What remains...
Kathleen Battle is one of my favorite opera singers of all time. Her voice is pure magic. Just listen to her rendition of Handel's Ombra mai Fu. It's a love song to a tree, but her voice elevates it to the sublime.
Kathleen Battle is also one of the most controversial opera singers of all time. She is perhaps most famous for being fired from the Met Opera in 1994. People who worked with her even wore T-shirts that literally said, 'I survived the Battle.' Stories of her less-than-stellar reputation are numerous—arrogant, unprofessional, and very, very demanding. As someone who understands how hard it is to work with arrogant, unprofessional people, I should spurn Kathleen Battle. But anytime the world is on fire, I always come back to her music first.
I guess, at the end of the day, time erodes everything. What will remain? In a century, will she be forgiven, with only the beauty of her singing left? Would that be so terrible, I wonder? The pettiness of human drama is forgotten, leaving only something beautiful, unfettered by squabbling.