This past weekend I got to play the Agnes trill etude in the student opera performance here at the Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, and it was a delightful experience. The show was Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon (Cinderella), and in this staging the show began with a scene from Madame Viardot’s salon. I got to dress up as Madame Viardot, and I played a Chopin mazurka (that Viardot set to words for an aria in the opera) and the Agnes trill etude. It was really fun to wear a big fancy dress and fascinator in my hair. You can see me smiling with my friends and colleagues, opera director Susan Hochmiller and orchestra conductor Cesar Leal. My dress came with a hoop and you better believe I wore it, even though hoops were out of fashion by the time Viardot premiered the opera in her salon in 1904. But of course I was thinking not just of dressing like Viardot but dressing like Agnes. Here’s one thought: I mostly wear knit fabrics, especially in my post-pandemic, comfort-is-fashion lifestyle, but the dress had structure. Like, I really should have ironed it. And I kind of liked it. It made me think about what kind of fabrics Agnes wore, and what her clothing felt like. There’s something about feeling the clothing having its own shape. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there somewhere about musical structure…
I enjoyed performing, and I definitely performed for the camera, planning to share the performance with you here. And you can listen to the video here. But oh my dears, it’s a video fail. The camera was very much in set-it-and-forget-it mode, and I’m almost completely off-screen. You can see the piano in the lower left-hand corner, and get a glimpse of the dress at the end when I take a bow. But you can’t really see the rest of my performance. As videos go, it’s definitely a bust. I decided to post it for now, though, because there’s something so perfectly fitting about that: the live experience in the community worked, but getting the wider recognition gets stuck. The performance felt joyful and sincere, and I got warm applause, and people have been stopping me ever since to tell me how much they enjoyed it. It was a moment of feeling like a star in my community, and I know Agnes had lots of those experiences. But when she tried to make a name for herself in the wider world, it didn’t work. So let’s call this video a little art project about obscurity…and I will, I promise, make some videos of her etudes where you can actually see them, not just hear them. Stay tuned.