Music that moves me: La Momma Morta from Andrea Chenier
When I was 25, my mother was dying.
I had never lived through the death of someone close to me. I was lucky. For 25 years I had squeaked through life pretty easily. I’m the youngest of seven. I was protected. And fate seemed to know it and agree that it was okay to keep me sheltered.
This is good, I guess, until you’re 25 and have no idea how to cope with disaster. I had no coping mechanism at all. I was living in New York at the time and spent my weekdays teaching high school kids. Then I would take the train to Connecticut to spend the weekend with my parents. Everything that had been familiar in the house where I grew up suddenly seemed like it belonged to someone else. The whole place. The furniture, the way the curtains blew in the windows, even my parents. The dynamic was so strange and foreign. I moved through my days like I was under water: everything felt kind of muffled and far away. But I just kept getting up every day and moving. There were siblings to handle the doctors and decisions, so I just did what I had always done even though nothing was like it had ever been.
I had a masters degree in English but no way to express my fear, my faith crisis, my loneliness, my panic, my broken and confused heart. Then I saw the movie Philadelphia. I don’t remember much about it—just the one scene when Tom Hanks spins around his apartment with his oxygen tank on wheels. Denzel Washington sits looking on, stunned as Hanks translates the Maria Callas aria La Momma Morta.
I suddenly felt as though my pain had a voice that was coming through someone else’s throat. “My mother is dead. The home that cradled me is burning.” The words from there on were less important. What resonated through me was the timber, the passion, the gut-wrenching agony of Maria Callas’s voice. I felt oddly comforted knowing that I was not alone. Even if it was just a performance, her voice told me that such a depth of emotion does, in fact, exist outside of me. I did not have a monopoly on anguish. And the anguish resolved in the key changes and then descended back into anguish, reassuring me that the roller coaster I was on was not one of my own making. It was just life. And death. And I was a part of it and had to find my way through it.
At the time I listened to Maria Callas’s La Momma Morta incessantly, I was living in a fifth floor walkup apartment in New York City. I didn’t have the luxury of Tom Hanks’s loft, where he could turn up the volume. So I lay on the sofa with headphones on, listening to it again and again. Morbid, perhaps. Comforting, definitely.
My name is Eileen Hornor. I live in Freeport, and this is music that moves me.