Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Am I imposing a morality as I view it now upon a morality as I thought I viewed it then? In reality, as well as anyone can relive it a half century later, wasn’t every young person with ambition and talent and brains and looks and energy behaving pretty much as we were, making their loved ones wince, but making them proud, too, and behaving thoughtlessly in a thoughtful manner?

  I have no doubt been faithful to a type—that unshaven grown-up in the park—yet fidelity in its most literal sense is a chimera, a potion like Tristan’s.

  (To prate in print about sex, as I so mildly do, makes me apprehensive. Might I be derided, jailed, tortured, guillotined? A government that bans abortion may, in later years, impose abortion.)

  The apartment on Kenmore, like the room on Orrington before that, and before that the room in Lindgren House, was almost certainly a seat of industry and rest nine tenths of the time. Those nine tenths are forgotten, congealed in their own dimension known as an oeuvre; a composer, a writer, forgets pretty much what he’s said or how it’s said once the saying’s in print. It’s the other tenth that is recalled, however askew. (Could this be said to hold for painters too? Looking years later at their portrait of Madame X, can they not more readily than a composer return to the room where the seances occurred? Is their own life reflected in the features of the sitter? We are whom artists make of us. Six photographers in the same room at the same minute with the same model will portray six models. Even in a photograph of, say, the Washington Monument, the artist’s nationality will be betrayed: a Japanese manages for a cherry blossom to peek over the edge of the lens.)

  We gave parties. Alice Martz played, over and over, the F-major Ballade. Over and over I played Ravel’s Forlane, during the second theme of which George would swoon, saying, “That makes my triangle tingle.” Such was his wit. Norris Embry and David Sachs, now colleagues at Saint John’s College along with a few hundred other enfants terribles, showed up and talked of Sang d’un poète by the same Jean Cocteau who had written Les enfants terribles. With them was Robert Anderson, no fool, despite being tall, blond, and handsome (and straight), and their description of the movie was graphically so precise as to leave no surprise when I finally saw it myself two years later. Hilda Mary Thomas, an overweight fluffy soprano with chablis-colored hair, materialized regularly to intone “Un bel di,” followed by “Blues in the Night” to her own raucous accompaniment.

  Then there was Arthur Weinstein, whose cousin Harold, manager of Russack’s men’s store on Michigan Avenue, was a footballish opportunist known to us all through his generous horniness. When Arthur, a Manhattanite of impeccable manners and angelic features, came for a visit Harold was anxious to launch him. He was a hit: infinitely cultivated, witty, pretty, tactful but sassy, musically versed, well dressed to a fault, he did not lack for adventures. I never knew quite what he did, but like his opposite number, Frank Etherton, he would regularly come strolling around the corners of my life, garbed in a silken shirt.

  We went to a roundtable in Thorne Hall (now razed) near Navy Pier. Topic: “Music in our Changing Society.” Moderator: Cecil Smith, parents’ old pal and colleague from university days, now critic on The Chicago Tribune. Panelists: Lehman Engel, composer and conductor, in a sailor suit; Virgil Thomson, critic and composer of Four Saints in Three Acts, which we’d heard of but not heard; and some woman, now forgotten. Opening volley: the obligatory struggle to define music. The others were falling back on Shakespeare’s “concord of sweet sounds” when Thomson shrieked: “Boy, was he wrong! You might as well call painting a juxtaposition of pretty colors, or poems a succession of lovely words. What is music? Why, it’s what we musicians do.” That settled that. His unsentimental summation was the first professional remark I’d ever heard—music is what musicians do—and could well have marked my semiconscious acceptance of myself as French and not German.

  In early December of 1942, Father, who was then twenty-three years younger than I am today, on one of his peregrinations to Philadelphia, stopped by the Curtis Institute of Music and left a sheaf of my manuscripts at the front desk, even as he had at Northwestern nine seasons before. Why did he? Was it because I was treading water at Northwestern? Because the draft status was perilous and a change of venue would delay being called up? Or that a scholarship to so prestigious a school would prove to him that I was the real thing, thus worthy of his further support in a world which largely didn’t care for (i.e., pay for) classical music.

  I was accordingly accepted, midterm, as a private pupil of Rosario Scalero’s and immediately sent eastward. With the knowledge of hindsight this dépaysement describes the first of three vital uprootings to occur in my longish life.

