Last Saturday night, hours after I had the honor of photographing the wedding of perhaps the world’s most beloved Carmen, I had the honor of being seated at the same table as one of the world’s great Turandots. And I could only smile to myself at the irony, for had it not been for that icy Chinese princess of Puccini's last opera, I probably never would have been seated anywhere at all. To put it in the form of a riddle that Turandot herself would appreciate, “What begins in Peking, owes much to Paris, resides in Washington, but always leaves its heart in Sevilla?”

The answer is simply this: my wonderful friendship with Denyce Graves. And if you didn't get it, fear not: you won’t lose your head. (That’s a Turandot joke.) Ours is a friendship that began innocently enough with a phone call years ago, and this past week it saw a definite high point as Denyce married Dr. Robert Montgomery at the Washington National Cathedral.

You see, many years ago, as I was retrieving answering machine messages one day in my Old Town Alexandria studio, I found myself doing an audio double take. “Maaaaatttttt," a deep, deep voice said, "this is Denyce Graves. I saw your pictures in a children’s store in Georgetown and I was wondering if you could come take some photographs of my baby girl.”

I played it back two or three times. Could it be? I didn't exactly do an on the spot calculation but I figured there couldn't be too many women with that name. And to understand why, in that very instant, I was even able to mumble to myself “the Denyce Graves??” you have to go all the way back to ancient China and Turandot.

I grew up with classical music. It’s hard to avoid, really, when your last name is Mendelsohn, even though he had an extra “s.” With the exception of the Beatles, we didn’t listen to a lot of popular stuff in my house. It was pretty much all Beethoven and Bach all the time, with some Modern Jazz Quartet for good measure. My father is a mathematician and that probably explains a lot of it--the Gödel, Escher, Bach thing.

And though I did desperately want to listen to The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta in high school, the fact is that I couldn't avoid classical music. I had a choir director in high school who was a New York legend. While a lot of choirs were singing "Corner of the Sky" from Pippin, we were tackling the Mozart Requiem with a full orchestra.

At home, the same thing. I can remember the cover of one record of Beethoven piano sonatas that featured a scary looking tree blowing in the nighttime wind. It gave me nightmares as a child. (To this day, when I hear the word “Pathetique,” I still think of that album cover and get goosebumps.) I had an older brother who would only listen to the King’s College Choir singing Once in Royal David’s City and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. I had an even older brother who played pipe organ at a local church on Sundays, despite the fact that, last I checked, we were definitely Jewish. Across the street, our neighbors built a hovercraft in their garage, attracting much local curiosity.  But in our garage, at 10 Neil Drive, my father worked for weeks on something that didn’t require a lawn mower engine or a propeller: a beautiful harpsichord. (My mother famously, or infamously, painted it Delft blue, to match her china.)

So if you asked me where my deep love of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony comes from, I’d probably say my upbringing. And if you ask me why I can still remember the words to Bach’s Ich lasse dich nicht, I’d probably say my crazy childhood. Le Sacre du Printemps? Yup, childhood.

But one of the few forms of classical music that didn’t come out of Old Bethpage, New York is my love of opera. That was all on my own, with a bizarre assist from Sid Vicious. In 1989, I began working at United Press International in Washington. I was the overnight photo editor, “moving” pictures from all over the world, like an oldtime telephone operator, to our client newspapers. It was exciting work, being involved in every major news story of the day, but by three of four in the morning, after the west coast papers had gone to bed, there wasn’t exactly a lot to do.

Except, that is, to watch the same movie over and over and over. The UPI bureau didn’t have cable TV, but for some reason, right around 3:00 a.m., the movie Sid and Nancy, about the short and violent life of the Sex Pistols star, would miraculously appear on channel 87 of the television in front of me. It was an odd occurrence, to be sure, and even odder was the fact that it was always--always!--accompanied by a commercial for some CD of opera greatest hits. It was like clockwork each night, this odd ritual of a movie about the Sex Pistols and a commercial featuring Pavarotti, but who was I to argue. At 3:00 a.m., there wasn't anything else on.

Over time, I began to know the commercial by heart. Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from La Wally, the flower duet from Lakmé, Un bel dì from Madama Butterfly. And, of course, good old Nessun Dorma. Keep in mind, in 1989 there were no Three Tenors recording yet, no English soccer anthems, no telephone ring tones. Just that gorgeous aria as it was meant to be. And I was hooked.

Needing to connect Nessun Dorma to a complete work, so that it wasn’t just a greatest hit, I began listening to the entire opera again and again. Because I was a novice, I figured I needed to get the guy in the commercial. So I went out and bought the Joan Sutherland/Lucianno Pavarotti/Montserrat Caballé
recording. Lucky me. As any lover of classical music will tell you, it’s always the first recording you hear of something that imprints itself on your brain. If you hear Rosotropovich’s Shostakovich Fifth, nothing else with ever do. Bernstein’s Beethoven’s Ninth before Van Karajan, you’ll end up with Bernstein. And so it was with Turandot.

I know you can’t really wear out a CD but I came close. I listened as the masses outside the palace sang O testa mozza! (Oh severed head!); as Calaf gently dissed the slave girl Liu with the gorgeous Non piangere, Liù (don’t cry, but don’t exactly wait up for me, either); and the incredible, show-stopping In questa reggia, Princess Turandot’s ode to her troubled childhood. (More opera humor.)

It was my introduction to opera and I’ll always be grateful to Turandot.

