45 years on, and this soprano's 3-minute Beethoven performance is still seared into the memory... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to Rediscovering Carmen Bustamante by Colm Tóibín above.
In 'The Dead' by James Joyce, Aunt Kate, in a discussion about singers, announces that for her there was only one tenor. ‘To please me, I mean. But I suppose none of you ever heard of him.’ His name, she said, ‘was Parkinson. I heard him when he was in his prime and I think he had then the purest tenor voice that was ever put into a man’s throat.’
But the others in the company have never heard of him.
Scholars have suggested that this is Joyce’s way of showing that Aunt Kate’s memory is fading, one writing, for example, that ‘it seems unlikely that such a group of aficionados would have known nothing of so remarkable a tenor voice as that evoked by Aunt Kate.
But I think I know what Aunt Kate might have meant..."
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
