Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  I used to see Sam most frequently at George Bemberg’s at 24 West Fifty-fifth, where we would dine à trois and sing our songs at each other. Before I sailed for France in 1949 Sam tried to coach me in how to behave with this or that countess once I got there. What would I be doing with countesses? I wondered.

  Diary: Paris, 1950. Barber loathes the imputations of the serial elite. He persists in addressing the perplexed René Leibowitz as Mr. Ztiwobiel. “Well, if a composer can’t recognize his own name in retrograde, how can his listeners be expected …”

  1958. The day he won the Pulitzer for Vanessa, Sam Barber came, along with me, to dine at Lee Hoiby’s. “Have you heard,” I asked, “that Poulenc’s writing a monologue for Callas on La voix humaine?”

  “Francis is an opportunist,” said Sam.

  “Still, what a swell idea.”

  “Because Maria’s an opportunist too—she can’t stand other singers on stage.”

  “But still, it’s a swell idea. Admit.”

  “You think so because you’re an opportunist. Everybody says so.”

  “Yes, but still—wouldn’t you have wanted her for Vanessa?” And I got up, collected my coat, and left. Before the elevator arrived, Sam came out to the hall and sort of apologized.

  “It’s just,” said he, “that you punctured me where I was most vulnerable.”

  Between these dates, 1950 and 1958, we met often in Paris, usually chez Henri-Louis de la Grange, a mutual friend, though I took him also to Marie-Laure’s, and they hit it off, more or less. Early in the decade I was seated on the terrace of the Flore with my girlfriend, Heddy de Ré, both very high on fine à l’eau, when Sam and Virgil and two or three others materialized at the table next to ours. For no reason I called Sam a shit, and for a year was ashamed at this gratuitous folly. I wrote a song for him—one of six ecologues on poems of John Fletcher, and mailed him a dedicated copy. He acknowledged this decently, and never referred to my misbehavior. He was a great solace, too, when I was in anguish about my Italian friend, P., whom Sam knew and liked.

  In New York during the 1960s he came to dine chez moi two or three times. In the 1970s I don’t remember seeing him except at parties, where he was icy. Like many, he liked at first, and then didn’t like my Paris Diary, which caused a flurry—so innocent now it seems!—among those in the closet. Sam was outraged (according to Chuck Turner) because I recounted an anecdote he’d told me years before, maybe at Tanglewood. “When you get to Italy,” he had said, “you’ll find the Italians acquiescent. But even when they say I love you they still want to be paid. A friend of mine was hiking in the most remote region of the mountains above Torino when he came across a peasant boy who’d never seen the city. They made love. After which the boy asked for money.” That’s all.

  If I declare that although I in a sense am among Sam’s audience, I never quite cared for the person, nor did I need the music: both were too rarefied, unpredictable, neurotic, and, well, too elegant for me to deal with. No sooner is that last sentence written than I’m assailed by contradictions. If I do not need Sam’s sounds, how to account for his ever-haunting “Anthony O’Daly” smiling through my most-sung song, “The Silver Swan,” which no one has pointed out in the forty-five years since that swan was hatched? For what reason have I kept over the years those dozen letters I now reread, finding in each a generosity somehow mislaid?

  In 1978 a disc was issued on New World Records called Songs of Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem. The liner notes by Philip Ramey included separately taped interviews with each of us answering parallel questions.

  Ramey to Barber: “What do you think of Ned Rorem’s songs?”

  Barber: “I like one, ‘The Lordly Hudson.’”

  Ramey to me: “And Samuel Barber’s [songs]?”

  Me: “Quaintly enough, I find Barber’s songs the weakest part of his otherwise strong output. They work, but they work in a turn-of-the-century way. They present few problems, and that’s why singers sing them. Understand that I’m not criticizing Barber’s language, only his tradition.”

  On this disc is Barber singing his own Dover Beach, recorded in 1933. Why am I covered with gooseflesh when the live voice of this dead acquaintance fills the room, as now it does, lending a patina of precious antiquity to the furniture?

  If frequent contact plus sharing of victory and woe are what make for friendship, then I’m not the one to recall Sam Barber in any formal fashion. We moved in different circles. Also, being almost the only ones whose catalogues were colored by Song, that fact in turn was colored—at least for me—by a certain rivalry. One may question the propriety of one composer publicly discussing another, especially when that other lies underground.

