Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  He resigned from the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra after his long tenure there. There was much speculation as to where he would go next. He could write his own ticket. He finally decided on the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, making guest appearances elsewhere.

  An accurate picture of John’s musical friends must include the German lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. John was devoted to him, and I inherited him when Dieter, as he was known, came for recitals to New York.

  John had met the young baritone in London in the 1950s. John had always cared for German music and was deeply moved by the exceptional artistry and the magnificent voice of this large blond Berliner.

  Besides their musical interests, Dieter was knowledgeable about painting; in fact he painted himself. The two toured the galleries together, and John helped him make some, at first, modest acquisitions.

  Fischer-Dieskau became world famous. Besides giving recitals all over Europe and in concert halls here in the United States, he sang leading roles in the major opera houses. John was still living in England in 1962 and went to Coventry Cathedral to hear his friend Fischer-Dieskau sing his friend Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

  I never saw him in an operatic role, but a DVD of The Marriage of Figaro, with Fischer-Dieskau singing the role of the Count, showed him to be a gifted actor with an unexpected flair for comedy.

  Later, when both Fischer-Dieskau and John were in New York, there were always reunions. Naturally, we were right there when Dieter sang Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, with that superb accompanist Gerald Moore at the piano. I was struck by the fact that even for a daytime recital, Fischer-Dieskau wore Pan-Cake makeup. Apparently, it was routine in Europe for performers at that time.

  In the 1970s Dieter arrived with a new wife: the Hungarian soprano Julia Varady. She was gifted, dark haired, lively, considerably younger. I took her to Ken Lane’s to buy some stage jewelry. John did the galleries with Dieter and helped him buy a Monet.

  John always kept a framed photograph of young Fischer-Dieskau and his two, then, small children, part of his personal pantheon: along with photographs of André Gide, Albert Schweitzer, Arnold Schoenberg, Cyril Connolly, and Henry James (he did not know the latter). Next to them was a childhood drawing by Lucian Freud for his mother.

  After a long and glorious career, in 1992 Fischer-Dieskau retired from the concert stage as a singer but took up conducting, with great success.

  Fortunately for us, recordings bring that ringing voice right into our living room.

  I can’t end this prestissimo gallop down a gallery of musician friends without including two remarkable but totally dissimilar artists: the conductor and harpsichordist William Christie and the composer Elliott Carter.

  We have heard Christie, Bill to us, on numerous occasions conducting in New York, where he draws a standing-room-only audience for concert performances of such operas as Lully’s Atys and Purcell’s King Arthur, sometimes conducting from the harpsichord. He pays meticulous attention to every detail of the staging, including the outfits worn by his young singers.

  One time, we went with him to Caen, some four hours’ drive from Paris, where he has built a devoted audience and was welcomed from the stage by the mayor. One might not think that a whole evening of Purcell would be a crowd-pleaser in a French provincial town, but it was.

  That nonstop day started in Paris, at eight in the morning. There was a long rehearsal at Caen, the concert, a reception afterward, then the drive back, with Bill lying fast asleep on the luggage. We arrived after one in the morning. We were completely exhausted, but Bill awoke refreshed and talked excitedly about forthcoming concerts—he performs all over Europe—and of his new plans for his country house in the Vendée. His garden has been classified as a national treasure.

  In January 2010 he had the prestigious honor of being made a member of the Académie Française. I went over to Paris to watch Bill, a former American, being welcomed sous la Coupole (under the Cupola) of this august institution. The building itself is magnificent—Louis Le Vau, late seventeenth century.

  The Academicians (there are by tradition forty; a new one can only be admitted to replace one who has died) filed in one by one, in their traditional uniform. Designed in the early nineteenth century, the black cutaway’s lapels and collars and the sides of the trousers are lavishly embroidered in green; a cocked hat sets it off (this was originally trimmed with black feathers, but they must have given up on this, I didn’t spot any); and a multiple display of ribbons and medals on many Academicians’ chests added what Diana Vreeland used to call “pizzazz.” A sonorous rolling of drums accompanies each entrance.

  Another tradition: the new Academician must deliver a eulogy of the departed member whose place he is taking. Bill’s task was to speak about the famous mime Marcel Marceau. For a musician who deals in sounds to speak about an artist whose specialty was silence would have daunted many, but not Bill. He spoke eloquently, and in perfect French, about gesture and movement. He even evoked Michael Jackson’s moonwalk—I doubt that any of the Academicians had ever heard of him. Christie illustrated his points about the French tradition of singing and playing baroque music by living examples: some of his young singers and instrumentalists were grouped in the audience and performed elegantly.

  In 2010, Christie made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera conducting Così Fan Tutte.

  No one is younger than Elliott Carter, who turned 102 in 2010. He didn’t hesitate to hop to Berlin or Paris or London or Milan to hear one of his works performed; until recently, he was far more widely played in Europe than in America, and incidentally speaks the languages of these cities fluently.

  Now it would seem hardly a week goes by without another new work by Elliott Carter being featured on a concert program.

