Photo at right: Bill Scharf and the author. Rockville, MD, 1995.I'm listening, as I write this, to an old monaural recording of Beethoven's opera Fidelio.
This live performance, on CD, was made April 26, 1952 in Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was then called West Germany.
I myself would not visit Frankfurt until the mid-1980s. In fact in 1952 I wasn't even born yet.
But William J. Scharf of Cleveland, Ohio was alive, kicking and collecting recordings like this one, and it would be my great good fortune, 37 years later, to make his acquaintance, not to mention the acquaintance of his collection of opera recordings.
And that's not to mention the acquaintance of his remarkable personality. Now that was my great good fortune.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live to a biblical old age, as George Burns and Bob Hope did.
If you ask most people whether they'd like to live to be 100 years old, most people would say yes reflexively -- dying isn't on the "fave" list of anyone I can think of.
But supposing you did live to be 100 years old. Since so few people live that long, by the time you got there, just about everyone you knew in your life would be gone, that is unless you were still making friends in your eighties and nineties.
My pal Bill Scharf didn't live to be 100. He died Aug. 8, 2006 at age 87. But I just know that if Bill had made it to the century mark, he wouldn't have lacked for living friends. He was that kind of guy.
Take me, for example.
What brought Bill and me together was music. Vocal music, to be precise. Bill was a lifelong, passionate, one might almost say fanatic opera lover. He had the most incredible archive of recorded vocal music I have ever encountered. He aspired to sing opera when he was young, never quite got there, but nevertheless followed it, studied it and enjoyed it with a vengeance throughout his life.
It was around 1989 that Bill and I met, through the mail. I was living in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and working at the American embassy there. Bill was living right where he always had, in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Brook Park. Bill spent nearly his whole life there, and by the way, with Bill gone, how many people are left now who saw, live and in person, Bob Feller pitch for the Cleveland Indians?
And How did a 33 year-old guy living in Brazil and a 70 year-old guy living in Ohio find each other?
Music, like I said. I was searching for a rare, out-of-print Philips recording by the Irish tenor Frank Patterson, a set of Irish songs arranged by Beethoven for voice, piano and cello. I had been carrying this recording around for years on a cassette tape, pirated from an LP that I'd borrowed from the local public library when I was in college. But the tape was getting worn out, and I was looking for someone who might have this recording and might be willing to make me a fresh pirate copy.
I wrote a letter to the Musical Heritage Society, asking if any of my fellow collectors out there might have this recording and be willing to either make me a copy of it or sell it to me. My letter ran in the next issue of Musical Heritage Review. To my surprise, several of my fellow collectors didn't even wait for me to send them blank tapes or postage: they just went ahead and copied this record, or in some cases a similar one by tenor Bob White, and dropped them in the mail to me.
Bill Scharf was one of these generous pirate-copiers, and along with his tape he tucked in a gracious note saying, among other things, that he, too, had a fondness for this recording.
I tapped out a polite thank-you note and dropped it into the mail going back to the U.S. (The Internet and e-mail were still about four years away at this point.)
Little did I know it, but I'd tapped into a gusher of music. It's a common trait among collectors to enjoy sharing their stuff. Bill really enjoyed it -- seldom would I mention a particular composer or singer in a letter to him that Bill would not respond by filling another cassette tape with bleeding chunks and historic tracks and firing it off to me. He had been recording the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts off the airwaves for decades and had an archive of LPs that must easily have been large enough to keep a radio station going for a year. Soon I had a whole shelf full of cassette tapes, riches from Bill's cornucopia of historic vocal recordings.
I wanted to reciprocate somehow, but how? Yes, I was a collector too, but comparing my collection with his was tantamount to comparing Belgium's nuclear arsenal with Russia's. Finally I selected one of the gems of my collection, a recording I'd made off the radio a few years earlier of Karl Boehm conducting the Bruckner 7th, and sent it off to Bill. Bill immediately protested that I mustn't worry about returning his generosity, but I wanted to. "We're collectors, you and I," I wrote back. "One of the things collectors like to do is share their stuff with each other."
Sure, by now I was regularly sending him money to buy tapes with: if he was going to record all these hundreds of hours of music for me, the least I could do was pay for the tapes and postage. But I found other ways to pay him back. A few years after we first met through the mail, I, now posted at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and able to buy Russian tourist goodies by the carload at the famous Ismailova flea market, went around and asked all my friends back in the states who would like a Russian fur hat, and what kind and what size? Soon I was dispatching a parcel to Brook Park, Ohio containing a brown beaver hat for Bill and a white fox hat for his wife Olivia, known to one and all as "Ollie." Bill dubbed me "The Moscow hat man."
