somewhat vaguely to describe people who had nowhere to live, having apparently fallen through the cracks in the city's welfare system, which otherwise generally provides at least basic necessities. Here, it seems to mean something more like being an immigrant who's still waiting for a green card, able to work but not much else. The harsher future New York in On Wings of Song either never had the socialist features of 334, or abandoned them after the series of economic and social injuries that are mentioned later in the chapter, so being a legal resident doesn't really get you much anyway except being allowed to rent an apartment.

Reichian therapist

Wilhelm Reich and his acolytes had a high profile in 1970s counterculture, and Disch had some personal experience; see 334.

New York had reduced its (legal) population to two and a half million

Combined with the other 2.5 million who are "temps", this would make the city smaller than it had been since about 1910.

the Sheldonian, on Broadway at west 78th

This fictional welfare hotel is, I suspect, ironically named after the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, a famous centuries-old university building used for music and theater performances.

Teatro Metastasio

Named after the 18th-century librettist Pietro Metastasio—or rather, after his pseudonym, since he was born Pietro Trapassi. It seems appropriate that a place with so much significance in Daniel's new life is named after a pseudonym, especially one whose literal meaning—more or less a Greek translation of "Trapassi"—refers to movement or transition (either in a positive sense or, as in medical usage, not so much).

the bel canto revival

Whether this future revival would count as the first one, or the latest of several, depends on what exactly is being revived.

To an opera lover in Disch's time, "the bel canto revival" would mean the surge of attention after World War Two—as seen for instance in the career of Maria Callas—toward certain 18th and early 19th century composers, especially Rossini, Bellini, and Donazetti. Very generally, the term has been used to describe both a particular vocal style, characterized by smooth and clear execution of long melodic passages, and the way that composers tended to write such passages during the time when that style was especially popular.

Proponents sometimes referred to the heyday of the bel canto style as a "golden age"—and the idea that this type of agile delivery of a solo aria was inherently more beautiful, or a truer expression of emotion, or showed a purer devotion to musical skill due to its technical qualities, has some obvious relevance to a story where "flying" depends on achieving a kind of ideal aesthetic harmony within the brain. The early 20th century composer and teacher Giulio Silva described the evolution of bel canto as a progress toward "true and lofty art", where expressiveness and technique were in proper balance: "The aim of the art of singing is to make of the human voice a potent agent of musical emotion, for when a human being is musically moved, he feels and communicates his emotion more strongly than in his usual psychological state."

The 18th century castrato singer Farinelli; standing next to him is Metastasio

Silva mentioned several factors in that evolution, including overall changes in how European music treated melody and rhythm, developments in musical education, the Italian language, and competitive innovation during the Renaissance. One that he did not mention, which other historians considered even more important, was the prominence in 18th century Italian opera of castrati. The extreme value placed on male singers who had had orchiectomies as children was driven by a combination of all the things that drive people in On Wings of Song: religious orthodoxy (female singers being excluded from sacred music), obsessive pursuit of an aesthetic ideal (castrati had a specific vocal timbre different from any other adults), and economic inequality (more and more parents subjected their children to this, and some children even allegedly volunteered, hoping for a career in music). Also, anyone whose life had been so irrevocably changed for the sake of being the best possible singer, and who would be treated as a social pariah in any other context, had a very high incentive to devote himself to his craft to the exclusion of all else—so ideas about castrati having inherently superior voices, stronger lungs, etc., may have been partly self-fulfilling ones. Castrati became prominent not only as performers but as teachers of vocal technique, who were so central to the bel canto tradition that when they started to die off during the 19th century, some felt that students who had not learned from castrati could not really be part of that tradition.

So, in the context of this novel, it's important that "the bel canto revival" means not only a certain kind of music becoming popular again, but also the return of a kind of sacrifice that would have been considered barbaric in our time—one that blurs the line between self-sacrifice and abuse, as anything involving money can do.

William Street checkpoint

Lower Manhattan as it is today, with dots for some of the expensive housing south of Wall. The area highlighted in yellow has been closed to traffic since 2001.

