by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, Franz Welser-Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem, with Asmik Grigorian, soprano (pictured), Deniz Uzun, mezzo-soprano, Joshua Guerrero, tenor, and Tareq Nazmi, bass (repeated on Saturday evening at 7:30 and Sunday afternoon at 3).
At the same hour at the Hermit Club, Les Délices will celebrate the Scottish bard Robert Burns in A Red, Red Rose, a new program featuring his poetry and music with tenor James Reese (repeated on Sunday at 3 at the Hudson Library & Historical Society.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Stimm’ in unsern Jubel ein!
Nie wird es zu hoch besungen,
Retterin des Gatten sein.
He who has won a lovely wife,
join our jubilation!
Never will she be praised too highly,
being the savior of her husband.
Those are the words that close Beethoven’s Fidelio, when the entire company celebrates the freeing of Florestan and other political prisoners through the intervention of his faithful wife Leonora.
Listening recently to the ebullient finale of the composer’s only opera — to be performed by The Cleveland Orchestra in May — made me wonder why the celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy around his birthday on January 15 every year rarely mention his own faithful wife, Coretta Scott King, who continued his campaigns against racism and injustice after his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
Moreso, as Jeanne Theoharis writes in a February, 2018 article in The Guardian, “Martin Luther King’s ‘helpmate’ was a seasoned civil rights campaigner in her own right — ‘never just a wife, never just a widow.’” Read I am not a symbol, I am an activist’: the untold story of Coretta Scott King here.
She was also a musician, who went on after graduating from Antioch College to earn bachelor’s degrees in voice and violin at The New England Conservatory, where she met her future husband, who was pursuing his doctorate at Boston University. She talks about her singing career in a video interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project, and in a WFMT article.
Sample the flavor of Coretta Scott King’s oratory in her address at Harvard’s Class Day Exercises in 1968, when she stood in for her late husband only weeks after his assassination, and just six days after Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.
An early protester against the Vietnam War who also campaigned for gay rights and was arrested in 1985 along with her son Martin III and her two daughters for protesting South Africa’s policy of apartheid outside the country’s embassy in Washington, Coretta Scott King’s 15-year lobbying effort resulted in the Act of Congress that established Martin Luther King Day as an official national holiday — the first non-President to be so honored.
And just for fun, on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, actor John Lithgow recalled having Coretta Scott babysit him and his siblings in Yellow Springs, Ohio during their time at Antioch.