  14. Philadelphia 1943

  No one strolling through Rittenhouse Square in 1943 could have foreseen the transformation of its environs during the coming generations. Two of the four sides were then flanked by dignified brown-stones, the high rise which currently straddles the library on the south corner was a one-story bar and grill where after class we swilled Jack Roses (Philadelphia’s indigenous libation), and right across from there the Crillon tower rose alone, waving like a concrete feather. But the park proper today remains identical to itself of a half century ago. Indeed, when I report to the Curtis Institute every few weeks (for I am now on the faculty), walking from Thirtieth Street Station even on stormy mornings and enjoying a perhaps false sense of security after the assault of Manhattan, the clock stops. I’m again a student with the queasy thrill of not knowing enough—or maybe knowing too much—to pass the course. The six lanes of Rittenhouse that intersect at the fountain, the bronze goat, the central booth, the petunia-bordered lawns, have not budged; the circle in the square with its many stone benches still plays host to a rotation of students, housewives, and workmen by day, and by night to a lazy flood of systematized cruising until dawn. On Eighteenth Street the Curtis Institute, outside and in, looks the same, although two new buildings have been added down on Locust Street, and the front office is now occupied by Ms. Elaine Katz.

  In 1943 it was occupied by Miss Hill—Jane, to some older students—an officiously motherly type with a Continental veneer, like Frances Osato, skilled at welcoming greenhorns. January I was to start here in the midst of the fray, where everyone else knew everyone else. Was my protecting father with me? Would he have explained to Miss Hill that he “happened to be in the East on business,” and stayed just long enough to ensconce me in a one-room flat above Gessell’s Florist Shop on Twenty-first, fifteen dollars monthly?

  At school, organist David Craighead was assigned to show me around. He introduced the composer flock: Wainright Churchill, Rolf Sherer, David Kimball, and Clermont Pepin whose teenaged Canadian sister was married to our common composition professor, Maestro Scalero, aged seventy-three. These colleagues seemed uppity and reactionary. Asked about their tastes, they mentioned Schubert and Reger; asked to show their wares, they stalled like brainwashed foreign agents. At my first lesson with the maestro, things grew clear.

  Rosario Scalero, born in Turin in 1870 and retaining an accent thick as minestrone, had studied with Ernesto Sivori (student of Paganinni’s) in Genoa, and had actually known and venerated Brahms. In 1919 Scalero immigrated to the USA, where later at Curtis he became the sole mentor of the adolescent Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber. Nothing if not technically adroit, these two had been guided by Scalero’s iron hand through an endless maze of counter-point and branded by his special conservatism (Respighi was the last European composer he approved of). On them it looked good. But Barber and Menotti were beginners when Scalero found them; I was already nineteen, with years of rigorous academic baggage, a preoccupation with the music of today, and a few notions of my own. When Scalero now explained that we’d be doing counterpoint and nothing but, and that if he caught me writing “original” pieces I’d be fired, I felt less offended than miffed. I gazed into his empty, hazel, always leaky eyes and wanted to puke. These weren’t terms to make a budding artist bloom—yet wh
ere could I turn? My parents were dazzled and vindicated by the fact of the scholarship. I could hardly retreat to Chicago. Besides, I’d begun to make friends.

  The first and most crucial of these was a seventeen-year-old pianist who lived one floor above me at the Gessells’. Eugene Istomin, the only child of white Russian émigrés whose existence revolved around his career, was Rudolf Serkin’s prize pet. In a few months he would be debuting with Ormandy (the Chopin F minor), would win the precious Leventritt Award, would perform (the Brahms B-flat) with the New York Philharmonic and become an overnight star. For now he was winding up the scholastic year, practicing all day, dining always at L’Aiglon nearby, where his father was maître d’hôtel, reading heavy stuff (Thomas Mann, Leibniz) and going to movies. Istomin père was good-looking, imperial, aloof. Istomin mère was dark-eyed, emotional, with a “telling” Slavic alto which she used for mournful love songs accompanied with artful campiness by her son. That son was physically a dusky, worried cherub with a social stance that combined warmth and hauteur in equal doses. (When at fifty he finally married it was to the strong and beauteous Martita Casals, a reincarnation of his mother.) He knew his worth at seventeen: a master pianist already, he never improved, and I mean this as a compliment. Great interpreters don’t progress—except sometimes negatively, the way a cancer progresses—so much as expand or contract repertorially; they are what they are by midadolescence, because excellence and comprehension don’t come with age, they’re inborn. Thus for teachers to admonish students, as Serkin did, not to attempt this or that masterpiece until they’re “ready” is to pity the students should they die beforehand.