  James Levine had been a particularly eloquent champion. We have had the good fortune of having Levine sometimes leave his post in Boston long enough to conduct his Met Orchestra group in New York, often with compositions by Carter on the program.

  Carter is a cherubic man with endless intellectual curiosity and a keen appreciation of good food and wine. I sent him the last bottle of my former French cellar for his birthday and received a handwritten letter of thanks, promptly, the next day.

  We ran into him at an opening in 2008 and discovered that he keeps all his curiosity about current events. He told us with a chuckle that Carnegie Hall had booked him for his hundredth. He made it! He climbed up onto the stage with only minimum help and, beaming, waved his stick at the cheering audience.

  Now a salute to our friend Ned Rorem, who lived in Paris during the decades I was there—the 1950s and 1960s.

  He was the prized composer in residence at Marie-Laure de Noailles’s handsome town house, a gathering place for the most interesting people of Paris: painters, poets, composers, assorted eccentrics.

  Over the years, Ned has composed some of the most ravishing songs of our times. And he has published diaries that are acute and poignant testimonies of a rich and civilized life.

  And I must include two beloved friends who, alas, are no longer with us, that superb two-piano team, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale.

  We first met in Paris in 1948, when Virgil Thomson sent me “the kiddies,” as he called them, about to make their European debut. I helped launch them with a large party—very important in Paris. (Alice B. Toklas came, almost disappearing under an exuberantly flowered hat—she bought one a year, she told us. Truman Capote sat on Janet Flanner’s knees.)

  But soon their artistry and personal charm had won over everyone who counted in the musical and intelligent social worlds. Francis Poulenc so admired the way they played his Piano Concerto that he composed a sonata for them.

  The leading French composers all wrote for them.

  Once when they were staying at the Hôtel Pont Royal in Paris, they were desperately waiting for a taxi to take them to their recital. Poulenc happened to come by. Seeing them in distress, he sank to his knees in the middle
of the hotel lobby, spread out his arms, and implored aloud, “Saint Francis, please send a taxi so that the boys can get to their concert, and send another so I can get to my dinner.”

  Whereupon, two taxis pulled up in front of the hotel.

  Back in the 1950s in Paris, Pierre Boulez was the prestigious—but not yet well-known—conductor of the Jean-Louis Barrault–Madeleine Renaud company, which occupied the Théâtre Marigny.

  Perched upstairs was a small hall, with excruciatingly uncomfortable seats. Here Boulez directed a series of concerts, called the Domaine Musical, of what was then extremely far-out music: Xenakis, Ligeti, Berio, Berg. The small public was made up of the cream of Paris intellectuals, with a few artists like André Masson thrown in (his son was a professional percussion player).

  I never missed a concert.

  I had never met Boulez until many years later, when we were both in Edinburgh for some celebrations of Leonard Bernstein’s birthday put on by Columbia Records.

  I introduced myself and thanked him for having made my contemporary music education with his Domaine Musical concerts.

  He kindly thanked me for having made his education with all those years of L’ŒIL.

  After that, John and I often heard Boulez not only conduct his own music but brilliantly elucidate such scores as Le Sacre du Printemps; both as a conductor and as a narrator, Boulez speaks excellent English.

  Recently, a double bill at Carnegie Hall had both Boulez and Barenboim presenting their view of Schoenberg: one coolly analytical, one surprisingly romantic.

  In 2010, Boulez celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. Now he sells out the house wherever he appears. What a contrast to those years when he was conducting the New York Philharmonic and the critics could not write a good word about him.

  About John

  John Russell, that most elegant and civilized writer, came, as he would say, from nowhere. He was born at the end of World War I, in January 1919. He never knew the identity of his father. He wrote in an unfinished memoir: “For a long time I fantasized that my never-known and never-named father had died a gallant death in action in France. But I knew nothing about him then and have learned nothing about him since.”

  The baby was placed in an orphanage. That would have been the end of the story except for his grandfather Isaac James Russell, who came to have a look at the baby. “That boy is never going to stay here,” he said, and took the baby home and gave him the family name. He and his wife were well into middle age, with no child at home. John grew up believing that his grandparents were his father and mother. They raised him with all possible kindness but in isolation, to hide the “shame” of the family.

  John’s grandfather owned a string of prosperous pubs. The family was comfortably off, but no one ever read a book, or went to a concert, or listened to music on what was then the wireless.

  “We lived first in Strawberry Hill, a London suburb that was dignified at that time by the presence of the former King of Romania,” John wrote. “Although I saw the top of the ex-king’s head every morning as he passed by our house on his solitary walks, I was not yet alert enough to reflect on the ups and downs of fortune but merely wondered why he always left his crown at home.”

  John always knew he would be a writer. He had a severe speech problem and wrote:

  For one thing, there was nothing else I could do. At a time that I could hardly talk and did not want to be a burden to others, I found I could put down whatever was in my head; I had always thought it through. To my surprise and my relief it turned out that there were people who would pay for it.

