Tosca, Teatro Regio Torino. (Photo by Edoardo Piva)

Princeton-Raised Jonathan Tetelman is One of Opera’s Rising Stars

By Anne Levin | Photos Courtesy of Jonathan Tetelman

Opera star Jonathan Tetelman spent the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic sheltering at his parents’ house in Princeton. Only a month before, he had sung lead roles in La Traviata and La Boheme on the stage of London’s Royal Opera House.

Upcoming European engagements for the 30-year-old tenor were being canceled. But Tetelman, an American Boychoir School graduate who was born in Chile and raised in Princeton, didn’t seem fazed. “It’s nice to spend some time at home, relaxing, doing my taxes,” he said at the time.

A month later, Tetelman was back at his apartment in New York, waiting for things to settle down and clearly feeling more restless. “I was supposed to go to Italy, Warsaw, Germany, and Seattle, but those dates have been canceled,” he said. “And now Tosca in Buenos Aires was just canceled, with the next scheduled performance not until August. It’s very difficult for freelance artists, and so many others around the world, who aren’t able to work during this pandemic, and have no other means of support for themselves and their families.”

Judging by reviews he has been receiving in publications across the globe, this interruption in Tetelman’s schedule shouldn’t pose much of a problem once the music world returns to some semblance of normal.

“In this production we were lucky to have the extraordinary tenor Jonathan Tetelman, a young figure who already receives excellent reviews and begins his career in the great theaters,” reads a review in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio. “His presence on stage is difficult not to compare to the young Jonas Kaufmann of the 2000s, just before being today’s superstar, with a voice in the transition from light to dramatic-lyrical repertoire.” more

Over 1,000 Romantic Letters Unsealed at Princeton University After 60 Years

By Donald Gilpin

The unsealing after more than 60 years of a collection of 1,131 letters written by Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale, his secret platonic love, caused “the special collections equivalent of a stampede at a rock concert” on the morning of January 2 in the basement of Princeton University’s Firestone Library, according to Daniel Linke, interim head of the Library’s special collections, as told to the Associated Press.

Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot in Dorset, Vermont, during the summer of 1946. (Photo courtesy of Princeton University Library)

Released at the same time as a 1960 “disclaimer” statement from Eliot, which had been held in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, those letters, one of the most noteworthy sealed archives in the world, will provide rich fodder for English professors and biographers for many years to come. Eliot aficionados have long debated the true nature of Eliot’s relationship with Hale and her influence on his poetry.  Psychotherapists will also be drawn to this intricately detailed, complex, unflattering depiction of a man who perhaps most closely resembles the persona of his first published poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).

“Prufrock” is a very odd love song, an interior monologue full of doubt and indecision, anguish, regret, weariness, and longing, but no more odd and frustrating than Eliot’s relationship with Hale as depicted in his letters written from 1930 to 1957. If you thought his poetry was difficult to understand, the complexity and confusion of his love life as revealed in these letters and his 1960 statement disclaiming his relationship with Hale will not surprise you. 

Like his character Prufrock, the Eliot who emerges from the letters to Hale and the subsequent statement, apparently intending to set the record straight, is full of contradictions and uncertainty. He burned Hale’s numerous letters to him when he found out that she had turned over his letters to Princeton University, to remain sealed until 50 years after they were both dead. He died in 1965. She died in 1969.  more