  Meanwhile Eugene liked me, but was wary. Curtis was not riven by hierarchies and lowerarchies, but it was segmented, and the specialists didn’t overlap, especially the composers, who were a breed apart. Eugene, whose role model was an older pianist, the absent (in the army, like so many others) Byron Hardin, a boisterous Don Juan whose glamour was advertised in hushed tones at school, may have found my French biases effete. But I amused him too. When we grew more friendly his childishness rather than his maturity (which was largely a pose anyway) came to the fore. My urbane generalities would reduce him to conniptions of hiccuping laughter, and he greeted my serious affirmations with incredulous appreciation. For instance, in the game of What If the Famous Dead Came Back to Earth, I said I’d be less interested in playing The Rite of Spring for Bach than in showing Nero how to use the vacuum cleaner. When he played Chopin a new world opened up for me. Eugene did not believe in cleaning the piano keys—soap renders them chalky, ungiving, while the encrusted grime of labor renders them homey, elastic. On his unhygienic keyboard he would pause occasionally, in a Largo section, to vibrate a digit upon an ivory as upon a violin string—a hopeless action, but a musical action nonetheless, and musical, a new term for me, was used in Philadelphia to describe a human trait. (In Chicago, we said “musicianship.”) Eugene contended that the violinist Jascha Heifetz influenced his piano playing as much as any pianist, and that he sought, through his buttery legato, to extract from a Steinway what nature had bestowed only on a Stradivarius. During that year I heard Eugene practice and perform for hundreds of hours. His nature became my second nature. I myself am hardly a great pianist but I am a good impersonator; when people comment on my pianism, I say: I can’t play at all, I’m doing an imitation of Eugene. If more than the singing of any classical musician, the blues of Billie Holiday (not the tunes themselves, but her way with the tunes) have colored my way of composing songs, so the artistry of Eugene Istomin has influenced the way I approach all music, even music he despises.

  Other pianists? Besides Eugene, Serkin taught five more geniuses. Of these, in 1943, I remember mainly Teddy Letvin, who was never depressed, and played with the assurance of inexperience. Seymour Lipkin, who was never without his copy of Van Loon’s The Arts, and played Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin intellectually, meaning with a deemphasis on dazzle, even in the Toccata, and stressing inner voices.

  Sharing the piano faculty was Isabelle Vengarova, a bejeweled virago who frightened me from across the lobby. Her students were to Serkin’s (in the ken of the cognoscenti) what Baldwin is to Steinway. Eugene’s imitation of “the Vengarova method” consisted of an arched hand producing a satiny but weightless gloss. Still, Madame Vengarova’s entourage remains clearer in memory than Serkin’s. Is little Gary Graffman, whose olden rendition of the A-flat Ballade remains indelible, truly the current director of the Institute for whom, a half century later, I’ve just completed a Left-hand Concerto? There was Eileen Flissler, too, she of the brassy laugh and rosebud lips, who could sight-read anything. After marrying Aaron Rosand, she had something of a chamber music career (in 1970 she played in the ill-fated nonet I composed and conducted for the movie Panic in Needle Park) and died a suicide. There was the rubicund Abba Bogin, frisky as a pup with an infallible ear and a “way” with Haydn. And Jacob Lateiner, for whom Elliott Carter would invent a piano concerto, thanks to the Ford Foundation in the beneficent sixties.

