My bittersweet memories of Rossini's Cinderella

There are times when performing on stage, be it as actor or musician, is a blessing for the temporary distraction it can provide from the stress and pain of real life.

My father, Glenn Winters Sr.
1909-1998

About a half-dozen years ago I posted a piece on this site about the intersection of my opera career with the final stages of my mother's life. You can read it here. Now Virginia Opera is in rehearsals for a production of Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) and that's my cue to post another highly personal memoir. This time it involves my father, Glenn Winters Sr.

I spent the 1990's heading the Community School of the Performing Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Each spring the Music Department's opera theater presents a fully-staged opera with orchestra. The limitation they often faced during my time there was a shortage of basses and baritones to play the buffo/daddy roles. All my degrees are in piano, but I sing well enough to get by in such circumstances. As an opera singer, I'm the pack of cards you stick under a wobbly table leg as a stopgap if you're having people over for dinner.

In this context I've had the joy of being cast in roles for VCU and other venues that I'd never get to sing otherwise, doing my best in Offenbach, Sondheim, Menotti, Cimarosa, Kirk Mecham, Johann Strauss, Gilbertt and Sullivan, Rossini and four roles in works of Mozart. The VCU production for Spring, 1997 was Rossini's Cinderella. The cast included Matt Burns, an undergraduate who has gone on to have a fine professional career, singing opera all over the United States, including several principal roles for Virginia Opera. He was our Dandini, but that still left open the role of Don Magnifico, so I agreed to take it on as a "guest artist".

This was a gargantuan undertaking! This role --- OY! Two lengthy arias, another solo with chorus, every concievable ensemble and several boatloads of recitative. Not the least of the challenges for me was a passage in the Act 2 aria in which Magnifico imitates a woman's voice, singing in falsetto.

I lack a falsetto and that's a fact. I listen to baritones who easily slip into head voice and marvel, especially when they play Puccini's Marcello in Act 4 of Bohème. When I try falsetto, it comes out like an elderly moose in heat. With the adreneline of the performance giving me some extra oomph I managed in the end to crank out something audible. Call it unintentional comedy.

But my memories of Cenerentola are dominated by extra-musical circumstances of the greatest stress imaginable.

On opening night of April 19, my father was clinging to life at Williamsburg Community Hospital, 50 miles away from the theater.

Dad had been retired since the early 80's from his career as Executive Director of the American Judicature Society in Chicago. The AJS is an organization of attorneys working to improve the administration of justice in the United States and around the world. He traveled the nation and the world, helping to root out corruption in the selection of judges by implementing a merit system to replace backroom politics.

In retirement in Virginia, he was a heart attack survivor and a champion of puttering around the house, battling the raccoons who invaded his garbage cans, nursing the Crepe Myrtle trees that were his pride and joy, and (naturally) doting on my sixth-grade daughter.

And earlier that day, the morning of April 19, 1997, when VCU's spring opera would open hours later, he staggered and fell to the floor in a local drug store while shopping with my mother. It was a stroke - a bad one.

As for me, there was nothing to be done; there was no understudy to step in and cover Magnifico for me. I had to drive up Interstate 64 the 74 mile trip from my home to the theater in a fog of shock and dawning anxiety. There were no cell phones in those days, making it no simple matter to obtain updates.

Dad was in bad shape; I knew he might not live through the night.

I realized that it would be important to keep this crisis undisclosed other than to the production's stage director and music director. Burdening the student cast, orchestra and the stagehands was out of the question: they had a challenging enough evening ahead of them.

Mugging shamelessly backstage as Don Magnifico

I found that hanging around the large room where makeup was being applied and wigs affixed in an atmosphere of giddy high spirits was intolerable. Whispering an explanation to faculty colleagues, I made my way up from the basement level to the wings of the stage where I could begin to collect my thoughts in the silence and darkness.

I do have vivid memories of the performance itself - it's like watching a highlight reel in my mind's eye. Now, over two decades later, renewing my acquaintance with Rossini's score (which I've not heard from then til now) is a phenomenon that produces a strange brew of nostalgia and unhappy memory.

As for my father, he survived the night and the next several months, but was never the same. Soon after he was assigned to a rehab center, but the damage to his brain, and thus his personality, was dramatic and permanent. The father I'd known was gone, replaced by a man who suddenly didn't know where he was or what was happening.

He had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Any of you who have experienced this horror with a loved one will be familiar with the destruction it wreaks on the individual and the family. My father, a devout Christian, was now a stranger with a hair-trigger temper who punched his nurses and wandered the rehab hallways trying to water plastic ferns. The following year he succombed to congestive heart failure.

It was awful not to be with my mother and my wife during that first perilous night of his stroke and hospitalization. But I have to admit, with selfish guilt, that I remain grateful to Gioacchino Rossini and Don Magnifico for the fleeting hours of distraction they provided on a harrowing evening.