Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Shirley (Xénia) Gabis with NR, Paris, 1949.

  19. Juilliard and Tanglewood

  Amid the diffusion survive these facts, used as points de repère: Scholastic year 1945–46 I went to Juilliard and got a bachelor’s degree. Returned to Juilliard for 1947–48 and got a master’s. Summers of 1946 and 1947, Tanglewood.

  If memory merges and blurs—blurges—the Juilliard years as it does the seasons at Tanglewood, it will accurately recapture episodes as on a camera’s plate, so that I can remember who and what smelled how and where. But not when. The diary begun in 1945 is some help, though not in chronology. While typing the extracts of chapter 17, after I became used to the pose (all books are posed), it grew clear that the young Ned was less concerned with history than with states of mind—and states of body. Daily agendas—engagement calendars—which I have kept from 1947 until the present, though also of some help, were, especially the early ones, dashed off in shorthand.

  I’ll continue as before, letting the present reshape the past.

  For Juilliard I retain neither nostalgia nor affection. I made acquaintances, participated in the Tuesday Composers’ Forums, enjoyed some courses, but never quite knew what I was doing there, the standards seemed geared to a lower mean. To get a degree one needed non-music courses. Having passed the entrance exams with flying colors I wasn’t forced to attend music classes except in piano and composition. The most pungent recollections of that illustrious music mecca are studies in sociology, American history, physical education, and yes, hygiene, which taught that the human diet needs copper as well as iron—copper being obtained both through milk stored in brass vats and through apricots. (Apricots again! shades of the nursery-school fare.) Also two semesters of world literature—imparted by the learned Elbert Lenrow—which, if nothing else, inspired some musical output including songs based on texts sacred and profane. Among the latter were Four Madrigals, my first attempts for unaccompanied vocal ensemble. Written in the autumn of 1947, they are dedicated respectively to Hugh Ross (who conducted their premiere at Tanglewood the following summer), to Rufus my father, Gladys my mother, and to my teacher Bernard Wagenaar. The C. M. Bowra versions of Sappho fragments were from Greek Literature in Translation, in the tattered margins of which I tenderly find scribbled my almost-completed melodies. Since then I have composed vastly for chorus in every size and shape, but never with that svelte flamboyance of beginner’s luck.

  Any phrase, not just in a slim volume of verse but in a newspaper or on a subway poster, was food for song. On my birthday Morris gave me a book of Donne’s Epigrams containing the enigmatic paradox called “A Burnt Ship” with these closing lines:

  So all were lost who in the ship were found,

  They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drowned

  from which came a song, then a home-recording with Remo Allotta, long since vanished, whose voice haunts no less than the couplet which revives yet again Enobarbos’s image of Cleopatra’s barge: “A burnished throne burned on the water.” This perfect ditty in the Lydian mode was thought up on the banks of the Hudson, and the tune now evokes the groves of academe far more than does any careful instruction of yore.

  Bernard Wagenaar, my chief raison d’être, was a delightful man. But of his teaching I remember nothing, not a shard. Others in his flock—Robert Starer, Robert Craft—may remember more. Yet I was a “major” in composition. As a “minor” in piano, I played that instrument better than my female teacher, whose name has faded. Vincent Perischetti taught form, and Robert Ward taught conducting, which I audited.

  I had flings with one or two students.

  When the Greenwich Village bars closed at 4 a.m., my custom was to invite stragglers—four or five, sometimes more—back to my room, stopping en route at an all-night deli for a case of Schaeffer’s ale. Toward 7 a.m. I’d say: “Everyone out. Everyone … except you”—pointing to a favored soul. Thus Chuck Turner, who in fact was a colleague at Juilliard seen in the halls, but met now at Mary’s Bar on Eighth Street. Byronically appealing in both mien and garb, with ruddy Wasp features and straight ebony hair combed in a leonine swirl, an open collar and erect posture, Chuck emanated neither narcissism nor ferocity, preferring the role of courtier to courted, and speaking quietly of all things cultured. He majored in violin, which he played well for a Gentile. He was also a year or two older but had none of the hauteur upperclassmen will show toward juniors, nor the envious condescension performers will show toward composers. I was the sophisticate, he the cornball, the roles were defined. But despite his ingenuousness he was more canny than I in the instrumental world and was helpful in special ways.

