Grief and sadness is for lovers, too
Christian Jost's Dichterleibe US debut on Valentine's Day makes sense to the brokenhearted (even if it's not clinically acceptable)
vol. 2 issue 5
Greetings,
Happy Valentine’s Day to you. By now, because so many media outlets have to come up with some kind of “content” with Valentine’s Day as the newshook, you probably have heard that the holiday has its roots in an ancient Roman fertility rite where dogs and goats were sacrificed and then their hides stripped, tanned, and dipped in the animals’ blood, then used to whip young women as a blessing that they might bear children in the late fall or winter.
Well, if you didn’t know that already, now you do.
But that’s not what I was thinking of this Valentine’s Day. I was thinking about grief.
In my fairly new role as chief critic and assignment editor for opera, classical, and contemporary music at DC Metro Theater Arts (there has never been such a person at the outlet before), I gave myself the task of previewing the US debut of German composer Christian Jost’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love). It is a re-working of Robert Schumann’s 1840 song cycle of love poems written by Heinrich Heine.
The original is lyrical and lovely. If it were not, it would not be central to the vocal recital repertory. The poems are sweet, but naive, typical of the German Romantic era. They are full of what today we might call “emo” lines. You know, the “fate worse than death” kind of stuff.
But Jost’s version of the song cycle is truly about a fate left by death. His version is the long division for turning his grief into a gift after losing his 47-year-old wife, the late mezzo-soprano Stella Doufexis, suddenly, savagely, to cancer in 2015.
You can read here what I wrote about Jost’s reconstruction of the song cycle, including his thoughts about how he used his creativity to help make sense of the senselessness of his loss, and to regain a sense of equilibrium and peace.
Keep this in mind when you read what I previewed: in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association removed bereavement as an exclusion of what constitutes major depression. There is no clear cut line between grief and depression in the DSM-5, the APA’s diagnostic bible, but by grouping bereavement with depression, the ultimate result is that grief is now largely taught to medical students as being on the continuum of depression, and depression when it lasts for more than a couple of months, according to APA-sanctioned algorithms, is to be treated pharmaceutically.
I leave that to the researchers whose motivations for staking a claim to definiteive knowledge only they can truly say, but as an observer who has spent years editing, reporting on, and having deep, off-the-record conversations with many well-known academic psychiatrists, I suggest that when we add metrics to bereavement, we rob the bereaved of their right to become more alive. We judge their pain for them and boundary it in a way they might think means they’ve gone far enough into the abyss, and needn’t go further.
Pain hurts. Why would I wish it on anyone? I wouldn’t. But neither would I rob a person of the opportunity to be transformed by their grief into something more, even if it is a person with more longing and pain. They are the people so often made wise by their loss, wise because they are compassionate. Compassionate, because they know grief hurts.
Here’s the link to my preview again.
And here’s the link to Jost talking about how he used the creative process to help himself heal. It’s the same video as featured above.
Implicit in a pledge of commitment is the risk of loss, which is why Valentine’s Day is of course every bit as much about grief as it is about love.
I look forward to hearing this concert and sharing my impressions with you.
Whitney