“And oh I want so much to sing, I tell myself no. But it is so hard to keep from singing.” — Donna Jo Napoli
It’s only taken 60-something years, but now, eight years shy of hitting the century mark, soprano Roma Marx is finally seeing her early-life recital recordings birthed into CD format.
Thanks to the dedicated midwifery of musician Ed Hines of Wendell, a selection of arias, Broadway favorites and beloved parlor tunes have made their way from the fatally fragile format of reel-to-reel tape into the digital domain.
The story is an intriguing one, and I will let Mr. Hines pick it up from here, in excerpts from a recent phone interview.
“Roma is a 92-year old soprano from Brooklyn, N.Y., who now lives in Malvern, Long Island. She studied with a gentleman named Desire Defrere in 1944. Defrere was stage director and former baritone of the Metropolitan Opera Company.
“He had emigrated from Belgium, sang with Caruso in Chicago, then went to New York and became associated with the Met, but by the 1940s he was giving lessons in his home in Freeport, Long Island. She auditioned to become his student/protégé, and he accepted. He was grooming her for a career on the stage. Roma was what you call a spinto soprano. Spinto sopranos are easily able to hit the highest ranges — I think that’s Roma’s unique gift — she has a beautiful voice, she’s very expressive, a true romantic, but she’s able to hit those high notes. In the middle of all this, she meets the love of her life, a Marine — in 1945, and by 1948 they were married.
“In the meantime, a cellist named Joseph Emonts, who was also a Belgian, a compatriot of Defrere, who had just finished an 18-year stint with the New York Philharmonic, hears Roma singing and is immediately drawn to her artistry. In the midst of all this, Roma has just given up a career on the stage and become a housewife.
“Emonts, who had also moved from New York City to Long Island, founded the Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra and the Adelphi Symphony Orchestra and was playing with many local community orchestras that were springing up everywhere in the post-war population boom. He convinced various orchestra leaders to invite Roma as a guest, with many of these between the years 1951 to 1968. These recordings that I’ve remastered are drawn from those performances.
“Her dad purchased a reel-to-reel and just followed his daughter around from concert to concert, recording them all. Roma and I had some initial discussions about doing something with her music several years ago, but we couldn’t come to an agreement. But one day this spring, I went onto Facebook to see if she was still around, and she was. Two days later she called me, one of those weird ‘synergy in the air’ things. I said, ‘I don’t know if I want to publish and promote because that would take a lot of time, but here, I’ll make you a deal: if you’ll allow me to make use of any of the Emonts material, then I’ll help you make a CD,’ because Joe Emonts was a musician I’d been studying and researching since 1970 with the thought of creating a book about him. So she said, ‘Okay.’ So for 3 months, I took 30 reels of tape and had them restored by Billy Shaw up at Sound Design Studios in Putney (Vt.). The tapes are a layer of plastic glued to a layer of iron oxide, and what goes bad is the glue; so what Billy does is takes a reel of tape and throws it in the oven, melts the glue and reattaches the layers. And then I sat down and converted them to digital files, culling the usable material from them.
“What I love about this CD is not only that it’s great music from the classical repertoire, but also that Roma is an artist in her own right and has her own special, unique voice — she’s a housewife who sang in community orchestras. That’s the bottom line. And she’s pretty good!”
In my subsequent conversation with Roma Marx herself, whose voice appeared, live and in person, just after the fourth ring of the phone, I found a gracious, warmly responsive lady still possessed of an audible enthusiasm and more than willing to share her thoughts about her life and her art.
“I can still sing, but it’s all according to how I’m feeling, whereas with regard to the professional singers, they have learned to stuff their emotions and be a trooper, so to speak. But sometimes I need a little bit bigger accompaniment, because I have a powerful voice; I was trained for the opera, although I can sing softly when it’s needed. I was scheduled to go to Italy to finalize my singing training when I looked into the eyes of my future husband and that was it! So Maestro Defrere said, “Baby, are you sure you want to do this?” and I said, “Yes, Papaji, I don’t want to be a lonely old woman in a hotel room with lots of flowers and lots of fawning friends who are phonies dancing around me and no real people I can call my own. I want to have a family. That was the way I felt about it. But I married a wonderful man who loved to hear me sing. And through Maestro Defrere I met ‘Uncle’ Joe Emonts who said, ‘I want you come and sing for this orchestra and that orchestra.’”
Before agreeing to the interview, I requested that, in the event those who wish to access her recording have trouble finding it, they may contact Roma directly, either through her Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/roma.marx, or by phone at 516 599 3345.
HOT TIP OF THE WEEK
There’s a special show at Pothole Pictures in Shelburne Falls on Friday, Aug. 19, and Saturday, Aug. 20. A showing of the 1929 Russian film, “Man With a Movie Camera,” which will screen to the accompaniment of a live, original music score performed on stage by Wayne Smith on cello, Lysha Smith on electronica and Patrick Doane on violin.
Pothole’s curator Fred DeVecca says, “This is a spellbinding, radical experiment — 24 hours in a Russian city, captured, often in dangerous, life-threatening ways, by the eponymous man with a movie camera. Machinery, crowds, boats, buildings, workers, streets, beaches, faces, planes, trains and automobiles are all captured in startling and playful black and white moving images, often employing techniques like double exposure, fast or slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, extreme close-ups, animation and tracking shots in Dziga Vertov’s dazzling cinematic classic.”
The film begins at 7:30 p.m. and runs for 68 minutes. Jess Dow and Friends will perform vocals from jazz to Celtic from 7 to 7:30 p.m.
Admission is $4 for children and $6 for adults. Pre-purchased advance season tickets are also accepted.
The air-conditioned, accessible theater is located at 51 Bridge St. in Shelburne Falls. For more info, call 413-512-0850.
An author and composer, columnist Joseph Marcello of Northfield focuses on music and theater. He can be reached at: josephmarcello@verizon.net