GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE.(Minette Levy)(Brief Article)

My grandmother's legs tremble as she climbs the makeshift steps to the scaffolding, two stories off the ground at the rear of the stage. It's, let's say, 1922, and twenty-something Minette Levy has never suffered from stage fright. What she's afraid of is not her voice failing her but her dizziness at this ungodly height. She inhales and tries not to look down, where the principals' heads look like tiny bobbing planets, far away. She focuses on the sound of the orchestra, reminds herself that this is her work; last night she was a Gypsy smuggler, tonight she's an angelic voice, and this is as close to heaven as she's ever going to get.

In my imagination -- the only place where this story can be fleshed out -- a tremor infects Minette's first note, then evaporates, so the musical line of her lyric soprano remains firm and sure as she casts it past the dark rafters of the stage toward the gilt-covered ceiling of the Metropolitan Opera House. She's singing now, which means she's on solid ground: confident, secure and, I like to believe, happy.

Fast-forward to 1943. My mother, Edith, clutches her armrest in the heights of the Family Circle at the same opera house. Dizzy and frightened, she reaches for her mother's hand -- but Minette is busy unbuttoning her prized Persian lamb coat, adjusting her pearl-handled opera glasses. "These are the best seats in the house," she tells Edith, who, at ten, has already endured elocution, tap dance, piano and voice lessons. "This is where the acoustics are the best." Minette smiles and sits back, waiting for the house lights to go down.

Fast-forward again, a half-century or so. As a novelist, I have been attempting to capture the magic of music in words. It's a dizzying, terrifying quest, and in the midst of it, I, too, find myself groping for my grandmother's hand. So here I am in the basement of a building I've come to love as much as Minette loved its Thirty-ninth Street counterpart; a place I was dragged to at the unwilling age of twelve (I watched Aida in horror, appalled at its extravagance of emotion -- and elephants); a place I was drawn back to in my early twenties as if a genetic time bomb implanted in my psyche had been set off by a random episode of channel-surfing that landed me on Live From the Met. ...