In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I pay tribute to Charles Griffes. Here’s an excerpt.
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This year marks the centennial of Charles T. Griffes’ sudden—and no less suddenly brief—ascent to musical stardom. A small-town music teacher at a boys’ prep school in suburban New York, he was catapulted into celebrity when Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony gave the world premiere of “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan,” his first large-scale orchestral piece, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem about an opium dream.
Born in 1884, Griffes had labored for years in semi-obscurity, turning out art songs and piano pieces that were modestly popular but didn’t sell well enough for him to quit the day job that he despised. The premiere of “Kubla Khan,” which was greeted with wild enthusiasm in Boston and New York, promised to change that in a single stroke….
Four months later, he was dead, a victim of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. He was 35….
For those of you following Mrs. T’s transplant-related adventures, here’s an update on her condition and prospects.
As many of you know, Mrs. T was airlifted from the University of Connecticut Health Center to New York-Presbyterian Hospital early on Saturday. She was moved there in preparation for the double lung transplant that she must undergo in order to cure her pulmonary hypertension. Her doctors agree that the time for transplant is ripe. While she’s stable for now, the attack of sepsis from which she’s recovering has left her extremely fragile, and the right ventricle of her heart, which was already weakened by years of chronic illness, could decompensate suddenly and without warning. This is why she was moved to New York: if her right ventricle starts to fail, she’ll need new lungs immediately.
The clock, in short, is running.
Would that there were enough donor lungs to go around! But there aren’t, which is the reason for the organ allocation list, which divvys up donor organs in the United States according to a complex formula that weighs the comparative needs of their potential recipients. For the past month or so, Mrs. T’s allocation “score” has been hovering above 50 (out of 100). This means she’s sick enough to start receiving organ offers as soon as a suitable pair of lungs becomes available—so long as it isn’t equally suitable to someone who outscores her. Because her condition deteriorated in the past week, the New York-Presbyterian transplant team was able to have her score raised somewhat higher.
And what if no lungs become available right away? Unless Mrs. T’s condition improves very significantly, she’ll have to wait at New York-Presbyterian instead of going home to stand by for the Big Call alerting her that donor lungs are en route to the hospital. The problem is that she needs more supplementary oxygen than can be administered at home, on top of which she’s still being treated with intravenous antibiotics for her sepsis. Fortunately, we live just thirteen blocks from the hospital—that’s why we moved to this neighborhood—and it’s possible that she’ll improve enough to be able to wait for the call at home. She won’t be going anywhere else, though, until it comes.
Many of you have asked about visiting Mrs. T. She’s not quite ready just yet, partly because she’s still worn out from the events of the week just past and partly because she’s temporarily deaf. She had to wear a high-pressure BiPAP mask for several days last week to force oxygen into her lungs, and her Eustachian tubes are so clogged as a result that she can’t hear anything anyone says unless they shout. No cards or flowers, either: Mrs. T knows you care from the explosion of support for her on the social media, which she’s following with amazement.
(Incidentally, Mrs. T had never flown in a helicopter prior to being airlifted to New York. I regret to say that it was a letdown. “It was like riding in a station wagon lying down,” she says. “The cabin was so small that there wasn’t room in back for anyone but me and the nurse, and there weren’t any windows I could see out of, either.” Sorry to disappoint you!)
So that’s where we stand as of today. While Mrs. T is resting more or less comfortably, she can’t go on like this forever. Sooner or later, she’ll have to have two new lungs to stay alive. Which is why I’ll end, as always, with a plea: if you haven’t yet signed up to become an organ donor, please go here to do so.
That’s always been a fine and caring thing to do, but for Mrs. T and me, it’s never been more urgent than it is right now.
Teresa Stratas appears as the “mystery guest” on To Tell the Truth. Bud Collyer is the host and the panelists are Johnny Carson, Dorothy Kilgallen, Dina Merrill, and Tom Poston. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on March 19, 1962:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.”
Yesterday’s posting in which I retold in exactly one hundred words the improbably melodramatic story of how Mrs. T and I met, fell in love at first sight, and fooled her doctors by finding happiness has been drawing a lot of traffic. Among other things, one of my Twitter followers read it and tweeted as follows:
This is wonderful. Now the question is which director, past or present, would be the best to make this movie. And which composer to score it.
Which led in very short order to the following responses:
• “I want Frank Capra, if only to guarantee them both a gloriously happy ending.”
• “Howard Hawks and Aaron Copland, respectively.”
• “Hawks. Play it for the laughs.”
• “The ever-underrated Mitchell Leisen (Remember the Night, Midnight).”
• “I will leave the composer to Terry, who is infinitely more qualified than I am in that department, but surely Douglas Sirk would have to direct.”
My reply to that one: “Oh, GOD. (Tears hair.)”
• “How about Preston Sturges, and the spin he could put on it? A little wry humor wouldn’t hurt, and he always did well with somewhat absurd, larger-than-life situations.”
• “The answer is self-evident: the man who mastered both sentiment and wit is Leo McCarey.”
• “William Wyler, with a score by Hugo Friedhofer. The only other plausible choice would be Lubitsch with a score of Viennese waltzes. I could go either way, but I can’t see any contemporary director making it work. It’s too romantic and-old fashioned and there’s neither CGI in it nor repeated use of the word ‘fuck.’”
I love all these suggestions, but I’m struck by the fact that the directors mentioned above were without exception golden-age filmmakers. In fact, the movie that I find to be closest in spirit to the improbable tale of Mrs. T and me is Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland, a 1998 indie romcom which I described when it came out as “an irresistibly charming movie about young love…Simply by taking romance seriously (for there is nothing more serious than comedy), Brad Anderson has arrayed himself unequivocally on the side of the angels.” As for casting, I myself think Hope Davis should play Mrs. T, but she would be equally happy with Laura Linney. Catherine Keener would also be a good pick.
Alas, Anderson has long since gotten out of the romcom business—he now specializes in thrillers—but perhaps Whit Stillman could do Mrs. T and Me as a costume piece!
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The theatrical trailer for Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland:
“Westerns are timeless. The soundtracks rarely are.” Lileks tweeted that pithy two-liner a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I love Westerns, but most of them have scores that are inoffensive at best, appallingly banal at worst. The exceptions to the rule are as rare as they’re noteworthy….