William Street runs roughly north-south through the financial district, and crosses Wall Street one block away from the New York Stock Exchange. We're told that "the whole Wall Street area" is a high-security gated community; probably this means Daniel is heading south on William, and everything south of Wall Street would normally be off limits to him. In the present day, quite a few luxury apartment complexes are in that area.

The origin of Wall Street's name is just what it sounds like: it was the northern wall of a Dutch colony that occupied the south end of the island. The future elite have basically recreated that situation.

phoneys

Finally Disch introduces the last and ugliest of the novel's relatively few futuristic ideas: white urbanites have started making themselves black—not exactly to fool anyone, but out of some mixture of ironic fashion, boredom, and paranoia about the fact that whites have become a minority group in the city.

The idea of doing this via a medical technique was probably inspired by John Howard Griffin's notorious work of undercover journalism Black Like Me (1961) (and a similar project by Ray Sprigle in 1948). But whereas Griffin's purpose was to highlight the oppression of African-Americans in the South, Disch's "phonies" have an opposite view, since they believe—or at least act like they believe—that it's now easier to get ahead with dark skin.

Whether that's actually true in the novel is less clear. Disch's narration mentions that in some cities Black people have "begun to reap some of the political and social advantages of their majority status"—which has happened to some degree in the real world in some US cities that are now majority-Black. Of course, in the real world, that only meant that they got somewhere closer to parity, and it certainly didn't cause white residents to cling less to whiteness; racists simply moved to the suburbs even faster. But at the same time, the novel tells us (in the discussion of castrato singers) that the poorest people, who would sacrifice the most for a better life, are still generally not white. The status anxiety that drives the "phoneys" is the kind that affects people who were born into middle-class privilege—even if, like some of Daniel's peers, they've fallen on hard times since then—rather than people who grew up in an underclass.

Disch said of his own performing experience as a teenager:

Happily I wasn't a faux noir. But in a way I was, because I was a supernumerary at the Met ... In Spartacus I was a black slave, in body paint. And I was also a black slave, face paint only, in Don Giovanni.

(Note: in 1979, "African-American" was not yet common usage, and "black" or "Black" was standard—with no clear consensus as to whether it should be capitalized or not. Disch in this book frequently uses "black"/"blacks" as a noun rather than "black people", which is jarring, certainly wouldn't be considered respectful today, and wasn't great in 1979 either, but was very typical for white writers.)

You didn't say what the position was

Daniel is understandably dismayed at being offered an usher job when he had imagined a singing role in the chorus, but another option that's never mentioned in this scene is the kind of supernumerary work that Disch had done in his youth—a non-singing (and usually non-speaking) background role. Soon after moving to New York at age 17, Disch lived with several dancers and got into this work through a friend of theirs. However, "super" work was so non-lucrative that Disch still needed two other jobs, so Daniel might not have been interested anyway.

We're doing Demofoönte

That title could refer to any of more than 70 different operas that are all based on the same libretto by Metastasio. We're told a little later that what they're doing is "a pastiche of four composers' settings" of the libretto, but (unlike pretty much all of the other opera references in the book) Disch doesn't bother to name any of the composers, which suggests that he just doesn't like any of those operas.

claques

In 19th century theater and opera, claques were groups of paid audience members, planted to give the illusion of spontaneous applause for a particular show or performer (or, sometimes, to boo them).

Bladebridge ... had sung neither wisely nor too well

In Othello, Act V, Scene 2, Othello—about to kill himself, after having been tricked into murdering his wife—describes his tragic flaw as having "loved not wisely but too well."

"Casta diva"

An aria from Bellini's Norma (1831).

Chapter 12

at Lieto Fino and La Didone

Lieto fine is Italian for a happy ending—a common term in describing 18th century opera. The restaurant's name here is written as "Fino" in every edition of the book I've seen, but given that there are other spelling errors also present in every edition, that's likely just a typo.

