Just a quick post so that my few readers will know I’m not dead.

I keep getting comments on this post. The Paul Robeson video has attracted four pages of fan comments at YouTube. You can read them here. And it’s even more surprising to me that I’ve attracted no anti-labor comments or rants from Robeson haters.

My post about Mack Harrell also continues to draw comments. In going back to it I discover that YouTube has removed the short Fauré Requiem excerpt. By way of turning the other cheek, here’s some more Mack Harrell, a recording I didn’t know about (and that I will be looking for) of “An die ferne Geliebte.” I’m especially glad to have discovered it because this song cycle was the first thing I studied with Mr. Harrell and the first piece I ever performed as his student.

I said maybe I would tell some stories. Here are a couple. As serious as he was about his vocation, Mr. Harrell was funny too—like the day we started working on the “Schöne Müllerin,” when he came in the studio in a straw hat with a stalk of grass in his teeth. I never called him Mack as some others of his students did; I noticed early on that they only did that behind his back. I also recall that he took a phone call from Rudolf Bing in the middle of one of my lessons once and told Bing that he wouldn’t return to the Metropolitan Opera for the next season, saying he had decided to “forgo opera.” I didn’t know that day that he already knew he was dying.

But the best memory I have is this one. I had failed to get an opera role for which I had auditioned, and I was depressed. When I arrived for my lesson the next day, Mr. Harrell played and sang for me a Schumann song, “Stirb Lieb’ und Freud’.” In it a young woman decides to take the veil, and her lover must reconcile himself to losing her forever. It’s a strophic song, beautifully simple and sublime, refining the emotions of which it treats and rendering them monumental. “We need to remember when we lose things,” Mr. Harrell said, “that there are still lots of good songs left in the world.” I remembered that in the summer of 1959 at Aspen, when he sang a group of Mendelssohn songs he had never sung before.