We met in the flesh only once, Bill and I. A year or so after the Moscow experience, I was back in Washington, D.C. when the news suddenly came that Ollie had died from emphysema. A nurse for many years, she had nonetheless maintained a heavy smoking habit. Bill wasn't in the habit of talking about his or his family's troubles, so Olivia's death took me completely by surprise (as would Bill's 11 years later.) I got on the phone and called him. We talked for a long time. Bill was a very devout Catholic and was counting on his faith to see him through this. I remember being struck by the stoicism of his comment that "Now it's just me and the dog."
Bill's son, Bill Jr. lived in Rockville, MD., just a short drive from my digs on Capitol Hill. Bill Sr. announced one week that he was coming to Rockville to visit Bill Jr. and his family. Would I like to meet for lunch? Of course I would. The following Saturday, with directions I'd gotten from Bill Jr., I drove out to his house in Rockville.
There I finally met Bill. He wasn't especially tall, but he was physically imposing: big hands, a firm handshake, and the kind of forceful baritone voice you might expect from someone who had once aspired to be an opera singer. After I'd been introduced to Bill Jr.'s family, Bill and I quickly hustled off in my 1990 Geo Storm to get some lunch. We went to a place that made excellent gyros sandwiches and had a nice long chat while we noshed on them. Bill had done a little bit of just about everything in his pre-retirement life, from writing and editing corporate newsletters to selling insurance to painting houses. He had some stories to tell, but none was quite so remarkable as the story he told that dated from his wife Olivia's funeral, just a month or so earlier.
I've mentioned that Bill was devout. He told me of how, the night Olivia died, he had prayed fervently for a sign. Acknowledging that he was way out of line having the audacity to make such a request of the Almighty, he nevertheless did make this request: if indeed Olivia was with God that night, Bill's entreaty went, would God...well, what? He had to think about it for a minute. "Have someone give me a rose," he related praying. "Or they don't even have to give me a rose. Just have someone call my attention to a rose."
That, Bill told me, had been his prayer.
The very next morning, he continued, he went to his daughter's house, where a family get-together had been planned following a memorial service for Ollie.
"I knocked on the door, and I swear, the moment my daughter opened it, the first thing she did was take me by the arm and say, 'Look, Dad! Over here on the table! Someone sent the most beautiful roses!' And there on the table was a bouquet of one dozen absolutely gorgeous roses. Throughout that day, people kept steering me toward that table and pointing out those roses. Finally I whispered, 'Enough, already, Lord. I get the message!"
I countered with my own recent brush with the paranormal. "Okay, you've told me your story. Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous," I said. "The other day I was reading Calvin and Hobbes because I never miss it, and at the bottom of the same page was my horoscope. It said, 'Count your change! Confusion exists with regard to an expense account! If you're not careful, you'll end up paying a bill you've already paid!' Just the day before I'd gotten a notice from the State Department claiming I had $1,750 in unvouchered travel advances from 1991."
I liked Bill's story better.
Watching the calendar as the new millenium approached, I realized that Bill was past 80 now, and I began to wonder, as the years went by, how I would find out when and if he had died, seeing as how he was now a widower. But he moved from Brook Park to another part of Ohio to be nearer some of his children, so at least he wasn't completely alone. By now we were staying in touch, sporadically, by e-mail. His eyesight was going, as evidenced by the typos in his messages. But he wasn't slowing down; as the new century dawned he was in the middle of a new project: transferring his entire massive archive, or as much as of it as he could manage, from the older tape and LP media to CDs.
In one of his e-mails to me in California, where I was by now living, he mentioned having had a complete checkup recently, but then added, "The doctor declared me good for another 100,000 miles."
I was blogging by now. Bill wasn't much of a blog-reader (not surprising, given that his eyesight was failing) but he did take time out from his busy archiving schedule to shoot me a nasty e-mail informing me that what I had just written criticising the teaching of Intelligent Design in biology classes was "bilge." This was the first negative thing he'd ever said to me. But it didn't stop him from continuing to share with me the riches of his collection, now coming packaged in handsome home-burned CDs with labels showing them clearly to be products of the "Scharf Lab and Archive."
It was completely in character for Bill to not bother mentioning that he had lung cancer. But I have a well-developed sense of the ominous, and when an e-mail popped into my inbox around mid-August of this year, with the subject line "Regarding William Scharf," I knew it wasn't going to be anything good. Bill Jr. in Rockville was informing everyone in Bill senior's Yahoo e-mail address book, a large company of which I was part, that his father had passed away a week earlier.
Well, now I don't have to wonder anymore. There's nothing left now but to be grateful. Grateful to Bill for having lived, grateful to whatever God there may be for allowing me to know him, and of course grateful for the 17-year bounty that I was permitted to enjoy through my long-distance association with this remarkable wannabe singer of long ago who made the service of a great art form his life's consuming passion. "May your last thinks all be thanks," as W.H. Auden wrote. Bill, thanks for your life and thanks for the music.
Coming up after Fidelio, Grace Bumbry and Shirley Verrett in Concert, Convent Garden, 4/25/82. I'm gonna crank this baby up loud. Let the neighbors complain if they want. Music, on this night, knows no regrets.
