Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  A great work is one you never get used to. Peter Grimes, like The Rite of Spring, was one of my milestones. Before opening night I bought and brooded over the score and befriended as many of the cast as possible. (Though not Phyllis Curtin, whom I scarcely met and would not come to know until 1959, when she turned into, and has remained, the most important soprano of my career.) Not the least of my motives for this detailed study was the report I made to Kubly (for yes, our friendship was still on) in his capacity of reporter. Since he could not attend the premiere, I sent a detailed telegram, and this was published, scarcely edited, in Time. Kubly did show up the following week, and Aaron gave me permission (but I was already twenty-two!) to quit the Barrington confines and lodge with Kubly at the Hotel Lenox. There I also gave him a review, musical and gossipy (Lenny’s acrid comments at rehearsals), of the American premiere of Shostakovich’s new symphony—I think it was the Eighth. Lenny pretended to be not amused, and during lunch on the lawn, in full view of everyone, knocked from my head the tan beret which I then sported, but kissed me afterward as was his flagrant wont.

  Britten did come. I spoke with him à deux only briefly, at the postopening party. He smelled somewhat of digested champagne. I was inhibited. A month later I sent him a sycophantic letter, a copy of “Alleluia,” and (since David Sachs had once told me that Prokosch had introduced himself to Spender with a nude photo of himself) I enclosed a snapshot, taken by Kubly, of myself stripped to the waist and picking raspberries. Britten didn’t answer. For the record, we did conduct for many years a two-sided correspondence which I later initiated from Morocco, not coquettishly but apropos of his work with pacifism. (Also for the record, I mentioned the seminude picture in my first published book, The Paris Diary, and received a dozen letters—not just from men but from women—whose senders enclosed nude pictures of themselves. You can’t imagine what people think they look like!)

  Oh, the fragrance of those giant elms, especially in the rain, when sounds like odors carry pugnaciously and the last movement of Sibelius’s Third spreads through the winds, conducted first in the morning by Seymour Lipkin, and in the afternoon by Gerhard Samuel, Koussevitzky’s chief new pets. Koussie (as he was called)’s chief regular pet was, of course, Lukas Foss, who, because the eminent Russian conductor couldn’t read scores, acted as literate assistant, playing all music, new and old, submitted to the maestro.

  Lukas, about my age, was more flamboyantly facile and versed than me. A German refugee—and retaining even today a crusty accent—his music was virulently non-European, meaning lean, angular, muscular, diatonic, unromantic, and using folklike tunes and jazzy rhythms, either foursquare or in ⅝ meters. Lukas and Lenny were intimates, vying amiably for their simultaneous reputations as triple threats. Lukas was surely as good a pianist as Lenny, a thoroughly trained conductor, and a composer (at twenty-two) of large-scope works that were conspicuously performed by major orchestras.

  That he was at this time more American than the pope (Aaron) reflects the yearnings of the naturalized citizen—yearnings to be accepted, to be in the swim. In ensuing years Lukas has leapt onto so many bandwagons (the wide-open-spaces vehicle, the twelve-tone vehicle, “chance,” “happenings,” the “masterpiece” syndrome, neoromanticism, minimalism, always using the “right” poets if vocalism was called for—in sum, so up-to-date that his music grew dated with each fashion change) that if all the art of our century were wiped off the earth save that of Lukas, the next century could reconstitute our musical history through his scores alone. Those who criticize this bent chez lui miss the point—that cultural promiscuity is Lukas, even as spreading-himself-thin is Lenny.

  He was socially promiscuous too, and, being heterosexual, for all practical purposes, made passes at various girls including my friend, the beauteous Grace Cohen, whose Nefertiti features, long lilac hair, and the plangent torso of a modern dancer pleaded for defilement, even as her Bronxy voice pleaded for mercy.

  Lenny brought Lukas and a guest, Marc Blitzstein, to a party one night in the great hall of our Barrington school. We all sat on the floor while Lukas played and sang—or rather, bleated as composers do—a spacious Parable he was composing for Todd Duncan and orchestra. I was jealous not only of his inspired technique for manipulating so large a canvas, which I’d have been incapable of despite my narcissistic act of self-assurance, but of his cool ability to show his cards so expertly in front of everyone. I resented my own reticence, my lack of exhibitionism on the grand scale, and rationalized that, well, I wasn’t Jewish.