  My First String Quartet (long since scrapped, thank you) was capably sight-read by the chamber group that met at Chuck’s on Sunday nights, and this taught me a thing or two. We often took walks together between classes along the riverfront. (Juilliard, it will be remembered, was then located where the Manhattan Music School is today, at 124th and Claremont.) We remained colleagues, dispassionate but staunch, long past the yearning college days. When I wrote violin music, he would “confirm” it on his fiddle, deferential but firm in his suggestions, as Seymour Barab was with my cello music. When in the late 1940s I needed performers for the backstage music being churned out for productions by the ANTA experimental theater, Chuck volunteered his services gratis. I thought of him always as handsome, green, unpretentious, smart, more than presentable, a mensch. When I moved to France we lost contact for a while.

  A year or two later, sometime in 1950, who should stroll toward me at Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the arm of Gore Vidal but Chuck. An unlikely duo, and one I vaguely disapproved of. I do not like categories to overlap, and Gore Vidal was somehow my property, as was Chuck on the other side of the stile. I had known Gore, sort of, from, of all things, those Pyramid Club parties (take-a-chance-on-a-chain-letter-and-win-a-fortune—really an excuse to meet people) which were the rage in the mid-forties. I knew his work and his social demeanor and couldn’t connect him with Chuck. But then, opposites attract—not that Chuck and Gore were opposites, at least not in their physical urges.

  A year after that, also at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Chuck reappeared, this time with Samuel Barber. Chuck had become not only the violinist laureate of the Barber-Menotti entourage (Sam was on his way to Copenhagen, where he would record, at his own expense, various of his orchestral works, including the Violin Concerto with Chuck as soloist), he had also become a composer. Barber was of those who must make geniuses of their swains, and had coaxed some not-bad pieces out of Chuck, including an orchestral poem called Encounter in honor of Spender’s recently founded magazine. Chuck was more of a true creator than many a performer-turned-composer (Casals, Casadesus) but was lazy, not prolific, and gave up writing music after the intimacy with Barber lessened ten years later. To his credit, he continued thinking of Sam as our century’s greatest musician, defending the mentor against all slights real or imagined.

  In later years Chuck turned into a teacher. When his parents visited from Detroit in the late 1960s they became friendly with my parents. All was cozy and Juilliardy except for one thing: Chuck had inherited Sam’s faults but not Sam’s virtues. The virtues were, of course, the undeniable gifts and the ability to sculpt and disseminate those gifts in convincing, sometimes deeply moving, forms of every size. And Sam had a debonair wit and a way with mimicry that was devastating. He could also be imperious, dismissive, snobbish, petty, and just plain mean, especially after a few drinks. These last qualities were acquired unearned by Chuck, on whom they did not sit well. At an all-boy meal chez Henry McIlhenny in Philadelphia, early in 1981 on the evening after Sam’s funeral, Chuck, who had earlier that day warmly lamented the good lost years, suddenly turned on me and said: “What are you doing here? You always despised Sam.” In fact, Sam and I had a love-hate rapport, such as it was. Sam felt slighted that my songs were sung as often as his, for who was I in his ken but a shrimp. But we sparred and were affectionate. (Now, post
humously, his songs are heard far oftener than mine.) A month or so before he died, Sam phoned to ask if I could get Chuck a job at Curtis, where I had been teaching for a year, and where he—Sam—had been the fair-haired child in the 1930s. I promised to try, and did.

  Since then Chuck has blown hot and cold with me, now “defending” me from my “enemies,” now sending me letters of such vituperative loathing that I no longer see him. His reasons are his reasons.

  I used to say that I forget but do not forgive. This is false. I cannot hold a grudge, and as the century closes am ever more baffled at the relish with which whole nations torture each other. It’s growing worse. I will be friends with anyone who is not a fool, beginning with Chuck Turner, although I am frightened of madness and bored with drunks who show no signs of attempted recovery.

