Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  For the record, I “minored” in piano with Freda Pastor, still on the faculty today with her wheat-colored hair, and treating me still like a child. At our first lesson she said, “You mean you’re going to do it by heart?” as, with no music propped before me, I prepared to attack Beethoven’s C-minor Variations, a piece I had mastered at Northwestern and felt professionally on top of.

  (I am my ideal pianist. If I’d rather hear myself play more than anyone, it’s not that I’m better than anyone—there is no “better than”; it’s that my imagination fills in missed notes, the inner ear camouflages mere sloppiness. I play just well enough for perfection, while virtuosos play too well for perfection. Most Big Pianists perform the same repertory. They can’t all be right. But I am right for me. Perhaps I should have said: The only pianist for my idealized performance is me. I have never needed to lament, “If only my parents had forced me to practice!”)

  The current landscape was stimulating and competitive. Curtis operated far closer to the professional bone than did Northwestern.

  As to the sexual preferences of these enumerated categories of musician, I was not yet conscious of the generalities I was later to formulate in talks with Dr. Kinsey. Meanwhile, although I had a perfectly ample sex life during my one year in Philadelphia, I never slept with anyone connected with the Curtis Institute.

  A few weeks after my arrival, I went upstairs to the Istomins’. There, sitting at the piano in a persian-lamb coat, legs crossed, one hand idly on the keys, was a girl who flashed me a smile of such radiance that it warms me even now. This was Shirley Gabis, aged eighteen, a protégée of Eugene’s whom he was grooming for the May auditions at school. Friends on sight, we have remained so through thick and thin. Her silver laugh, like her golden smile, is all-embracing. (As a rule I dislike laughter, all laughter, but particularly the penetrating overreactive shrieks of girls impressing boys whose jokes they don’t get, or the jerky cackle of mediocrities at the beach whose sole response to anything is this mechanicalization. A rare few have good laughs—Michael Torke today has a firm, round, male laugh—and Shirley was one of them.)

  She lived on Delancey Place, number 2302, with her divorced mother, handsome Rae Gabis, who had been raised in London and enunciated in uppercrust British tones peppered with yiddishisms and goddamns. Shirley’s speech, in turn, was an unnuanced mélange of high English and low Philadelphian, enjoyable but odd to my Chicago ears. She had inherited her mother’s beauty and poise (Shirley’s limbs and torso remain famous), as well as her willful, even combative, intelligence, often at odds with a plaintive vulnerability. Two older brothers were off at college; the father, a small, wiry businessman, lived elsewhere in the city but showed up occasionally to lay down the law, then vanished again. Rae Gabis, who loved music with the awed respect of the cultured amateur, was self-supporting as a furrier’s assistant in Germantown, rising early to catch the commuter train, returning late, shopping en route at Horn & Hardart’s, and making ends meet for the sake of her daughter’s uncertain future as a pianist.

  An hour after Rae Gabis had sized me up, she asked, with a smile of anxious ingratiation: “How much rent do you pay at the Gessells?… Fifteen a month?” Pause. “Would you like the back room here, for ten dollars a month, plus meals?”

  So I moved in. The street-level apartment shared by this pair of adult females was a floor-through railroad, with three large rooms: a front parlor with sliding door which at night separated two sleeping areas for Shirley and her mother, and a back dining room, which was also my bedroom, overlooking Fitler Square. Smallish kitchen, one bath. Upstairs lived the Grossmans—Roy, the neighborhood’s air-raid warden, and Mary, a retired high school teacher who drank.

  We “children” went to bed late, got up late, evening meals were served by the schwartze, Lucy, during which Rae harangued us: “You goddamn kids, sleeping all day, while I work just to feed you.” I had never heard voices raised at table, and found this as glamorously indigestible as the food, both here and in Latimer’s delicatessen on Spruce Street: rare meat, corned beef, pastrami, sour cream, Jewish and Italian specialties. We went continually to movies (when not attending the almost-nightly recitals at Curtis), mainly at the Avon—The Cat People, The Hard Way—or at the all-night theaters on Market Street after bars closed, which was midnight in Pennsylvania.

