After several months of loneliness since his beloved wife, Hannah Voigt, died, Burt Andersen has, as the saying goes, left this mortal coil. Many of us tried to fill the void Hannah left. We were not enough, but Burt loved the effort.
Burt sang in a pure high tenor voice that should long ago have rasped out or developed that “permanent wave,” the ever-widening vibrato some voices acquire with age. Instead, he continued and improved upon his early-in-life passion for singing and carefully preserved that voice almost to the end.
He loved to sing the songs of Stephen Sondheim. It helped that he pursued a program of vocal lessons with Marty Swisher, a fortunate pairing, because she foresaw that if she introduced him to Hannah Voigt, sparks would ensue. They did.
My wife Judith and I got to know Hannah and Burt a short time after they announced their engagement. I don’t recall the exact moment that we discovered we four had a special bond, but I do recall it happened. That bond had many lovely effects.
Among the effects was Hannah’s idea that Burt and I should sing duets. I was dubious. My voice, adequate in a choir, was no match for Burt’s. But Hannah saw something else that made the pairing work. Hannah’s puckish sense of humor – which matched Burt’s – led to our performing “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” from Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And then we did “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” Groucho Marx’s favorite song, as a follow-up. We loved watching the odd expressions on our listeners’ faces.
Burt was a man of surprises. A few years back, when I was writing a blog entry on the deaths of two of my great uncles – age 8½ and 10 months on the same day in 1873 – we were visiting Hannah and Burt and talked about my essay. Burt had been advising me on the fine points of infectious disease (he headed the Infectious Disease Department at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago). My blog piece was mainly about medical diagnosis prior to the rise and development of germ theory, suggesting that medical diagnosis in Western society had changed very little since Galen in the second century. Burt suddenly left and came back with a book for me to take home and peruse: Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine, a 912-page book written by Burt and Joann Scurlock, an expert in cuneiform. It showed that Mesopotamian medical texts, especially Sumerian writings, demonstrated a systematic medical understanding, including the development of diagnostic tests, drug preparations, and systems of public sanitation. I did not read this book cover to cover. I simply marveled at the very idea of studying such arcana and producing a revealing historical record.
Three years ago I was in the hospital for a very painful condition caused by chemotherapy. Burt visited me on a Sunday morning. We were talking and laughing, as we so often did, when the hospital’s infectious disease attending physician entered the room. She no sooner identified herself, when Burt – who instantly became a wholly different person – barked at her, demanding to know what medication she was planning to prescribe for me. At “Who are you?” Burt replied, imperiously, “the head of infectious disease at UIC Hospital.” She blurted out her prescription, he agreed, and she left the room. I was stunned. I didn’t know Burt was a shape-shifter.
He was also a true impresario, wrangling the talent for Unity Temple’s Schubert Festivals, for which he was a driving force. He and Hannah engineered two private celebrations of Stephen Sondheim’s music, which he entitled the “International Sondheim Festivals.” The were “International,” I suppose, because the participants were of Norwegian, Belgian, Irish, Prussian-Mennonite, and other stock.
We had joint subscriptions to classical concerts and plays and had rousing discussions after each event. We introduced Hannah and Burt to the Free Readers, professional actors performing monthly play readings at Oak Park’s Nineteenth Century Club. The first time he attended, Burt recognized actors he’d performed with in local theaters in years past (yes, he was also an actor) and was overjoyed.
The deep, abiding friendship Judith and I had with Hannah and Burt, which seemed to happen so naturally, was a revelation. We have many friends of long standing. I had assumed there would be little likelihood of deep, close new relationships so late in life. I was wrong. The loss of these two rare, extraordinary people leaves a hole in our souls that will remain raw at its edges for a long time.
Rest in peace, Burt. Rest next to Hannah, as you have wanted to.