  On 11 March 1946, Father had his picture in Time magazine:

  The fastest-growing experiment in U.S. social medicine is the Blue Cross, a nationwide organization with the laudable purpose of helping members meet hospital bills in advance.… In 1938 a medical economist named Clarence Rufus Rorem, using the remnants of a Julius Rosenwald fund grant, made a survey of the scattered hospitalization plans, sold them on forming a national organization. Rorem is now the $15,000-a-year national director.… For a maximum of $24 a year, the average Blue Cross subscriber, or any member of his family, gets: (1) 30 days semi-private care in the hospital.… As an obvious and partial answer to socialized medicine, Blue Cross has worked well… all that can seemingly stop Blue Cross from snowballing still more is state-controlled medicine.

  Another time—was it that season, or a year or two earlier? (it seems to me the war was still on)—early on a Saturday evening, around nine, in the Crossroads Bar off Times Square, I caught sight of Tony Romano, whom I’d met in passing at a party somewhere when he was with someone, me too, and we’d eyed each other with hopeless shrugs, at least my shrug was hopeless. Now he was alone. To myself I said what the alcoholic says in his better moments: Don’t mess this up by getting drunk. Tony Romano resembled everything his name implies: Italian from Brooklyn, husky biceps, army uniform but with neck unbuttoned since he was no longer in the service, wisp of black fuzz peeking from out the white T-shirt, semieducated with a destructive smile, masculine to the core with not a shred of the queer’s wily subterfuge, tough, a paragon, my opposite, my type.

  Once in my room he declined a drink, but said: “You’ve got an orange”—designating a platter of oranges “can I have an orange?” After the orange he pinned me to the mattress as a lepidopterist pins the moth to his board.

  Tony, with whom I had nothing in common, whom I “dated” only three or four times (always the result of a spur-of-the-moment call from him), and to whom I was merely a roll in the hay, became during the next decade a totem—like the unshaved man in Jackson Park during my teens—an ideal provoking a stimulating languor to which I would succumb in waking dreams and look for on every street corner, while knowing it could not be rediscovered.

  In the mid-1950s, during a brief trip back to the USA and a briefer hike to the Everard Baths on Twenty-eighth Street, I spotted Tony in the morass of the steam room, where tears are not distinguishable from sweat, and he didn’t recognize me as I sank to my knees. He was the dedicatee of the little opera A Childhood Miracle, but of course he never knew.

  Irritation. Like the sound of chewing and swallowing in someone you no longer love.

  An artist doesn’t see things as they are, but as he is—so runs the age-old saw.

  Leo Sowerby came through town to hear Hugh Ross conduct the world premiere of Canticle of the Sun. He had been to Manhattan twice before, introducing me to David McK. Williams, H. W. Gray, and others of the specialized field of organ and church music, but never hobnobbing with the more cosmopolitan milieu, i.e., Aaron and Virgil. Instead, Leo seemed aloof to that which he would name modish, the very milieu I longed to be accepted by, and which today would be called the Power Elite. Leo had met these “powers” on committees, but they were as little aware of him as he them. If when Canticle of the Sun won the Pulitzer that spring of 1946 he felt vindicated, he didn’t let on. Vindicated of what? Joaquin Nin-Culmell recently wrote me that “Virgil was a smart critic who tried to quip his way through music.” Leo would have concurred. As for Aaron, wasn’t he just chic?

  On this occasion I took him to Drossie’s, where his so-ultra-bourgeois aspect—rimless specs, thin necktie, worried frown—only confirmed his membership in high bohemia to those at neighboring tables. (Parenthetical remembrance, apropos glasses, of Virgil’s pragmatic query to his surgeon, circa 1985, after emerging from anesthetic: Virgil: “Am I going to die?” Surgeon: “No.” Virgil: “In that case I’ll need my glasses.”) At one of these tables sat composer Sam Morgenstern, to whom I announced: “I don’t know what to do this summer.” “Why not,” said he, “go to Tanglewood?” So life changed again.

  For the first time since the war Tanglewood reopened like a great flower in June of 1946 with a vigorous sense of liberation and fertility rife in all the arts. I have never ever felt such a collective purposefulness and camaraderie as was displayed during those six weeks on that handsome campus. Since Aaron Copland was not only the chief composition professor but co-director with Koussevitzky, my scholarship was assured.