  My falling away from Paul Goodman (beyond the fact that he grew less interested as I grew more independent and lost my baby fat) stemmed from an incident. A Meeting in the Lobby is the title of a skit he devised in 1947 for me to set for a now-vanished soprano. I scoffed to someone about Paul’s marginal notes on how the music should be composed, saying that he erred as poets often will by “helping out” their musician, and that anyway he seemed to have thrown the words together. The “someone” told this to Paul who (maybe rightly) felt it was not for me to broadcast how he worked, that the skit emerged from special experience, and that I was ungrateful to the very person who had put me on the map. Actually Paul was no more known than I in those days, and if “The Lordly Hudson” is now the famous title of his collected poems, it was then strictly a song by me, not us. But I was ungrateful. I learned far more from him than he from me.

  In Seven Little Prayers, my first cycle on texts of PG, I was still confusing prosody with “gracious sounds.” For example, knowing that long open vowels are easier to sing high than tight e’s and u’s, I took the word son as an arbitrary climax to one of the prayers.

  Paul: “Why did you put son on that long loud B? Because you knew the poem was really about my daughter? Or because it’s the same as sun shining high? Or from love or resentment of me? Why?”

  “Because it’s a good word to sing high.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  Paul actually had a pretty fair ear, but was somehow too—well—too intelligent to let his ear lead, rather than follow, his idea. Thus in his fiction when a character speaks colloquially, any given phrase rings true, but the sequence of phrases degenerates into didactic philosophy. Elsewhere, as in chapter 4 of The Dead of Spring, the conversation is silent, and the respect in his description of manual labor is so gently contagious that it’s hard to imagine such writing outside a novel. Paul did not follow the rules, he made them, and he made them only after the fact of finding them in his own pieces.

  His theater does not work. He knew all about it except how to make it.

  Nearsighted but refusing glasses (they aren’t medical), he continually crashed into the furniture. He did not think women equal to men.

  The difference as guru between Allen Ginsberg and Goodman is that one catered to the feelings of the young while the other catered to their minds. Obviously Ginsberg won out.

  I can’t recall ever seeing Paul Goodman and Marc Blitzstein in the same room, though they can’t help but have met at one of the billions of parties we all were giving. As lurid left-wingers the two would have had more in common ideologically than with the blander Sam Barber, yet Barber’s and Blitzstein’s origins were akin.

  Like Barber, Blitzstein was raised in a well-off pre–World War I Philadelphia milieu, but veering thence in opposite directions, Sam toward the anxieties of mandarin individuals (Cleopatra, Prokosch, Kierkegaard, Vanessa), Marc toward the collective woes of Everyman. During the Second War they did both serve in the military, resulting in a jingoistic bomb from each one: Barber’s Second Symphony, known as the Night Flight, which he finally withdrew, and Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony, which finally withdrew itself. Beyond this coincidence, they had nothing in common. That one was Episcopalian, the other Jewish, surely figured.

  A more coge
nt comparison is between Pasolini and Blitzstein, both upper-crust Communists murdered by rough trade, the first in the outskirts of Rome by one of the very ragazzi di vita he had spent a lifetime nurturing, the second on the isle of Martinique by three seafarers of the very type he had spent a lifetime defending. Though communism may have been a mere touristic escape for each man’s life, it nonetheless formed the core of each man’s art. “A scholar and a master of the Italian language, [Pasolini] picked up no grounding at all in the life of the proletariat,” wrote Clive James recently. “He never did a day’s manual labor then or later.… This is standard for revolutionary intellectuals and can’t usefully be called hypocrisy, since if there is such a thing as proletarian consciousness then it is hard to see how any proletarian could escape from it without the help of the revolutionary intellectual—although just how the revolutionary intellectual manages to escape from bourgeois consciousness is a problem that better minds than Pasolini have never been able to solve without sleight of hand.”