And that’s why, some fourteen years later, when I listened to that answering machine message in my studio, I knew exactly who Denyce Graves was. I had become an opera buff during those ensuing years, complete with way-too-expensive season subscriptions at the Washington National Opera and way-too-many three disc sets. By the time I had moved on from the obvious and started listening to John Adams Nixon in China, Maya was ready to throw me out of the house. (I even wrote a silly little piece a month or so ago, poking fun of the National Symphony's plan to Twitter a performance of Beethoven's Sixth symphony outside at Wolf Trap. I imagined what a Twitter stream of Turandot would sound like.)

And so I met Denyce, I met her darling daughter Ella, I met her wonderful mother, Dorothy, and we all quickly bonded. Denyce is so generous, so talented and so, well, normal. We shared a wonderful week in Paris, Alexandra and Ella ate crêpes in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. We saw her sing Carmen at the Met while sitting in then-director Joesph Volpe’s box.(And while Alexandra and Ella played with the horses and costumes backstage.) And we stood and cheered after her groundbreaking performance in Margaret Garner, the operatic incarnation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. One time, I had a wedding in Chicago the same weekend Denyce was singing at the Lyric Opera. I took my aunt, a Chicago native, and we sat in the fifth row and beamed as Denyce received a fifteen-minute standing ovation.

Denyce is a true artist, someone who thinks deeply, feels deeply, expresses herself deeply. She is the embodiment of Floria Tosca’s famous aria: Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore. I lived for my art, I lived for love. (And, thankfully, Robert seems more Mario than Baron Scarpia.)

Early on in our friendship, I remember Denyce coming over to the house to pick up some prints and I started showing her a slideshow of the Holocaust project I was working on with my brother. As the presentation was running, I thought to myself, “Are you crazy? Why are you wasting this big star’s time?!?” But Denyce graciously watched the entire thing. She’s an artist who appreciates her fellow artists.

And boy, was that appreciation evident this past weekend. This was the third of three wedding celebrations for Denyce and Robert,who just happens to be one of the world’s leading transplant surgeons. (And one of the few people who can claim that they’re the inspiration for a Gray’s Anatomy episode.) Back in June, I photographed a small, private wedding for the two complete with surprise dinner at the Inn at Little Washington. Then, in July, they flew to Kenya for an authentic Maasai tribal wedding. Last Wednesday, a party at an aircraft hangar in Leesburg, including a private performance of the band Brazilian Girls. (A hangar, to celebrate the fact that Robert and Denyce met while sitting on a plane to Paris.) And this past Saturday, a regal wedding at the Washington National Cathedral and elegant reception at the Anderson House in Dupont Circle.

For the big picture, you can read Ellen McCarthy’s great Washington Post piece. I’ll give you some offbeat details instead:

• At the hangar rehearsal dinner, I almost opened the wood box on one of the tables, thinking it contained tea bags. It contained a six-foot python for the belly dancers. Whew. Also, the cake that night was in the shape of Robert's cherished Shelby Mustang, right down to the license plate. My assitant Cliff took a picture from an angle that makes it look like a real car in a showroom. And, finally, Denyce and Robert came dressed as they were for their African ceremony.
   
  The entertainment, by the way, was Robert's favorite group, Brazilian Girls, which, curiously, only contains one girl and a bunch of guys, but who's counting. They were fantastic, especially their Lazy Lover.
  
  
• My daughter Alexandra was one of the three flower girls, along with Denyce's Ella and Anaïs
  Killian. The three girls had a Disney princess sleepover at the hotel, and I feel sorry for guests in the room below.

• Robert and Denyce invited some of the kidney donors and recipients who have helped and benefited from his inspirational and groundbreaking work at Johns Hopkins. What a wonderful gesture.

• One of Robert’s dear friends gave the homily at the  National Cathedral. His name is Bill Fox and he happens to be the same man who married Maya and me twelve years ago at the Friends Meeting House. What a small world!

• Denyce’s longtime costume collaborator, designer Donna Langman, made all the dresses from scratch. Like, a week or so ago. To say this woman oozes talent and dry wit (“I said ‘Denyce, I don’t do weddings...’”) is a gross understatement. Meeting her was a treat.
• Denyce’s friends sang during the service. Roland Smith sang Far More, Richard Troxell sang My Eye Is On The Sparrow, Ridley Chauvin sang The Lord's Prayer and Anna Sorrano, the matron of honor, sang from Handel. For me, the highlight had to be soprano Alessandra Marc’s sublime Ave Maria. There are simply no words to describe this performance. I glanced over at a few of the tourists who were in the public section of the cathedral and even they were ready to start weeping. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. (Don’t laugh, but I’m so used to reunions of various grooms’ college a cappella groups at weddings--reunions that would be better left to memory--that I forgot what world class talent could sound like.)

• The day after all of this was over everyone gathered at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where Denyce graduated high school, and played kickball and jumped rope double dutch style. Seeing Dorothy, Denyce's mom, skipping in and out might have been the funniest part of the whole week.

But it was at dinner, inside the gorgeous Anderson House, sitting at the same table as Alessandra Marc, that all those Turandot memories from the overnight shift at UPI came flooding back. She, after all, has received great acclaim for that role--like Denyce has for Carmen--and I could only smile at the full-circle-ness of it all.

That's it for me. This is where the photographer lays down his pen (the last Turandot joke) and the curtain comes down.

Because Denyce and Robert are friends, and because they gave my daughter the thrill of a lifetime by allowing her to be part of their special day, I've put together a larger-than-usual mini gallery. (That sounds a bit oxymoronic, eh?) To see a sampling of pictures from their rehearsal dinner and their marriage at the National Cathedral, click here.

See ya,

Matt