  The mansion at the Great Barrington school lodged twenty students, ten boys being quartered in the adjoining barn, and ten girls in the mansion proper. A bus took us each morning after breakfast (pancakes), via Stockbridge, to Tanglewood near Lenox, about thirty minutes away, and returned us in the evening, unless there was a concert, which there usually was. In our dorm I recall Howard Shanet, Earl George, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Louis Lane, and Danny Pinkham (all students of Martinů’s) bunking demurely in a row, and of the girls Sarah Cunningham plus two auditors—Grace Cohen and Paula Graham, a singer. Also the morbidly seductive—both his music and his person—Heitor Tosar.

  Bohuslav Martinů was staying alone in the mansion too. His terrible accident happened during that first week. I had visited his small New York apartment on Fifty-ninth Street the previous winter when David Diamond was subletting, but had never met the man. Aaron now admonished me to be nice to Martinů (“those Europeans are always at loose ends without their wives, you know”), and when I asked Aaron what the Czech’s music was like, he answered: “Like a Chinese nightclub under water.” One evening, when Paula and I were savoring lemon meringues at a Barrington bakery, in wandered Martinů, at loose ends without his wife. We invited him to our table, chatted amiably for an hour as darkness fell, then returned down the avenue to the jasmine-scented gardens of our communal school, and said good night. Five minutes later, a crash, a yelp, a groan. Martinů had fallen from a fifteen-foot parapet leading from the mansion to the nearby golf course. Ambulance, hospital (Nikolai Lopatnikoff was quickly called to substitute for the remainder of the season.) We never saw Martinů again, but he lived in continual pain until his death thirteen years later.

  Along with running the whole show at Tanglewood, and giving his six pupils two private lessons a week, Aaron Copland in his classes gave lectures on instrumentation (for one of these he took us to the shed and had each first-desk man of the Boston Symphony demonstrate his instrument), on other composers’ methods, and on how to write movie music. During the war Aaron had been the only “serious” composer to go to Hollywood, first to score Of Mice and Men, Our Town, and then Samuel Goldwyn’s North Star. He introduced a new esthetic—“the Copland sound”—to films, which dominated soundtracks until the late 1950s, when all cinema, here and abroad, stopped using anything but pop. In off hours Aaron mingled with the Hollywood intelligentsia, mainly European refugees, and heard his chamber music played on special recitals. At one of these he performed his own brittle Piano Sonata, after which who should come backstage but Groucho Marx. “Groucho, what are you doing at this kind of concert? I have a split personality, so don’t tell Mr. Goldwyn.” “Oh, he doesn’t mind,” said Grouc
ho, “as long as you split it with him.”

  Preparations for Peter Grimes dominated every segment of Tanglewood during that summer of 1946. Rumor had it that Britten himself would be there, and Koussevitzsky had already stated: “There is Carmen. And there is Peter Grimes.” Britten was only a name to me, one I assigned to the preset blancmange notion of British music. England had produced some pretty good authors and painters in the past 250 years but had not, for some reason, a single composer of any weight since the death of Purcell in 1695 (except for maybe Sir Arthur Sullivan). Suddenly issuing from every rehearsal hall on campus were the most persuasive tunes imaginable, long and inevitable and strong and mournful. Over there in Studio B was Phyllis Curtin (then Phyllis Smith) with two fellow sopranos and pianist, venerable Felix Wolfes, going through the trio that closes Act II and, with its soaring otherworldliness, putting Rosenkavalier to shame. Over here in the espalier terrace was Hugh Ross and his large chorus practicing the vast a cappella ensembles which, as fully as any of the soloists, will propel the opera’s tragedy. Down in the main shed was Lenny disciplining an orchestra which, though standard in make-up, emitted, thanks to Britten’s unique ear for checks and balances, noises that were more than music—that were, literally, chalk cliffs and waves and stifled lust and fear. So English music, like Sleeping Beauty, now with Britten’s kiss, had awakened after two centuries. The odd aspect: Britten was no innovator; he was as conservative as Poulenc in pursuing the tried and true, and, like Poulenc, his every measure seemed traceable to another composer. He was better than, not different from, speaking the same language with a more singular accent. Because in the next decades Britten would become the brightest light in English music, and by extension the strongest influence on the young, those young emerged writing conservatively. England did not, like America and France and Germany and Italy, have to suffer the convulsions of serial experimentation.