  As for Marc, how might he have reacted to the “liberation” of Communists thirty years after his death? By seeing them as eager consumers, no better than they should be, “born of poor but dishonest parents”? Today we perceive a lopsided focus in certain visions of the golden past. Marc retained that focus to the end, though his friend Lillian Hellman wrote: “A younger generation … look upon the 1930s radical and the 1930s red-baiter with equal amusement. I don’t much enjoy their amusement, but they have some right to it.”

  Like most young composers in the 1940s I knew Blitzstein’s worth solely from hearsay. Textbooks were full of him as America’s embodiment of Brecht’s “art for society’s sake”; he himself decreed that the creative artist must “transform himself from a parasite to a fighter.” A parasite on whom? I wondered. A fighter for what? If I was not political, I was impressed by those who were, like Lenny Bernstein and Aaron Copland, who constantly sang Marc’s praises, making me feel guilty. Even Virgil Thomson, a sometime foe of Blitzstein’s and an aristocrat to the toenails, had declared years earlier: “The Cradle Will Rock is the gayest and most absorbing piece of musical theater that the American Left has inspired … long may it remind us that union cards can be as touchy a point of honor as marriage certificates.” Beyond the force of these dynamos, Marc had the added mystery of one who had been there—of one now unavailably away in the wars. The music was no longer played but the spirit held firm.

  Then suddenly he returned, a hero in uniform, and Lenny premiered, in April of 1946, the ambitious Airborne Symphony, with Orson Welles as narrator, eighty male members of Robert Shaw’s Collegiate Chorale, and Leo Smit as pianist with the New York City Symphony. Who was I to express a purely artistic dissension among these committed intellectuals? Yet I was appalled. What I intuited then I affirm today: the piece was patriotic smarm. Admittedly I have an allergy to melodrama—to, that is, speechified music—unless the verbalism is tightly rhythmicized, as Walton so cannily rhythmicized Sitwell’s Façade. (If the sung voice is the most musical of instruments, the spoken voice is the least.) Thus masterworks like Debussy’s Martyre, Stravinsky’s Perséphone, Honegger’s Jeanne go against my grain even as I revel in their sonic superstructure and fairly classy texts. But Blitzstein’s text for Airborne gives new meaning to overstatement, a Reader’s Digest tribute to our air force, preachy, collegiate, unbuttressed, as Copland’s corny Lincoln Portrait is buttressed, by a lessthan-trite musical background. The few nonembarrassing moments in the score are too close for comfort to Histoire du soldat, and in the libretto, to Whitman’s diary. Bernstein was to appropriate Blitzstein’s sentimentality—the boyish belief in Man’s essential Good—and to use it better. “Better” always means better tunes. (Of music’s five properties—harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, color, and melody—melody is sovereign; without a sense of contagious melody a composer is not a composer.)

  Yes, a great work is one you can never get used to; but I grew used immediately to the Airborne Symphony, which went in one ear and out the other with no trace of residue.

  Yet on that famous July evening in Barrington four months later, when Marc played and sang for us with such tough and telling charm, suddenly everything fell together, the pudding was in the eating, the components of his art meshed. Harmony churned, counterpoint spoke, the rhythm was catchy and the color luminous, the tunes came across, all precisely because they spewed from Marc’s own body, then lingered like a necessary infection to love and not get used to, at least for one evening. Next morning, if the songs were gone, Marc’s fragrance remained.

  During the fall, as a student at Juilliard, where to qualify for a degree one had to take sociology, I phoned Marc for an interview about his ideas on Art and Society. What do I recall of our talk that November afternoon in the one-room flat at 4 East Twelfth, where he lived until he died, I who felt no relationship with—much less a need for diverting—the masses? I recall that Marc called Poulenc a sissy. That he called Cocteau a true artist, while claiming that anyone who could turn a fable of Love and Death into something as “chic” as L’éternel retour (all the rage then in New York), especially by labeling the love potion “poison,” was hardly a great artist. That all music to him was political. That he looked like Keenan Wynn. That he said: “Admit it, you didn’t really come here to interview me for your class.”

  During the next sixteen years we were friends, even when far away, friends, that is, as much as quasi mentor and reluctant pupil can platonically be. I sense that, while never saying so, Marc always misguidedly felt I was too much the prey of the upper class to write important music. As for the lower class, I never saw that, except for sex, Marc was a mingler there. He liked good food and drink and shunned the reality of deprivation.

