<<  -- 7 --  Jennifer I Paull    CATHY BERBERIAN: LEGACY

Cathy made the world aware that Kurt Weill's music was not simply 'light' as previously branded. She recognised its worthiness and importance and dared to include Weill in her concert programmes. Song of Sexual Slavery raised quite some eyebrows and took quite some guts, initially.

It is relatively routine, today, to see Luciano Pavarotti on MTV in a video clip, miming one of his own really light, very commercial 'hits'. In those days, no great singer (opera or recitalist) would have entertained such an idea. I am certain that Pavarotti's moments of shallow wallowing or those of Montserrat Cabaillé singing Barcelona with Freddy Mercury would have held no musical interest for Cathy. 'There are only two types of music, the good and the bad.' She was right. Cathy Berberian would never have lowered her hard-earned, intellectual standards for outright commercialism. The content of everything she undertook was erudite. With her outstanding talent, she amalgamated innovation, meaning, purpose and style.

Cathy's Beatles sketches have withstood the test of time because the music itself was sound and her ideas of caricature interpretation within them, brilliant. Several of her parodies of other subjects are to be seen in the rare videos that still exist, or discovered in her recordings of which there are, fortunately, many.

Joan Baez, the war-despising, folk-singing, straight-faced idol, never, ever betrayed emotion in her voice. Cathy took Yesterday -- one of the most emotional songs of McCartney's pen and gave Baez imaginary singing lessons with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Of course, a guitar-strumming folk singer is no longer the material of today's chart-topper, as was then the case. A backing group is de rigeur, not for its vocals but for its thrusting hips. Therefore, to transpose what Cathy had imagined into an equivalent, contemporary setting, I would suggest she sang Madonna's Like A Virgin in the style of Michael Jackson, having taken lessons with Peter Pears, choreographed by Missy Elliott. Can one conceive of a world star of today's recital stage being able to carry such a mosaic of capacities, let alone assemble its pieces into meaningful parody?

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