What Once Was Poem by gershon hepner

What once was, should be, but will never be again,
the words we ought to sing when ending a fiesta,
are far too sad, and so we never say amen,
but sing instead, finch’ han al vino calda la testa.

Inspired by the death of our 8-year old cat Jezebel, who died quite suddenly in the middle of the night, sprawled on the floor of our upstairs library. She will be greatly missed. She continued to be loving and playful until the last day of her life and had uncanny telepathic powers, running away from us when she knew we wanted to take her to the vet and also, on one memorable occasion, when we wanted to lock her up for a Friday night because we had invited my ailurophobic second cousin Daphne Merkin to join us for dinner.

In an article on Walter Felsenstein, the founder of the innovative Komische Oper in East Berlin in 1947 (a twelve disc set of his opera has just been released) , Peter G. Davis writes (“Aria! Action! Making Opera a Director’s Art, ” NYT, May 18,2008) :
“Don Giovanni” was an opera that Felsenstein revered but had avoided for years trying to figure out how to bring this irresistible seducer-in-decline to the stage. His commentaries on the opera are intriguing — “The ‘Champagne aria’ is no more than a hysterical dream, a memory of what once was, should be, but will never be again” — but for once the cast, including several Americans uncomfortable singing in German, makes the performance seem almost like a work in progress. Still, the rehearsal sequences are revelatory. Just watching Felsenstein work with Anny Schlemm (another indispensable Felsenstein regular) as Donna Elvira on two lines of recitative explains a great deal of his stage magic.


5/25/08