The full name of the second restaurant is given later as La Didone Abbandonata: "the abandoned Dido". La Didone is a 1640 opera by Cavalli based on a story from the Aeneid, except that when Dido is abandoned, instead of killing herself she finds love.

an insanity belt

This term is Disch's invention; the more familiar "chastity belt" is never mentioned. One possible reason is that (in the popular imagination at least) male chastity devices were generally the kind of cage-like things Victorians had proposed for the purpose of keeping boys' hands off of their own genitals—but it's clear from how people talk about the "insanity belt" that it has an even more restrictive design to wall off absolutely everything below the waist, basically an impenetrable rigid diaper.

supposedly ad libitum passages of fioratura

Ad libitum, "as you wish", is what "ad lib" is shortened from. Fioratura are major embellishments to a melody.

Chapter 13

mignon ... migniard

Mignon is French for cute and little. Migniard is the same but with a suffix that makes it into a noun describing a person, like "cute little [guy]".

L'Engouement Noir

Engouement means excitement or infatuation—this restaurant's name could be translated as "the black craze", presumably referring to phoneys.

Incubus

Alicia's nice little dog is named after a type of sex demon. It may be that there is some opera/classical music inside joke here, but I'm not aware of it.

Chapter 14

what was billed as Sarro's Achille in Sciro

Achille in Sciro is another Pietro Metastasio libretto that several composers wrote scores for. In Disch's time, the version by Sarro was a forgotten work that no one had performed in more than 200 years, so it was plausible that an audience wouldn't know the difference between this and Alicia's score.

Chapter 15

the da Ponte libretto

Lorenzo Da Ponte is probably best known now for his work with Mozart, but Axur, re d'Ormus was a Salieri opera, making it a slightly less grandiose choice for Alicia to write her own score for.

Chapter 16

No one was quite sure what marked the commencement of this brighter era

In dystopian fiction, it's rare for anything to improve without it being ascribed to some particular dramatic event; that's another way that On Wings of Song doesn't follow familiar genre patterns, as we see the country taking a more liberal direction, at both state and federal levels, for no clear reason except that time has passed. There's a hint here that some kind of political conflict may have happened behind the scenes ("a lot of problems had disappeared from the headlines along with a number of people"), but we never learn more about that—which is consistent with the novel's point of view being mainly limited to what Daniel, and other people who aren't very concerned with the big picture, would know.

Besides flight being decriminalized in some of the Farm Belt, we'll hear a few more details in the epilogue: Amesville now has a non-Republican mayor, and Midwestern teenagers have started adopting "phoney" style for apparently more idealistic reasons than what we saw in New York (Daniel's niece calls it "an affirmation"). Whether those are meaningful developments or not, the culture has clearly moved on since Daniel's childhood—but not uniformly, since the undergoders are still around and hoping to regain influence. This fits with Disch's statements about how science fiction relates to time, and to his own experience:

It's either about the present or about the historically accessible past. The plot I wanted for On Wings of Song was ... someone learning to become an artist over an historical period. In the twentieth century, you can't write about a span of twenty years and not have the historical panorama it's set against change—it just does. In my own lifetime it's changed a whole lot. So the historical pattern of On Wings of Song mirrors my growing up from 1952 to 1975 ... At the same time ... I was perfectly aware that I was portraying a future that I could see happening out of the present. History has its cycles, and one of the basic cycles is that it alternates between liberation and oppression.

the Puritan Renewal League .... pledging allegiance to a flag

The Pledge of Allegiance is likely what gave the undergoders their name, but we haven't seen the Pledge itself emphasized much so far; it sounds like this latest faction of them has doubled down on it to emphasize their nationalist credentials. This ritual will return in the very last paragraph of the book.

The League's uniform is described as "black stetsons, stiff white collars, red rayon bow-ties, and insignia-blazoned denim jackets." There's an obvious US flag motif in the colors of the last three items—but the first three would be Nazi colors.

all Sehnsucht and impatience

Sehnsucht is yearning, with a lofty spiritual connotation due to its use by German Romantic writers. See Schiller's "Sehnsucht" and Goethe's "Selige Sehnsucht".

