Mon coeur

[goldhands]

Mezzo Soprano Angela Matarese:
Mon Coeur by C. Saint-Saens
From Sansone et Dalila

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Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix

Comments

Re: Imprinted on my Heart

[forioscribe]

My dear Maestro I, too, have vivid memories of our many interesting and sometimes intense conversations and of course when you mention Elio's, La Piazzetta, and La tinaia I can see and feel them as if I had never left the island!

At 69 years of age I remember as a boy that radio was the main source of home entertainment, and the amazing technology of TV was just getting started. Foreign countries were truly distant abstractions, not entirely real outside newspaper stories. Transatlantic telephone calls were too expensive to use regularly, and what we now call "snail mail" took weeks or longer.

And now? I may with a click of the mouse enjoy a recital from an island in the Bay of Naples as if I were still there. Who could have imagined such wonders back in the 1950s?

I have a rather large apartment in Allentown, PA, which is only a two-hour bus ride from New York City. Allentown is a fifteen minute drive from Bethlehem, PA, where La Piccola Principessa lives with her bossy-boots aunt. Maria and I have resumed our romance, of course, although her various adoption traumas and brain tumor surgery has left her somewhat cognitively impaired. The impairment is subtle, and manifests itself as a display of utterly charming innocence and child-like behavior, as if she were still a teenaged girl. But at other times she is surprisingly mature and alert and runs conversational circles around me.

Like you, she decided to upgrade her point-and-shoot camera and bought a semi-professional Canon. Relatives asked her to do the photography at a wedding in rural Pennsylvania, and also one in Tucson, Arizona. She gave me the memory cards afterward, so I could download and edit the images for her.

To my great happiness and pride, her work was utterly magnificent! She has a natural talent as a photographer, an unerring eye for composition, which of course can't be taught. Either one has it, or one doesn't.

Currently I'm working on building her a website that will feature her wedding photos as well as her fine arts photography,
here. She's also done an experimental work entitled "Novella in black and white," which she's asked me to rename as "Mon Voyage en Noir et Blanc,"
here.

As for me, I'm still trying to sell FELLINI'S ANGEL and LOVE STORIES to publishers in New York, and am deep into the sometimes painful work of excavating my ancient history. I awaken at 0400 every morning, and work on it, relentlessly. Creating a memoir is not so much an emotional problem as an aesthetic one. Much of my childhood history, as you well know, is unpleasant and disturbing. The challenge is finding ways to make it all palatable, readable.

Finally, here is a recent photo of you know who!

j