  I was eleven or twelve when one of my more convivial aunts urged me to enlarge my experience of life. “If you can’t have amusing people at home, you simply have to read,” she said. “Go to the public library, sign up, and get yourself another life.”

  And “another life” is exactly what I got. Not only did I enjoy it hugely, but it made it possible for me to get a fix on a cultural wonderland that none of my schoolrooms had signaled to me. It was often way above my head, but at least I looked into James Joyce, Marcel Proust and T. S. Eliot. I was often baffled, but I knew at once that these were the giants of the day.

  By the time I reached adolescence I was already precocious in my expectations of life. When I was thirteen and at prep school we were asked to write about the summer holiday that we would most enjoy. I wrote that ideally I would like to go to Paris and tour the town in the company of one or two of Mr. Cochran’s “Young Ladies” (more or less the equivalent of a later day Ziegfeld Follies).

  My essay was passed at once to the headmistress of the school. Never in her long career had anything of the sort been presented to her. If I was not forthwith expelled, it was for two reasons. One was that there was no sign that I would ever be able to put my ideas into practice; the other was that the school was broke and needed the money.

  To their great credit, John’s grandparents, after his prep school, sent him to the best day school in the country, St. Paul’s, in London. There he had brilliant, eccentric masters, as they are called in England. There was Mr. Cotter, as John always thought of him (E.P.C. Cotter), who came on like a man of leisure who was doing the school a favor for turning up. After setting the day’s tasks, he would sit back and continue the correspondence in Latin verse that he kept up with a fellow staff member.

  Then there was G. E. Bean, who later became known for his studies of Turkey in classical times. He was immensely tall and a very good tennis player; in fact, in the 1930s he competed in the men’s doubles at Wimbledon. At that time at Wimbledon, all men played in long white flannel trousers. When Mr. Bean and his partner were scheduled to play, their match was always put on last on the day’s program. This made it possible for Mr. Bean to complete his work in the classroom, change into his almost unbelievably long white trousers, and arrive at Wimbledon in time.

  And there was a magnetic form master, A.N.G. Richards, a classical scholar who was a gifted musician and sang the tenor role in Handel’s Semele. He showed young John how Toscanini had conducted the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so that, John wrote, “I could almost hear those fastfluttering strains.”

  In 1936 the talk of the town and that filled the press was the large international Surrealism exhibition. Major Surrealists were there, including Salvador Dalí, who gave his speech from a diving bell. John had studied the catalog and the press clippings with great excitement. One day in class, the high master of St. Paul’s, John Bell, said something like: “Everyone seems to be talking about Surrealism. I can’t make any sense out of it. Can any boy in this room tell me what Surrealism is?”

  John found his hand raised of its own accord. And he heard, for the first time ever, his voice raised in class. “Sir,” he said, “I can.” He was asked to go into the next room and write it all down.

  Two hours later, he sought out the high master in his sanctum and gave him a sheaf of papers. It was not a work of genius, but the right facts were in the right place, and the current controversies were summarized.

  The high master read it through line by line. Then he looked at John with a new curiosity and said, “Russell, you could make a living out of this.” Within twenty-four hours John’s situation in the school, and his entire future, had changed.

  John wrote in the sketch for his memoirs:

  My general education was further enriched by the fact that I had been given a small sum for my lunch. This was meant to be eaten in a down-market tea shop no more than a minute’s walk from the school.

  I soon realized that I could find a better use for my money. Every day I took the tube to Leicester Square and fanned out among the second-hand bookshops and print shops.

  Up the road was Covent Garden, where during the annual season of Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, the topmost seats at either side cost little more than a shilling. Or if I got out at Green Park, the art galleries of the West End were no more than two minutes’ wal
k away. I could not always afford to go to concerts at Queen’s Hall, but if I timed it right I could slip into the back at the end of the concert, and watch Richard Strauss or Toscanini or Artur Schnabel, as they came back for one more tumultuous bow.

  In this way, and with the help of substantial teas at home, I was able to get a supplementary education on which I built for a lifetime.

  With his speech problem and a shaky hold on the required classics (Latin and Greek), John had little hope of a scholarship for Oxford or Cambridge. But unexpectedly, his history master, Philip Whiting, took him aside and said, “I think you’d better try this June for a scholarship in the history department.”

  John sat in a big upper room at St. Paul’s and wrote and wrote and did his best. His pen seemed to move effortlessly.

  When a letter arrived from Oxford asking him to present himself for an interview, he wrote:

  I said to myself: “I am not nervous, I shall not be nervous. I shall be buoyant, self-assured and above all talkative.” I still believed, until I reached the front door of the Master’s lodgings, that I would do well in the interview. But I could not get out a single word. After several minutes, the Master said, “Why don’t we continue in the garden? People often feel more comfortable there.” I still could not say a word. It was the all-time low point of my life. I had given up all hope for Oxford.

  I went back to London and I never mentioned it to anyone.

  Then one day I bought the Times on my way to school. I turned the pages at random. Suddenly I saw the results of the examination I had taken. I had come out at the top of the list.