  Eugene, Shirley, myself, formed a triumvirate (except when Shirley and I went barhopping, which we deemed Eugene too young for), smoking a lot, talking unstoppably of subjects deep and gamy. I was uncomfortable with the local stress on classicism, especially on Beethoven. Yes, at Northwestern, and even before that with Belle, I had learned, even mastered—or vanquished, if you will—much of the standard repertory. But it hadn’t occurred to me that Beethoven was the core of the cosmos. Now, with that Teutonic shadow over Curtis, and especially with Eugene and Shirley, I was made to realize that France was an unnourishing dessert, while everything east of the Rhine, with perhaps an added pinch of Italy, was Music.

  I immersed myself in the late quartets, dissecting the scores, pondering the discs (mainly the Busch ensemble), and fearing that the lack was in me and not in Ludwig when his airs didn’t click, when “it” didn’t happen, when the involuntary mental erection impelled by True Art failed to materialize. I never got—still don’t get—the point of Beethoven. Far from weeping, I nod; my guilty love of Debussy and (shame!) Poulenc was as disconcerting as my preferring sugar to pasta, or preferring men to women. Would Beethoven acquire new meaning when I “matured”?

  Meanwhile I was subjected again to a draft exam, and was again rejected, as I would be still a third time in 1947 when Dr. Kraft, my analyst, wrote to the army psychiatrist that I had “not yet developed mature sexual impulses.” (Picture the wise young privates in their barracks, ripe to defend the nation with mature sexual impulses!) But I digress. When I did mature I had not learned to appreciate Beethoven more intensely, though I did learn that Beethoven himself never developed mature sexual impulses.

  As for that added pinch of Italy, it was intoxicating. Shirley was crazy about a dozen Monteverdi madrigals as recorded by Nadia Boulanger with four singers—the Comtesse (Marie-Blanche) de Polignac, Paul Derenne, Hugues Cuénod, Doda Conrad—in Boulanger’s own arrangements for piano and strings. This music “spoke to my condition,” as Quakers say; one of the madrigals especially, “Amor,” or “The Little Nymph’s Lament,” has, with its mounting melody over a four-note descending ostinato, lingered and resounded through my own songs more than any other musical experience from this period. Polignac’s thin soprano—backed up, like a pop vocalist’s, with a chorus of three commentators—was hardly lovely, but it denned expressivity at the highest level. Forty-five years later I found a copy of the old disc and played it again for Shirley. Oddly, though she recalled the other madrigals, she didn’t remember “Amor,” which, thanks to her, had been so seminal to me. (In 1954 in Rome, Bill Weaver played me the raucous Kay Starr’s “Comes Along a Love,” which throbbed in my head forever afterward. Recently I reminded him of this. “‘Comes Along a Love’?” he mused. “I don’t remember. Was it on the other side of Kay’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’?”)

  Curtis had its claustrophobic side. Escapades were in order. Not having seen New York since the world’s fair in ’39, when I so savored the anxious sensuality of being far from home, I planned a return visit, with who knew what mischief in mind, sometime in late February.

  “Then you’ve got to look up Lenny,” said Shirley. She was forever talking about Lenny, Lenny this, Lenny that, and making comparisons between his talents and everyone else’s. There’s nothing Lenny can’t do at the piano, she claimed, nothing he can’t do with an orchestra, plus he’s witty, good-looking, cultivated, bedazzling, hot stuff. Alvin Ross concurred. Alvin was Shirley’s painter friend, gentle to a fault, winsome, wry, smart, and excruciatingly adept in his Balthusian portraits. He reminded me of Géorg Redlich, whose recent death was still unsettling. Alvin painted my detailed likeness
(since lost) and we became staunch platonic chums, remaining so until he, too, died thirty-two years later of colon cancer. Alvin had a velvety voice, hooded eyes, and a single long white hair that sprouted from his forehead. He too raved about Lenny, who seemed to be a legend around Philadelphia, though but twenty-three when he quit Curtis the previous year. Lenny was one of those few who called Miss Hill “Jane.” Both Shirley and Alvin were in love with him in their way, and so was Rae. His fabled gifts, where did they lie? I wasn’t too aware of, or much interested in, what it meant to conduct, and no one had yet mentioned that Lenny composed. Why? He himself was not modest about his gifts; yet within the next twelve months, when three large, well-drafted works of his were unveiled to the world, even his intimates applauded as though he had suddenly grown a third arm. For the moment, though, he was a throbbing cipher.

