How did we get here?
I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s time…there’s no going back.
I began writing a long time ago, with letters to my wife before we were married. She worked in the veteran’s hospital in Ste Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, and I was an engineering student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She still has those letters, but don’t hold your breath…
I sang a lot, most of the time at the top of my lungs while driving heavy machinery. The advantage of singing to the accompaniment of a noisy engine is that you can only hear the best part of your voice—like singing in the shower. And you can’t hear anyone tell you to shut up.
I sang to my children, and they pretended to like it. My other gig was singing my wife to sleep…at least, I thought she fell asleep, but now with the benefit of hindsight, she might have faked it so I would stop.
Finally, my family had had enough, and the neighbours threatened to burn the house down if I didn’t shut up. Since I was addicted to the sound of my voice, my wife suggested two options…singing lessons or silence. She pointed out an ad in the local paper: “Madame Dubois is opening auditions for new students. Call…to arrange an audition.” A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, my wife said, “Come straight home from work this afternoon. You’re auditioning for Madame Dubois at four-thirty.” She handed me my lunch box, and her face said, “You had better do this.”
I had a repertoire of Western songs that would take a month to sing, but I didn’t know a single piece of classical, and Madame Dubois didn’t sound like someone who had a repertoire of country music, so I had to find a compromise.
Before marriage and children, my parents took me to New York City, and the lights of Broadway captured my heart. It was the heyday of the musicals, and we did what one did on Broadway in 1958—we went to see “My Fair Lady” and “The Musicman,” and I fell in love with Broadway’s music.
My parents bought recordings of both musicals, and I wore them out, learning all the parts in both productions. So, naturally, I chose a song from “My Fair Lady” for my audition. My wife, a bona fide musician who plays the piano, taught me “Wouldn’t it be loverly.” Liza Doolittle, the cockney female lead—Julie Andrews on our recording—sings that song in barely understandable cockney-accented English. I memorized the piece precisely as she sang it on the record, complete with the accent. My wife taught me what I considered the little things…like the right notes at the right time. Wouldn’t it Be Loverly – Julie Andrews
Mrs. Black, Madame Dubois’s accompanist, was a white-haired lady with a dry sense of humour. Right after I said, “I’m pleased to meet you,” and handed her the piano score, she said, “Are you sure you want to sing that? It’s a woman’s song, you know.” I immediately regretted refusing my wife’s advice to sing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
Madame listened to me sing Liza Doolittle’s soliloquy stone-faced, even sympathetically, but Mrs. Black sniggered and snorted more than a few times. Despite my nervousness and the lack of a covering diesel engine, I dove into the wistful song, belting out a rendition that would have been more appropriate for the national anthem at a hockey game. When I finished, Madame Dubois sent a smiling Mrs. Black home, and I’m sure I heard her laughing as she went down the front steps.
As soon as Mrs. Black was out of earshot, Madame Dubois said, “Young man, you are a Heldentenor, and you will sing Wagner.” I opened my mouth to ask the obvious, and she said, “Don’t worry about that; I will teach you how.” Fortunately, she didn’t laugh. I had no idea what a Helden Tenor was, and Wagner sounded like the name of a paint sprayer or a company that made brake parts for trucks.
The years passed, the neighbours’ complaints about my singing subsided, and Madame Dubois introduced me to Mario Lanza’s golden voice, the student prince mario lanza. She followed that with Franco Corelli’s magnificent sound, franco corelli nessun dorma, and finally I found my voice and Richard Wagner. The recording here is of the first Wagner aria I learned, sung by Jonas Kaufmann, my favourite tenor. It’s a love song about spring. Jonas Kaufmann: Wagner – Die Walküre.
On Saturday afternoons, I worked on my stock car in the company’s machinery repair shop. I listened to “Saturday Afternoon at the Opera” on CBC—prompting my pit crew to protest, but to no avail. I bought recordings of tenor arias from German and Italian operas and a stereo for the shop and, when I was alone, sang along with CBC or the recordings until I was hoarse. I sang the most difficult arias in the repertoire with all the gusto my vocal cords could take.
Eventually, with my wife’s support, I began to hear Lanza and Corelli in my voice and believed, naively, that I could learn to sing like that. With Madame’s blessing, I started to study repertoire with a teacher in Toronto, and he prepared me for an audition with the manager of the Canadian Opera Company, Mr. Herman Geiger-Torel. I sang a couple of arias for him, and he asked me to audition again in a more formal setting. At the second audition, this time in the Macmillan Theatre, I met Jean Cox, a Helden Tenor guesting in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of “Götterdämmerung.” He was an American Heldentenor living and singing in Mannheim, Germany, and his advice was a critical factor in my life. The General Music Director of a German opera house who was conducting Siegfried was also there but disappeared without speaking to me. Following the audition and a frank conversation, Mr. Geiger-Torel suggested I bring my wife to see him.
In the end, Mr. Geiger-Torel recommended that I not accept the contract that the music director had offered. He said my voice was acceptable for a German theatre, but my musicianship skills were, in his words, “so sad.” He also pointed out that I couldn’t speak German and a stint in a German university might help with that. Herr Geiger-Torel specifically recommended that I study with Professor Lindenbaum in Detmold, Germany, if he would accept me, and that I apply for a scholarship at the Nordwestdeutsch Musikakadamie Opernschule. I was successful in getting both the place with Professor Lindenbaum and the scholarship.
My wife and I had three children at the time, and none of us spoke a word of German. I couldn’t go to Germany without my family, so naturally, as I returned to Moncton, I wrote off the idea. But my wife said, “I think we should go. The children will be fine in German schools, and we can all learn another language—how hard can it be?” And that is why we recently celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary.
When Madame Dubois invited me to her home for our final goodbye, she showed me a medal. She said, “This is the Croix de Guerre I earned fighting the Bosch, and I want to tell you what I did so that you will know a little more about the people you will be living and working with.
It took her several hours to tell her story, and those hours changed everything for me. Madame Dubois was an opera singer in Belgium, France, and Germany during the war. A wave of dramatic events carried her to a career with the Résistance as a spy, smuggling Jews out of Germany and generally tormenting the Nazis. Her father, a prominent member of the Brussels community and a leader of the Résistance, managed both her singing and spying careers. But eventually, perhaps inevitably, the Gestapo caught and tortured her—she showed me her scars. But her father’s influence, together with the help of an SS officer, succeeded in freeing her, although the physical and psychological damage remained.
The first and second books in ‘The Songs of War’ series, titled Fools, Angels and the Devil and A Song of Sorrow, are loosely based on the story Madame Dubois related to me. Her story was the beginning of an odyssey, a journey through the horrendous years leading up to and continuing after the Second World War, told from the perspective of people from both sides who lived it.
The Songs of War series is not a historical account of events but a look into ordinary people’s lives through the lens of this terrible period. For the victims who wrote that period in world history and those who are suffering a similar fate today, life was a fight for survival. The fight will continue until the world discovers that tyrants have no place in modern civilization. There are no Angels among tyrants, only Devils. And Fools are numerous among their victims.
Robert Faulk