  Blitzstein was even more of a performer. Drenched in the gold dust of reputation, he was part of American history with his leftist operas of yore, his army stint in Europe from whence he’d just returned, and his recent huge piece of patriotic gore, which Lenny had just conducted in New York, called the Airborne Symphony. Now here he was in the flesh, about to show his cards.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that inside every composer lurks a singer longing to get out. What is known in the trade as “the composer’s voice”—that squeaky, unpitched organ with which composers audition their vocal wares to baffled sopranos or uninterested opera producers—may explain their becoming composers in the first place, out of frustrated vengeance. The human voice is, after all, both the primal and the ultimate expression, the instrument all others seek to emulate. I have known only two American exceptions to the rule that the composer-as-singer sabotages his own work. One was Samuel Barber, who had a true, gentle baritone of professional class, albeit with the rolled r’s of upper-crust Philadelphia. The other was Marc Blitzstein, who, true, had a “composer’s voice,” but who composed specifically for such a voice. With his wheezy larynx he could put over his own songs because of a fearless, horny conviction that I’ve never heard elsewhere. Indeed, during the long run of Threepenny Opera, all of the regularly changing cast seemed to be hired according to how much they sounded like Blitzstein.

  Now here he was in Barrington, cajoling, whispering, rapping his new song, which Lenny was calling a masterpiece, and which in fact was called “Zipper Fly.” We could not then know the dancer from the dance, for with Marc at play, his song (to his own text) seemed irresistibly witty. In retrospect, heard through “real” voices, one realized that his left-wing ditties are lessened by standard beauty.

  I wanted to know Marc Blitzstein, and would, but not then.

  The fellow student composer I came to know best and longest was Daniel Pinkham, he of the eternally even temper, ingratiating smile, roving eye, biggish ears that were maximally experienced for church music. Like me, Danny wrote songs, indeed, specialized in songs, although choral music and little operas were very much in his catalogue too since in Cambridge, where he lived and had a church job, he had access to all sorts of professional singers. We weren’t quite aware at the time that all composers didn’t write songs: the icy truth is that songwriters are as rare among composers as composers are rare among football players, and this specialty within a specialty proved a bond between Danny and me. By Song I mean: A lyric poem of moderate length set to music for single voice with piano. (A lyric poem is an expression of its author’s feelings rather than a narrative of events. A moderate length is up to five minutes. Single voice means the instrument of one singer. A piano is a piano.)

  Danny, protégé of Piston’s and Boulanger’s, grandson of Lydia Pinkham, and a proper Bostonian with long a’s and soft r’s, did not show feelings other than optimistic ones. One can’t picture him weeping. Blazingly intelligent, his culture was—is—nonetheless restricted to music. He is music. Reading matter, no matter how abstruse, seems cogent only insofar as it serves his muse. His conversation, though clever, is nondevelopmental, almost strictly anecdotal, as though he feared where an evolving entretien might lead. He remains a major American harpsichordist and organist, and a confector of—at its best—delicious and sometimes touching Gebrauchsmusik. He has never shown envy, and attributes his smallish reputation to his not being in the swim. He has always
lived in Massachusetts.

  Danny had a station wagon, the better to cart around his ever-present harpsichord. He was always going somewhere or coming back, saying good-bye or saying hello, transferring hitchhikers, unloading students at the nearby lake where we swam at noon, sometimes tearing off a piece in the back seat. Our relationship was platonic. We remain faithful colleagues and mutual champions.

  Remnants:

  —Have I mentioned that Aaron called me Boy?—he called all of his boys Boy. Or that in his speech on movie music he claimed that in Hollywood you could score for anything you wanted, although the actual orchestration, for legal union reasons, was farmed out to hacks? That, for example, in the snow scene of the horseless carriage in The Magnificent Ambersons Bernard Herrmann used fifteen celestas. That last point scintillates, but the fact was belied years later when I saw—heard—the film on television. No celestas.

  —Did I drink at Tanglewood? Not much, and not problematically. Did I have sex (other than with K)? Just once, with an oboe player in the woods, followed by a violent headache.

  —Paula Graham presented a group of my songs with me at the piano, at one of the composers’ concerts, and was, as the saying goes, a success.