  If, as the French contend, beauty is its own calling card, so is chutzpah. So too, in my case, is ignorance. Leonard Bernstein must not have owned a phone, or else I didn’t know you’re supposed to call people before you go visiting—at least in New York—because my entrance into his life was a knock on the door.

  I had never seen anyone who more exemplified Wordsworth’s “bliss was it then to be alive,” whose favorite works of art were so in sync with my own, yet whose acquaintance with these works had fomented in a milieu so foreign to mine. This I would realize in the next few hours, for to know Lenny at all was to know him immediately.

  I had interrupted a rehearsal. Later he chided me about manners, but now invited me in and bade me listen. The piece being practiced was Lenny’s own Clarinet Sonata. For someone not a composer his sonata sounded so much more seductive and well wrought than anything I—who was a composer—could come up with, that I felt, well, wistful. Already nineteen, with a scholarship at the world’s most prestigious conservatory, what had I to show for it? For that matter, had any nineteen-year-old American, thriving in this youth-worshiping land of the free, composed a symphony with even half the strength and skill that Shostakovich had at nineteen in his repressive Russia, or a poem with even half the wisdom and nuance that Rimbaud had in his decadent France? I would delve into the matter at length with Lenny (who never delved except at length), because when the rehearsal ended and the clarinetist—whose name was David Oppenheim—departed, I remained for the weekend.

  Bernstein, then twenty-four, subsisted as a music editor and piano teacher, working out of his second-floor flat in a Fifty-second Street brownstone, west of Fifth Avenue between Tony’s Bar and the 21 Club. Since the block still glimmered with the same nightclubs as in 1939, the new residential pockets seemed incongruous. Yet in the four intervening years classical musicians, who once lived in Greenwich Village and who today haunt the Ansonia and environs, were already staking out flats midtown in their immigration to northern Manhattan. (That tinkling piano in the next apartment—said my host—is none other than Eugene List laboring on the Chávez Concerto, an image which moved me more than being with Lenny, because I had heard of List.) Lenny shared the place with a girl named Edys, who loathed me on sight. He balanced this, without apology or explanation, by his unpatronizing interest. If in later years I often saw him rude to a point of parody, it was always to peers, never to underlings unequipped to shout back.

  We went over his little Clarinet Sonata, of which I especially adored the jumpy 5/8 motive. Learning that I’d been to Taxco two summers before, he seemed put out—he hadn’t been to Taxco. That I’d met Paul Bowles, whom he apotheosized, while in Mexico vexed him still more—he forever combined generosity with competitiveness. Then he cheered up, declaring that the jumpy motive was his “Taxco tune”—that he had been to Mexico through his music. As for the “Taxco tune,” it acted on me for years to come as Vinteuil’s petite phrase acted on Marcel. Its serious frivolity, so vaguely low class and so precisely American, were traits I’d not known before.

  “Shirley says you’re the only one alive who can negotiate all those repeated G-sharps in ‘Alborado del gracioso.’” “That’s because I fake it by taking every third G-sharp an octave higher,” and he showed me how. “Here’s a better piece,” he went on, and played “Une barque sur l’océan” from the same suite—Miroirs by Ravel—as the “Alborado.” I’d often read through but never learned “Une barque,” dismissing it as one of Ravel’s rare duds. Now here was Lenny bringing life to those academic roulades, revealing a brand-new side of the one composer I purported most to know. His pianism was the most alive I’ve ever known, glittering in my mind still as I write. Those vital hands are now a skeleton’s.

  We talked of Chávez, agreeing that we were surely the only two people on the block who knew the Mexican’s Sinfonía de Antígona. And how many others on the block could intone by heart the newly recorded French chansons of Marlene Dietrich, “Moi, je m’ennui” and “Assez”? (In the latter the orchestra suddenly halts as Marlene utters a deep Ah!, “the dirtiest single syllable ever etched in wax,” said Lenny, echoing my reaction to Mae West five years ago.)

  How had he avoided the service, and how did he deal with those complete strangers in the street—inevitably women—who point a finger to say: “Why aren’t you in uniform?” Asthma kept him out. He dealt with the strangers by ignoring the hostile ones and cajoling the others. Left of liberal, like his friend Marc Blitzstein (who was in the army—pridefully so), Lenny was no pacifist, at least not then, but would come, over the years, in his fight for a better world, to believe in the wretchedness of the military. Would he today, with me, discourage the gay men and lesbian campaign for acceptance in the military, encouraging them rather to join in abolishing the military? (If I’d said this before, I repeat it here—my one obsession that bears repeating.)

