For most of my life, I have been a victim of what I call "lazy ambition." My head was always full of lofty musical goals, most of which I knew I was capable of attaining, but a deplorable lack of motivation kept me from attaining them—that, and being by nature a yellow-bellied chicken. All the more peculiar, considering I was also competitive to the point of pettiness; I resented the accomplishments of other people with talents like my own, thinking, "That should be me getting that job/award/compliment, I'm a much better pianist than he/she is!" Meanwhile, my piano was getting dusty from lack of use. Perverse, I know.
In school and college I was also unmotivated but, while I had musical aspirations aplenty, I had zero scholastically. Deep down, I knew I was a lot smarter than my grades showed; I simply didn't care. The classic Underachiever.
After being accepted into the Houston Grand Opera Studio, my primary goal was to land a job on the HGO music staff. But it had to do with simply earning a living, not so much with realizing my potential as a pianist and coach; although indirectly, by virtue of the fact that I put in more practice time than I ever had in my life, I did make some advances in that respect. However, whatever motivation I had managed to fire up subsided quite a bit once I did land the job. Within five years, it came dangerously close to burning out altogether. My playing grew more and more mechanical, my coaching dry and superficial. I was becoming complacent, both as a musician and as a person, and began to question why I was in opera at all. Some of my colleagues exhorted me to conduct, but after just one perfomance, I discarded the idea.
My life changed quite suddenly around my 36th birthday, when I met the great love of my life: a wonderful, talented, and intellectually brilliant man I'll call "C." Unfortunately for me, C was and still is very happily married and a father, so I have never told him my feelings, but am perfectly content and greatly privileged to share with him a friendship based on common interests and deep mutual respect. For the past sixteen years he has simply been The Distant Belovèd, and while I have come to know and accept his faults, I've chosen to hold up his many merits as inspiration by which to better myself. His intellectual curiosity, which is insatiable, has stimulated my own and spurred me on to expand my tastes in reading, art, and music, as well as my knowledge of Italian, which is his native tongue. He has made me see, all unknowingly, what a waste I made of my mind the first thirty-six years of my life.
So I began studying like a fiend, setting goals and attaining them. Improving my Italian was my first priority, and to that end I went to Italy twice to do a total immersion program. My biggest personal project during those first years after meeting C was writing a translation of Torquato Tasso's play in verse, Aminta. Not an easy task, that, even—as C himself told me—for an Italian, as Tasso's language is very archaic. To make the task even more challenging, I decided the translation should be in prose and in period English, which meant I had to limit my vocabulary and idioms to those in use before 1600. It took me about two years to come up with a satisfactory draft but, with C's help on a couple of particularly difficult passages, I did accomplish what I set out to do. I had and have no intention of publishing it (who am I, after all, in the academic world?); I only wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And it was fun!
There were other projects—translating more plays, studying Latin, poetry, and art, taking up drawing and bookbinding. A whole exciting world opened to my eager eyes and, more importantly, I was ready to see and learn.
Of equal if not greater consequence was the influence C had on me as a musician. After meeting and working with C, my coaching underwent a marked improvement. My playing also took on a depth it didn't have before. I had a new enthusiasm for my work, a desire to be the best coach and pianist I'd always known I could be. I wanted to be worthy of the respect C had for me as a musician, and I began to think of all those wasted, gray years of old as my life "B. C."—"Before C." Now I had discovered what I could accomplish with true motivation, there was no turning back. I even made another attempt (actually, two) at conducting, with the added encouragement and help of HGO's Music Director, Patrick Summers, but finally and firmly concluded that it was not for me. I wrote to C about it and he agreed, writing back that he thought my "true destiny was to be a pianist/coach."
Though my present venture as a poet began with writing spiritual poems in the monastery, C has been my primary muse. My ongoing collection of love poems, The Distant Belovèd, written for him, is one of the things I'm most proud of in my life so far. Not every piece in it is "up to snuff" by my poetic standards, but every piece is straight from the heart. I've promised myself that someday I'll send it to him, as thanks for everything he's unwittingly done for me.
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