COMMENTARY: The Singer, Not the Song

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.) (UNDATED) The death of the distinguished Irish tenor Frank Patterson was as sad as many of the […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) The death of the distinguished Irish tenor Frank Patterson was as sad as many of the songs his countrymen and their American relatives drink down like stout just before closing time at the corner pub. For if they never tire of ballads about lads lost at sea and their idea of a great show is titled “The Dead,” they were still shocked at his sudden passing.


At 61, he had just begun to receive recognition on a stage deeper and broader than the one from which he had entranced Irish-Americans for many years. His appearances on public television made him known to millions more and revealed him as a worker of the closest thing to a miracle in our bored and boring popular culture: His self-effacing visits made Pledge Week, America’s own purgatory, not only bearable but enjoyable.

Patterson had lanced the peak of fame with his stake and stood at last in that high, unspoiled air that carried his voice like amazing grace down to the valley below. How unfair that he should die in the last rainy days of spring when the summer was so filled with sunny promise.

Nor did it seem right that he and his accompanist wife, Eily, and their violinist son, Eanan, were denied so small and simple a thing to ask for, time to enjoy their achievement together.

Still, he was remembered for all that he had done _ for his concerts, his movie appearances, his singing at the White House, his sold-out appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Boston Symphony, and on the Capitol steps with the National Symphony and an audience of 60,000.

He prized most singing in Dublin’s Phoenix Park before the 1.3 million at Pope John Paul II’s Mass in 1979. So, too, he sang the “Ave Maria” in St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the pope 17 years later.

So, too, he had medals, honorary degrees and papal knighthoods, all that the Catholic culture could bestow upon him. And he was flown to Ireland for another Mass and burial in the earth from which he came. It is more than enough to make the sentimental cry, and isn’t it a shame about Frank Patterson, and only 61, you know, ah, he’ll be missed, and, yes, I will have another drink, to Frank.

Yet in Patterson and his sudden death June 10, as if he had left without warning us, so that we missed our chance to say goodbye and see him into the night, he leaves us something that we must honor with more than the last toast of the evening. For Patterson filled the time he had fully, gracefully, and with a modesty and good humor that moves us to think on the time we have and how we spend it.


It was my good fortune to have dinner with Patterson after he had sung at the wedding anniversary celebration of my brother and his wife. He offered all of us a lesson in time for neither he nor his wife seemed in a hurry to leave, although God knows they must have sat through a thousand such nights. He was comfortable, as fully present at the meal as he had been when singing in the church or later when he ended the night with “Danny Boy.”

He was not troubled by time, except to enter into it, to fill it comfortably and with great self-possession. Great artist that he was, there was nothing of the affectation or expectation of attention that often go with the gifted, the famous or the powerful.

It was as if he had mastered time and left some of that gift with you, if only in the desire to be as free of its demands as he seemed to be. He had used his enormous gift as all truly great artists do, to break time’s hold, and to arrest life, and love and death, too, so that they are suspended motionless and we can see more deeply into them.

No wonder he spread a feeling of peace around him, a peace beyond our understanding but not beyond his.

Of Frank Patterson, it can be truly said, it is the singer not the song, for he invested every word with that sense of the eternal with which he was so intuitively at ease. We may not have been ready for his death, but he was.

As an artist who was also a believer, he understood that his calling was to take on time and triumph over it, making eternity less forbidding and more familiar for those of us who were blessed enough to be attuned to our own depths by him.


DEA END KENNEDY

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