Discoveries/Madama Butterfly

"But for opera I would never have written Leaves of Grass,"

Walt Whitman is said to have acknowledged in later life.

I first discovered opera when I was a child coloring on the floor in my grandmother's parlor while she listened to the Met broadcast on Saturday afternoons. My memories of the romance between my father and my mother are intricately bound to the melodies of Madama Butterfly. When my husband and I were choosing the music for our wedding ceremony we wanted to honor our parents with pieces that had meaning for them. For my Viennese father-in-law and Bavarian mother-in-law, we chose Mozart. For my parents, it was "Un Bel Di," Cio-Cio-San's hopeful dream of happiness.

I don't know that I would never have written without the influence of opera, but the motifs of Puccini and Verdi that filled my childhood have certainly shaped my vision of the elements of a passionate love story--the backdrop of a specific, climactic moment in history (the fall of Saigon in "A Daughter's Journey," the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in "The Hand That Gives the Rose"); lovers from widely divergent backgrounds thwarted by family, duty or political upheaval (the privileged daughter Giulia defying her conservative family to embrace Paolo, the union organizer with the fiery pen in Dancing on Sunday Afternoons). The stakes are high; the language is lyrical; the ending is not always happy-ever-after but has integrity and coherence in the midst of great sacrifice.

Has a piece of music found its way into what you do?

Inspiration/Die Mauer

Twenty years ago this week, I was driving home from my weekly German class and listening to the news on the radio. Although I’d been living in the country for over a year and had become comfortable in using the language in my daily life, I didn’t always catch the nuances of conversation, especially when I was only hearing a voice coming out of a box instead of face to face with a speaker. And that is why I didn’t trust what I thought I’d heard the newscaster say, although it was a simple declarative sentence of only four words, “Die Mauer ist weg!”

The Wall is gone. It was such an impossible concept that I assumed I had mistakenly translated some idiomatic expression. But the agitation and exuberance of the normally somber German announcer convinced me that something extraordinary had happened.

When I arrived home I immediately turned on the television, seeking in images what I couldn’t believe in words, and understood that my initial grasp of the announcement had been correct. The Berlin Wall had been toppled. That night became etched in my consciousness as it did for the millions of Germans in both the East and the West who experienced it.

Being in the midst of such a moment taught me to pay attention to its meaning on a personal level to the people around me: the friend who was able to baptize her infant daughter in her husband’s ancestral village in the former East Germany; the new family that moved into our neighborhood from East Berlin who became fast friends, sharing meals, life stories and late-night glasses of vodka; the empty field in our village that was transformed nearly overnight into emergency housing for the thousands of East Germans pouring into the West in search of better jobs, a better life.

The emotional impact of that night on those around me became the seed for my novella “The Hand That Gives the Rose.” The political reverberated into the personal, changing lives, and that is what captured my imagination as a writer.