"I Whistle a Happy Tune"

In The Brave Little Toaster (written around the same time), we're told that this is the toaster's favorite song. Both there and in On Wings of Song, it's one of many references to the idea of faking it till you make it.

a fauvish pastel portrait of Rey in the role of Semiramide

Semiramide is the queen of Babylon in the Bellini opera of the same name.

Chapter 17

Pelion on Ossa!

A very melodramatic choice of reference to express that Daniel's troubles are even worse than Shelly thought (because he doesn't drink).

My dear old Mammy

"My Mammy" (1918) is best known for Al Jolson's several on-screen renditions of it in blackface. The actual content of the song is straightforward: an over-the-top (yet totally nonspecific) praise of the singer's mother, or maybe a substitute mother figure, back in "Alabammy"; this couldn't be further from Daniel's distant and cautious relationship with his mother, and his total lack of nostalgia for home. Jolson's performance style is so manic and gestural that it's hard to imagine how Daniel would go about "exaggerating the body language," but it also has a formality that fits with Daniel's idea of a performance "more like kabuki than schmaltz."

(Jolson's "Mammy" scene in The Jazz Singer and in Rose of Washington Square)

"Nun wandre Maria" from Wolf's Spanisches Liederbuch

Spanisches Liederbuch (1891) is another of this novel's many references to works of poetry set to music. Wolf divided this collection into a "spiritual" half and a "worldly" half; "Nun wandre, Maria" is from the former, an exhortation by Joseph to Mary to keep going till Bethlehem.

Chapter 18

Had Schumann written a violin concerto?

He had—just one, which wasn't performed until the 20th century, making it more plausible that Alicia could've overlooked it.

Actus Tragicus

A Bach cantata on the theme of death. The passage Daniel had difficulty with, "Bestelle dein Haus", is named after the Biblical injunction to "Set your house in order" (because you will die).

Chapter 19

the Betti Bailey Memorial Clinic

Years ago in Chapter 3, Betti Bailey, star of Gold-Diggers of 1984, was still alive and comatose in an L.A. hospital after having "hooked in and taken off" to be a fairy.

Epilogue

He'd been called up for National Guard duty

Daniel predicted that this could happen to Carl back in chapter 9, when Grandison made the offer of firing Carl for him.

The Chicken Consubstantial with the Egg

This is a theology joke: the words consubstantial and consubstantiation are almost exclusively used in the context of Catholic doctrines about the Trinity and the Eucharist.

St. Olaf's College in Mason City

There's no such college in Iowa now, but there is a long-standing one in Minnesota.

a la turca march-tune

This name for a particular aggressively energetic march style was popularized by Mozart in his Piano Sonata No. 11.

If Daniel is following the same set list here that he used in his ABC TV special in chapter 19, then this song probably corresponds to the "recreation of the 'March of the Businessmen' from Gold-Diggers of 1984."

The dials of the apparatus showed that Daniel was in flight

Whether this is entirely a fraud, or is secretly true despite the dials being rigged, is left to the reader's imagination here—but Disch did express his own opinions about it elsewhere, so you should stop reading this if you don't want to know what those were.

In 1984, he addressed it somewhat indirectly:

The ending of On Wings of Song is positive for me but only if you interpret Daniel's end as a moral triumph according to a certain secularist view of Christianity that the book sets forward in its own pages ... for Daniel to be a kind of exemplary figure of the artist as a kind of secularized figure of Christ. And insofar as he fulfills the Christian paradigm with his last great stage show and his redeeming lie, he's become a figure of the particular ironical Christ that the book has been talking about.

His comments in 1999 ended on a blunter note:

In a way it doesn't make any difference, because morally he has done something. In holding faith with Boadicea for so long and in making a career of a singer (of whatever sort) he has met the two major moral challenges of his life. I think that the book does really say ... that there's no afterlife. You can't beat the odds on the grave—everyone dies. There is only art, and that's the transcendence that's there for us in whatever form you want it. And Daniel's had that to the degree that he can. And so, no, he hasn't escaped as a fairy. He was killed before that, and he probably never would have escaped.