  He wowed me with his just-published version of El Salón México. But when I began sight-reading Copland’s Sonata—rather well, I thought—he asked: “Don’t you believe in observing dynamics?” I countered that the dynamics were in my head. He went on: “You ought to go see Aaron. Aaron’s always interested in jungische composers.” Whereupon he picked up the phone and made a date for me with Copland.

  We stayed up late, drank scotch, I vomited, we finally retired on a floor mattress in the front room, and arose next day at nine after Edys had left for work. Since he had to give a lesson at ten (to an untalented middle-aged priest) we had a quick breakfast on nearby Sixth Avenue at the Faisan d’Or—gay bar by night, short-order joint by day—where Lenny washed down his cornflakes with another shot of scotch (before a lesson! I was impressed), and where he put nickel after nickel in the jukebox to hear “Why Don’t You Do Right?”, because “it’s all about money.”

  We went to the Museum of Modern Art (my first visit), and when I stumbled over the name Rouault, he corrected: “It’s roo-ohl. Slowly now: ROO-OHL.” Music, too, must be “pronounced” right, he claimed. “There’s the inevitable performance for every piece.” I can’t agree. There are as many right ways for any piece as there are good players; even the composer’s way isn’t the last word (late note), and styles change with the years, etcetera.

  We went to the Central Park zoo (also my first visit) and examined the camels, which resembled cartoon creatures who suddenly speak English. Antelopeanly, Lenny leapt among the boulders, proud of his New York.

  Yes, we saw eye to eye, but from different angles, he from his extrovert (Jewish, if you will) performer’s perspective, I from my retentive Protestant vantage. Thus, when he listened to Les noces—which we both loved—through his ears, I through mine, what were we hearing? Les noces is about ancient Russia by an orthodox Catholic.

  When I said that a certain person had all the bad points of Jews but none of their good points, Lenny coolly asked if I were anti-Semitic, then promptly added (will I ever forget?): “You’re a disconcerting mélange of surprising sophistication and stupefying ignorance.”

  How do I sum up Lenny Bernstein after this first encounter? In our country of self-limiting specialists, here was a jack-of-all-trades as authen
tic as Leonardo. There seemed no area in which he did not consider himself an authority—music, pictures, books, politics, cooking, lovemaking. His overreactive enthusiasms did not embarrass me, even though they stemmed from someone five years my senior who should have known better. Nor was I ever quite certain, during the next four decades, how much of it was faked—like those repeated Gsharps in the “Alborado.” Still, each of us decides early in life on the part he’ll play; the role of enthusiast like the role of Protestant becomes ingrained, second nature, ourself. The fact that we were both, by definition, a part of our century did not keep us from shivering with delight at the very thought, unlike (and this still holds true) 90 percent of classical musicians, who are trammeled by the past.

  “What in the hell are you doing with Scalero?” he wondered.

  What indeed?

  Scalero now seemed dryer than ever. And so old. The fact that I, in his shoes today, will soon be as old as he was then, does not soften an interpretation of the past, though it does affect my way with the young. If my semiweekly intercourse with the maestro concerned nothing but counterpoint and more counterpoint, proffered in the abstract, an end in itself, I now avoid all emphasis on that craft with my students; should they need some tightening of their voice-leading, I suggest a refresher course elsewhere in the school. A teacher of composers, if there is such a breed, must himself be a composer, one who has often heard his own works well played, and thus has the practical sound in his veins with no cause to be frustrated. His point is made more through example than preaching. Indeed, looking back, I’ve learned as much from composers I never knew, or never could have known, as from scholastic discourse. Their work, not their words, provides the model, and a model is all that a student can build upon. I don’t recall ever discussing music with Scalero, though we must have done so occasionally. I do remember his claim that the theme for Essay for Orchestra No. 1 by Samuel Barber—Sam, as he called him—was from his (Scalero’s) own notebook; and that when the name of Virgil Thomson came up, Scalero said: “Silly man—he wears bracelets.” Not being a practicing, much less an appreciated, composer, Scalero was damned if anyone else would be. To a younger pupil this approach could be sterilizing. But I was nearing twenty, and would bide my time. At least I knew who I was.