Her Own Voice: The Majesty of Dame Janet Baker

Thoughts on a singer who will never be lost to the world.

I am forever fascinated by the cults of celebrity in Western art music. Perhaps it is the constraints of their performing lifetime which make singers particular objects of dedication. I openly admit that there are singers for whom I will always break and always at the top of that list is Dame Janet Baker. Baker is one of the few British singers of the generation to emerge after World War Two still living, but she has lost none of her vitality in retirement. Like many of my generation, I can and will only experience her voice after the fact through her recordings. Indeed, it is through her recordings that I can credit Baker with two of the most moving spiritual experiences of my life. The first was hearing “He was despised and rejected” from Messiah which turned an afternoon of house painting into a soul-searching self-confession of spirituality, and the second is really a repeating instance. Every time I hear her any of her three renditions of “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” I am truly and gloriously lost to the world.

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Jump Starters: Fragments on the Art of Opera Introduction

A social media exchange about introducing a coworker to their first opera got me to thinking and sent me back to a blog post sitting on the back burner for a few years. There’s no single best answer to the questions I’m asking.

This is half their delight.

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