  —On the lawn by the shed we were likely to see Paula’s visiting friend, Patricia Neway, gaunt but firm with a businesslike stride, fierce deep eyes, an unfunny approach to music and drama, a tragedienne with, it was said, the most beautiful voice in the world. That winter she would star on Broadway in Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, would give recitals all alone and make you think they were operas, and would finally create the role of Magda Sorel in Menotti’s The Consul internationally, and have flaming desserts named for her at Maxim’s. More of her later.

  —On the raft in the lake we were likely to see Arthur Weinstein, Lenny’s chief hanger-on, yet with his own identity as interior designer, and a pretty amateur tenor voice with which he interpreted recherché repertory, i.e., Poulenc and Britten and sometimes me.

  —On the cash register of the music store we were likely to see Robert Holton, energetic in his promotion of living art, ambitious in the publishing field, soon to be important at Boosey & Hawkes where, some years later, at his behest I would be welcomed and remain until today.

  —On the grass behind the rehearsal hall, Robert Shaw was putting a group of madrigalists through their paces. The work was Hinde-mith’s unaccompanied set of Six Chansons, on Rilke’s French lyrics sung now in English. Shaw was a handsome hypnotist who, by merely rocking the cradle, could entice lovely tones from shrieking babies.

  —So enamored was I of Britten that I pillaged every available score from Bob Holton’s bookstore and discovered, for the first time, that originality as a virtue is only relative. The opening song of the Michelangelo Sonnets, for instance, is, in the piano accompaniment, not even a plagiarism of Ravel’s Le paon but a carbon copy. Yet one never hears of an affinity between Ravel and Britten. The two works, given their contexts, are independent.

  —For the composers’ meetings we each had to analyze a short contemporary piece from top to bottom. I chose Samuel Barber’s Essay for Orchestra No. 1 in which I accounted for every note in its formal, harmonic, contrapuntal, melodic, rhythmic, and instrumental context in relation to every other note. I still have the marked-up music, which I know better than my own.

  —Father drove through Lenox, met some of my pals, renewed acquaintance with Aaron, and told me that Mother was edging into another period of darkness.

  After the stint in Tanglewood, my parents and I went to New Glarus. It was their last local sortie before their permanent remove from Chicago to Philadelphia in the fall. Herbert Kubly, proud of his Swiss origins and of his Wisconsin home town, a cheese-making center, where every August the Wilhelm Tell legend was acted out in Switzerdeutsch before a huge audience en plein air, invited me and my parents to witness this pageant and stay as guests in the family house. The show was endless and incomprehensible, but Mother was moved to tears by the ending, when Tell shoots the apple from his son’s head, and the two fall into each other’s arms. She couldn’t stop crying, and continued off and on through the night, imploring me to remain with the family forever. Kubly, not amused, felt we were a neurotic clan right out of The Silver Cord. Mother, when I told her this, was offended. As for me, wasn’t I the picture of stability?

  Wasn’t the “artist,” in fact, the most sane of citizens, saner than generals or moneymakers, since he and he alone knows what he wants to do and how to do it? (Money and war merely bide the time.)

  Back in New York that October the ties with Kubly weakened. I recall myself as passive observer, touched by but indifferent to Kubly’s flailing, his anxiety, his landing in Bellevue. A truly unhappy person is tiresome, his misery being so all-consuming that he relinquishes his personhood. Nor is another person (thought by the unhappy person to be not a person but a monster) ever responsible for the unhappy person’s unhappiness. But neither of us reasoned that way then.

  20. Paul • Sam • Marc

  No no.

  A miracle works more than the spell of spellbound music.

  It works life;

  it awakens a dead body to behavior

  and my poor heart to love such as I did not know I knew…

  —from A Sermon on Miracles by Paul Goodman

  Time oozes on—at least for those of us who are alive (as the euphemism has it in English)—sometimes swift, sometimes stagnant, always forward and flexible. Ten minutes spent being burned at the stake are not comparable to ten minutes in line at the bank, or waiting for your lover’s phone call, or at a lousy movie. The condition anterior to being alive and the condition after (even rocks are alive, even lava and salt; Earth is a panting organ coated in rubicund slime—us) are the same, that is, no condition: nonexistence. Though the very term “nonexistence” implies a tangible finality, a something that is there. The poet Freud knew that our own death is unimaginable; when we try to imagine it, we perceive that we really survive as spectators.