  Shall I add that mostly all of these pianists who were my new friends were also Jewish? That I mention this merely as a sociological datum is only partly true, or that I noticed it simply because I was Gentile, thus an outsider. For one thing, the pianists among themselves spoke not only the common language of pianism but of the Jewishness they shared, and which indeed dominated the performing world then, as distinct from the composing world. (Aaron Copland as a Jewish composer was the most visible exception since Mendelssohn. But he was also gay, which sort of makes him a Gentile.) In fact, I felt a bit like a cheat, as I had felt at Northwestern, in my passivity at not cultivating a more goyische milieu. Today this sense of … of illegitimacy could not arise, since the student pianists are mainly preteenagers from Korea or Japan who, for sheer technical proficiency, play rings around Horowitz, but who spend so much time practicing their instruments they never learn English. In 1943 the gap between a reticent midwestern Wasp and second-generation Russian Jews was casually spanned by the rambunctious magnanimity of the latter, with their stage mothers and extrovert brio that is part and parcel of the public performer’s character. Besides, who else was there?

  I don’t recall having shared a single meal with any of the cowed composers, much less visiting their rooms. Was I reticent about wanting to discuss, say, Delius, fearing they might have found him superfluous, even facetious, if they even knew of him?

  The famed harpist Carlos Salzedo was a vibrant figure around the halls, with a following of exclusively female blond angels who had all forgone the standard instrument—the golden triangle that is strummed in heaven—for the Salzedo harp. The Salzedo harp sounded effective for Salzedo’s own works (the most popular, called “Scintillation,” required striking the hollow case of the instrument) but looked like an ecru coffin. One of the harpists invited me, and I crazily accepted, to accompany a recital in her Virginia hometown. (What the program comprised, I’ve now forgotten, likewise the bus trip south. I do recall only that the angel’s parents spoke of “Negroes” even as a Negro passed canapés.) Can one fraternize with harpists?

  The harpist needs a lot of pluck,

  A black silk costume and a truck.

  wrote Gluyas Williams.

  The singers at Curtis, by the nature of things, became staunch pals, and some remained so for decades. They were pupils of Madame Gregory’s, of Richard Bonelli’s, of Elisabeth Schumann’s. Muriel Smith, whose mezzo was rich and slick as peanut butter, was the first person ever to sing my songs publicly. This she continued to do, recitalizing regularly along with her triumphs as the first Carmen Jones, later as a vedette in London, finally as a pawn of Moral Rearmament. She ended as a dietician in a southern college, where she died forgotten.

  Ellen Faull, whose soprano of unlimited range flowed with unflawed naturalness from her larynx like a cloud of peridot chiffon, was also a disciplined technician with a wide repertory. She has become, via international opera houses, one of our
classier vocal pedagogues. In 1963 at her behest I made a little book of Tennyson settings which she premiered the next year, and continues to promote. Remo Allotta (later called Kenneth Remo), a laughing Italian with diction clear as spring water, also inspired some psalm settings which he championed, until the song recital as a lucrative medium collapsed forever. Meanwhile he created a major role in Weill’s Street Scene, vanished, reappeared in California as Aschenbach in Death in Venice toward 1974, and now seems again submerged.

  Tenor David Lloyd, then David Jenkins, was, like Byron Hardin, in the army and showed up only on sporadic furloughs. Will I ever forget this seductive self-assured soldier as he opened his mouth to intone—Eugene at the ivories—a lied of Brahms’s? David didn’t so much change as instill my notion of Song: how it is sculpted, articulated, sounded. Four years after when we were all in New York I set a text of Catullus expressly for—not David himself but—his disembodied voice. In 1962, with Veronica Tyler, he created (as the French say) my cantata, King Midas.

  Of the string players I remember many but befriended few. The image of cute Bobby LaMarchina does return, sitting on his haunches in the cloak room tossing jacks, regarding no one, seemingly illiterate, then in the evening, on the stage of Curtis Hall, concluding a sensually controlled version of Ravel’s Habañera with that insidious upward glissandoz, so adult, so satisfying, and yes, so musical. He was Piatagorsky’s pride who grew into a conductor, performed my Third Symphony in Washington, D.C., and again in Hawaii, had flings with two strong-minded female acquaintances of mine, and now I’ve lost track.

  Although William Kincaid and Marcel Tabuteau (the latter’s wife coached French at school) were in evidence, especially on Saturdays at the Academy at their respective desks as first flute and first oboe, and although I was in awe of the very fact of them, as one is with people one has long heard about but never seen (their solos on the three separate recordings, all led by Stokowski, of L’après-midi d’un faune, were, in calculated languor and tonal hue, nothing less than lewd), I did not mingle with or recognize any student wind players, even less the brass and percussion majors, if there were any.