Every year at the party he threw in the Beverly...

Sunday, February 12, 2012

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Every year at the party he threw in the Beverly Hilton Hotel — where she died Saturday afternoon, hours before she was scheduled to appear — Davis held out hope that this would be the time Houston would regain her breath and her fire and finally win again. She did make a go of it in 2009, wearing leopard skin and smiling widely as she sang with her cousin Dionne. It wasn’t miraculous, but it was good enough to move the room to cheers and tears.

That Houston died mere steps from that stage, only to be discovered by her bodyguard in one of the thousand hotel rooms where she’d laid her head, is strange poetry. I’ve long thought that someone should write an opera about this brash, brilliant woman, born a child of soul and raised to womanhood within the heart of crossover pop. She broke hearts, and was herself broken. She suffered, but not in her music, which even at its saddest was grounded in a sense of dignity and the determination to transcend.he defined a style that so many would adopt, yet her talent was unique.

At the beginning of her book Opera, Or the Undoing Of Women, the French theorist Catherine Clement turns to various arias to embellish her argument about how music symbolizes and enacts the pain women must endure. “A prima donna is a column broken in two that bleeds from top to bottom,” sings the diva in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. This reprisal reveals what we listeners crave: gorgeous suffering, self-exposure a show of power.

” Ann Powers on Whitney.