  Anyway. If chronology has been often unverifiable hitherto, I now have before me the first of four-dozen agendas kept since 1947, and they are explicit. Alas, except for the page of January 1, which contains but one word, “Chaos,” many of the other notations throughout the year are in shorthand, referring to forgotten Christian names, and to appointments without direction, sometimes several on a day. There’s a seemingly limitless sprinkling of boyfriends (Al, Sunday at 6; Eddie, Tues. at 2 a.m.; Fabian, Carl, O’Malley, Dick Stryker, Max T., John H., Tony, Gary) some of whom reassemble themselves in the mind’s eye with their smiles, their threats, their uniforms, and I tingle as I type this. Janet Fairbank’s name recurs throughout the year, always at 11 a.m., so I must have been still working for her. George Perle, Pavlik, Alfonso Ossorio, Grace Cohen, Shirley, Ben Weber, Leo Rost, Seymour Barab, are names that turn up weekly. On 25 April I note that my journal was stolen by an overnight visitor. (The visitor phoned often to say we—he and I—could make a bundle by publishing it. When he finally brought it back, hoping for a reward, I asked Grace and Seymour to be present, in case of any rough stuff.) Romolo di Spirito, Eva Gauthier, John Heliker (Lou’s dear painter friend who’s line drawing of me remains in my treasure chest), Joan Lewison, Christopher Lazare, Jennie Tourel. Buy lotion for crabs. Write Rome Academy again. 26 May, At Noon upon Two at the Old Knickerbocker (I’d thought it was at least a year earlier). Read Gide. Read H. James. John Lindsay (who became John Wingate), Howard Moss, Ankey Larabee, Zeller at 9 p.m. (this was Robert Zeller, picked up at the Old Colony Bar, who eighteen years later would conduct the premiere of my opera Miss Julie, and fifteen years after that would perish from AIDS, before AIDS had a name), Paula, David Stimer, Hennig (my elderly German pupil), Mae O’Donnell, and Rae Green. The Mother of Us All. The Eagle with Two Heads. Kimon Friar. Muriel. 18 June leave for Martha’s Vineyard on train with Paul.

  Why have I not written of Paul up to now? Because I couldn’t know how to start? Outside of my fa
mily, Paul Goodman was the strongest nonmusical influence of my American life; and his influence, as a poet and thinker, on my music—literally on my music, not on my thoughts about music—was inestimable. He was my Goethe and Heine, my Apollinaire and Eluard, my Boïto and Hofmannstahl, my utterly American source, my spring; the poet, among the hundreds I used and sometimes abandoned, to whom I most often returned, even after he died in 1972 at sixty. To paraphrase Auden: He was my North, my South, my Night, my Light,/I thought that love would last forever,/I was right.

  A decade earlier he closed his journal thus: “I am not happy, yet as of today I would willingly live till 80. I have already lived longer than many another rebellious soul.” Growing Up Absurd had finally brought him major prominence, although he had been preaching (and practicing) its contents all his life. If he was not happy, nobody wise, with imagination and open eyes, can stay happy for long. But he was vital and fertile; more important for an artist, he was appreciated, even ultimately “understood,” when he died, twenty years short of his goal. Happily—if that’s the word—he did not survive to see his reputation fade, to be replaced by flabbier savants. Even at the end, in the melancholy of fame, Paul Goodman was admired by thousands who, paradoxically, did not know his name. His original notions, having become general knowledge, crumbled into slogans which the liberated youth of the 1960s spouted at him—to set him straight.

  To say that he became my most pertinent influence, social and poetic, would be to echo many a voice in the young groups who felt themselves to be as important to Paul as he was to them—the inevitable covetousness that comes when great men involve their entourage not only through their work but through their person.

  My first good songs date from the mid-forties, most of them settings of Paul Goodman’s verse. I may have written other kinds of songs since, but none better. That I have never in the following decades wearied of putting his words to music is the highest praise I can show him; since I put faith in my own work, I had first to put faith in Paul’s. Through Paul I wrote not only songs to celebrate Sally’s smile, or Susan at play, or prayers for the birth of Matthew Ready (who died before his father, mountain climbing), but the opera Cain and Abel, a ballet (with Alfonso Ossorio), choral pieces, backgrounds for the Beck’s theater and nightclub skits.