For most listeners aware of her name, Marni Nixon—who would have turned 94 today—is best remembered for being heard, not seen, via cinematic sleight-of-hand wherein the viewer is beguiled into the illusion that her voice is that of the actress lip-synching on-screen. An interesting bit of trivia, but this facet of her career never had much significance to me, having neither grown up with musicals, nor ever enjoying them very much.

My first encounter with her voice, improbable though it may sound, occurred through Robert Craft’s complete Webern on Columbia, which I discovered shortly after discovering serious music. The anticipation of placing the headphones on my head at the library, watching the librarian secure the LP onto the turntable, then very carefully place the stylus—then, finally, hearing a silvery voice gliding effortlessly in Webern’s Fünf Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George. I was transported.

World of beings,

long fare thee well!

Open up, forest

of pale-white trunks

[...]

Dream-wing, whirr!

Dream-harp, resound!

For a 12-year-old this was revelatory stuff! There had been nothing like it in my life growing up in Highland Park; nothing which could have previously intimated to me that there was more to life beyond the casual disillusioning, demoralizing eyesore of the everyday of miserable strip malls, defaced public spaces, inexplicably brutalized pay phone booths, derelicts boozing at the park, apathetic teachers, careerist school administrators, willfully unteachable children mass-produced to form the next generation of an immovable underclass that aspires to nothing more.

Webern, however, was my window to the sun—gratefully opened for me by Marni Nixon.