My portrait is now at the National Portrait Gallery, in “Capital Portraits: Treasures From Washington Private Collections,” which opens Friday. Coincidentally — but conveniently, as the children will be in town for the portrait show opening — five songs from the cycle will be sung that same night by Kate Lindsey at the Barns at Wolf Trap.
Several gentlemen we know have thanked my husband for ruining their marriages. As one snarled, “Now what am I supposed to do for my wife’s birthday? Have her face carved on Mount Rushmore?”
Much clandestine activity, which I was too thick to notice, preceded these over-the-top presents. Our friend Phyllis Pancella, the opera singer who first performed the song cycle at a surprise party at the Cosmos Club in Dupont Circle and then made it part of her repertoire, tells of choking at our dinner table. With her husband and me safely seated at the other end, Robert had approached the matter by whispering, “I’ve left a note in your coat pocket. Don’t let on to Judith.”
Argento, whom we had met only briefly, although we subsequently became friends, recounts in his autobiography, “Catalogue Raisonne as Memoir: A Composer’s Life,” how Robert had badgered him for 20 months until he agreed to write the music. Unfazed, Robert retorted, “Where would we be if Waldstein hadn’t badgered Beethoven?”
Edelstein was already a friend, and we exchanged luncheons and dinners with him and Annamaria on our frequent trips to Venice, where they were living before moving back to England three years ago. One time, on the eve of a trip, I read a rave review of a show in New York of his pastels of Roman fountains. Being familiar with the problematic Italian postal system, I telephoned upon our arrival and asked Annamaria if they had seen the new issue of Art and Antiques.
“It arrived yesterday,” she said, “and now Victor thinks he’s Giotto.” (The review had concluded by comparing “a simple line” with which Victor had indicated a background tree to Giotto’s having demonstrated his mastery by drawing a perfect circle without lifting his pencil.)
I failed to connect our enjoyment of his work with my husband’s strange new habit of photographing me whenever we got dressed up. If I had realized that he was shooting the results off to Victor, I would have taken so long to decide what to wear that we would never have gotten to wherever it was that we were dressing to go.
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