Louis Roney: Love

The word “love” has confused people from the beginning of time. In 94 years of living, I’ve learned a few things about love.

When I was a small boy, I said to my grandmother, “I love candied yams.” “You like candied yams,” she replied. “You do not love material things.” “How about my dog?” “That's different,” she admitted smilingly.

As I grew from a small boy into the splendid superannuated relic that I am today, I witnessed the word “love '” being used in slews of different ways to represent slews of different human moods and conditions.

The song, “Love is a many-splendored thing,” sets our minds to locating all the splendors we have time to identify from personal experience.

An old, much-loved, wedding song goes, “I love you truly, truly dear.”

The song's overheated repetition of the word truly may protest enough to make skeptics wonder if it's really true.

Sardonic sour-puss American humorist Ambrose Bierce wrote spoofingly in defining love: “A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.”

Plato on love: “A grave mental disease.” (like Liberalism?) — but what did he know?

Robert Frost on love: “Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”

My longtime friend, the late composer Mana-Zucca said in her great song, “I Love Life,” “I love life and I want to live! To drink of life's fullness, take all it can give!” Manna did just that, stepping off the world-stage with a smile, at 95!

“Love” is the motivating force in many of the operas I have sung in Europe and North America. Verdi's “La Traviata” deals with a father's thwarting of his son's love, with a beautiful dying courtesan.

Beethoven's “Fidelio” is about a woman's love for her husband and her success in freeing him from political captivity in a Spanish dungeon.

Verdi's “Otello” is the story of a powerful man brought down by unwarranted jealousy of his young, innocent wife. Bizet's “Carmen” tells of a false-hearted Spanish gypsy woman's ill-fated love affair with a Basque Corporal. Puccini's “Tosca” is a melodrama about a great soprano, and her patrician, artist lover, a story that ends in death for three, when Tosca kills the sadistic, rapacious Baron Scarpia, in an attempt to save her lover. Gounod's “Roméo et Juliette” is perhaps the most famous love story in human history, and ends in the death of the young star-crossed lovers.

Not every love story is suitable for drama, for drama depends on conflict. Two lovers who never have a problem and “live happily ever after,” will never end up starring on the stage.

Love of country, patriotism, that is, often transcends personal desires and feelings. The greatest heroes, from those who saved us in the Revolution to those who are voluntarily fighting today to keep terrorists from destroying our country, represent patriotic love that may go beyond human understanding. We owe our freedom to all who have fought through the centuries to “let freedom ring” for those of us who survive, to live and love.

Agape is perhaps the highest form of love given anonymously and without any expectation of anything in return — not even a tax write-off!

We speak of “love of the game.”

Expletively, we say, “for the love of Mike.”

Love of a child by a parent can be extraordinary and last throughout one’s life. Such love does not — and should not — replace a married couples' love for each other, the love which is the basis of the child’s security and in fact, his very existence.

Married love should ideally be an equal partnership shared by two people who enjoy being with each other in every kind of situation that life can produce. Married love, at best, is enhanced by its ability to express itself in a long-term “giving” physical relationship that encompasses all the life-sustaining qualities of passion, tenderness, and understanding.

For the average “normal” person, if one dares to say normal anymore, there is probably no love on earth more important and gratifying than the total love between man and woman. And the greatest embodiment of such love, people have historically believed, occurs in the legal marriage of one man and one woman.

Thirty-five years ago this commentator “hit the jackpot” when he heard a beautiful young soprano sing in New York and went backstage make her acquaintance. All these years later we remain happy in the lakeside Winter Park home we cherish.

We have been a loving “team,” a winning team, in every imaginable and exhausting project we have undertaken. Together we have sung and taught in the U.S. and in European countries. Some reading this column may recall our frequent singing in “Musicales” which we presented

some 70+ times at Rollins College and the Winter Park University Club.

People who have loved each other for a long period of time may think and act as one person. Two heads are, after all, better than one — particularly if one of the heads belongs to a tenor.

“Love is the greatest thing, the oldest and the latest thing” is our living love song….