  Why, I recently asked a person who knew them both, was Lenny such a devoted admirer of Marc? Because, said the person, Marc was a failure. Well, Lenny worshiped Aaron too, and Aaron was a success. Yes, but Aaron was that much older (b. 1900 as against Marc b. 1905), and a monolithic idol for us all. True, there are cases where two friends, one famous and one not, are switched overnight in the world’s eye, as Lenny was switched in rapport with composer Paul Bowles, and later with Marc. Bowles went on to plow (successfully) other fields, while Marc persevered in Lenny’s shade. But if Marc could ever have been deemed a failure, he is not that today, and his renaissance, as well as his historicity (he’s been gone for nearly two generations), now allows him to be judged in perspective.

  The first of his few letters came after I had moved to France in 1949, and was in reply to what must have been that bane of all “older” composers: a young composer’s request for a recommendation.

  July 14, 1949 Dear Ned: Yes, you may use my name as reference for a Guggenheim.… I envy you Paris, and I remember that gone feeling. Me, I just sit chained to the desk, getting the orchestration of the new opera done in time for a deadline.… As ever, (signed) Marc Blitzstein

  The new opera was Regina, his first in twelve years, which was premiered four months later. Eight years later, this time to New York, came this:

  November 8, 1957 Dear Ned: I was charmed and impressed with the tribute, and with the quality of the song. But when you go to the trouble of making a fine piece and dedicating it to me, why the hell don’t you present it in person? My love Marc

  The “tribute” was a setting of Paul Goodman’s “Such Beauty as Hurts to Behold,” which I would have felt worthy of Marc. Earlier that year I had written a one-act opera, The Robbers, to my own text based on Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.” Marc was dismayed—he said I’d got lost in “libretto land” with my arch and archaic locutions. He undertook to rewrite the entire text: without changing a note of the music he refashioned each verbal phrase so that it fell more trippingly on the tongue. This was a voluntary two-day job for which I thanked him with the little song.

  Jan. 6, 1959 Dear Ned: Here is the piece, and a note to Bill Flanagan, which I beg you to deliver. I despair of reaching you by phone; my h
ours are a mess of disorganization.… Love, Marc

  The “piece” was a 500-word essay, “On Two Young Composers,” contributed at my prodding to launch a program of songs by me and William Flanagan (whom he’d never met) that took place on 24 February. The first general paragraph, beginning “Songs are a tricky business” (even more apt today than then), is wise, original, and bears reprinting. Of Bill he concludes: “A certain modesty dwells in his music; it should not be confused with smallness.” Of me: “Ned Rorem makes thrusts, each of his songs is a kind of adventure.… It is a long time since anyone brought off the grand style, outsized sweeping line, thunder and all, that marks ‘The Lordly Hudson.’ He will one day write an impressive opera.” (So concerned was he about “an impressive opera” that he brought me together with his beloved nephew, Christopher Davis, who had made a libretto called Mario for the occasion. Nothing panned out. But Christopher’s powerful and responsible writing—on capital punishment, on the sociology of rape, on his uncle—has held my interest over the years, and our “impressive opera” may yet be born.)

  Libby Holman, torch singer and art lover, had contributed financially to the 24 February event (the first of a series of “Music for the Voice by Americans” which Bill Flanagan and I produced in those years). She had become a friend. I was young enough still to be dazzled by my legendary seniors, and smug enough to feel a power when introducing, for the first time, one of these seniors to another. Libby had never met Marc but would perhaps have enjoyed playing the role of Pirate Jenny in one of the myriad productions of Three-penny Opera which at the time had made Marc (ironically, because he was only the translator, and because the late Kurt Weill, a homophobe, never cared for Marc’s “cashing in”) a rich star. One evening I brought them together in a Village bistro. Libby, exonerated from maybe having murdered her husband years before, had inherited that husband’s fortune but spent a fat chunk of it on civil-rights groups, especially after her only son died—as Paul Goodman’s son died—while mountain climbing. There now I sat, silent, as these two conversed intensely with their violent theatricality, their true unusualness. There I sat with her who had killed and who would later kill herself, and with him who would be killed.