Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  One evening we did them at a party chez William Kapell. Who among those who have known Willy can forget his electric vitality? Of all first-generation North American pianists (a notable preceding generation does not, for whatever reason, exist; the mentors of this first generation were at least twenty-five years older and inevitably Central European), Kapell was the most successful. His fame when I knew him rested on his so-adroit championing of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto, a blockbuster that wriggled and swooned and did what you wanted it to do. Eugene had befriended Willy and brought us together hoping we’d show off for each other. Even as I write I can still hear his way with a keyboard: that purposeful, shining, pliable strength, like Damascus steel, yet gentle as a child, a good child. I never grew to know him well (though what does “know well” mean? Willy seemed so dynamically alert that an hour with him was like a month with anyone else) but retain as in a snapshot the powerful almost-sexuality of his attention. It never occurred to me, when Eugene urged me to play, that Willy would call me a good pianist, but when I finished he knew the music better than I did, plied me with questions, not letting me off the hook. He cared. He would demonstrate at the piano, ubiquitous cigarette between the lips, or expostulate from an armchair while brutally scraping the eczema on his forearms with the teeth of a comb. Somehow his too-short career, given his violent concentration, did not seem “too short.” Willy was only thirty when, one month after Jacques Thibaud died in a plane crash, he died in a plane crash. I was at the Boeuf sur le Toit on the rue du Colisée that autumn night when Sigi Weissenberg came up to announce the news. Neither then nor in the following weeks was there anything but sorrow in the air: no sense among pianists of competition eliminated, only the weird realization that the more concerts can be packed into a jet-age international itinerary, the more chance the devil will take revenge.

  Anyway, Nell sang Penny Arcade at Willy’s party. As usual she was exemplary during the performance, passionate yet precise. As usual she was insufferable after the performance, incoherent and trying too hard. Arthur Judson, the redoubtable impresario, was there, impressed with her vocal style, appalled at her society. Nell never got a big-time manager.

  It’s not that I’d sleep until noon, wasting half a day; I went to bed at noon, rose at seven, and began all over again. This would occur once or twice a week. But the interims were as positive as the binges were negative—frantic work and careful diet balanced desperate play and near starvation.

  When in the late 1950s I first dipped a toe into Alcoholics Anonymous (but it would take another decade before the tenets took), I was struck by the logic of the formal meeting but bemused by the lack of self-analysis. I didn’t realize that appraisal required sobriety. Erich Kraft, of course, felt that sobriety was a matter of willpower, and that willpower was a result of the piercing glance at one’s childhood.

  Eugene was the first of us to go to Europe. The grand tour was the goal of American graduates then, as it had been in the nineteenth century and as it is not today. For us the reflection of Paris’s postwar aura from the twenties was forceful enough to impel an equally forceful mystique in the fifties. We would supply the mystique, awakening France like Sleeping Beauty of a long-war’s nightmare. Eugene, giddy with his success as a young pianist and abetted by the funds of the Leventritt Foundation, went abroad early in 1948 and wrote us about how the newly released ferment of intellectual activity was more purposeful there than in the States. He rented a villa in Cap Ferrat where Shirley and I and maybe Norris Embry planned to meet him that spring. Shirley, in fact, went (hoping never to return), while I, despite a paid-for boat ticket, remained in America for another year. Here is why:

  Seated one afternoon in a booth at the San Remo with pretty Sally Goodman, Paul’s wife, discussing how Jewish thinkers never take us goyim seriously, I grew achy and overwarm. Even as she watched, Sally saw blotches spread over my face. “Looks like chicken pox,” said Sally calmly. Sure enough, the symptoms were diagnosed next day. Of all things, for a twenty-four-year-old! Canceling France, I went to Philadelphia to convalesce with Mother and Father. There was nothing worse to the disease than a fortnight of itching so exquisite that even a saint with fiery fingernails could not resist ripping—slowly—the luscious thick scabs from his forehead. To this day I retain a crater above my right eyebrow.

  During that May in Philadelphia I composed my first Piano Sonata, a short three-movement affair with a rousing finale called Toccata.

  Returning to New York, I collected a master of science degree (as did four other composers and sixteen instrumentalists) in the hallowed halls of Juilliard. My reaction, as the handsome new president William Schuman berobed me in dark velvet, was: Such fuss for so little. What had I learned there, at the parents’ expense, but an affirmation of what I’d already taught myself, and a confirmation of the still-throbbing fact that performers and composers face in opposite directions? Yes, I did compose, under the hazy tutelage of Bernard Wagenaar, an Overture in C for orchestra, which won the George Gershwin Memorial Award. The piece didn’t deserve the prize, but I did. According to the terms of the honor, the Overture would be premiered the following season by the New York Philharmonic under Michel Piastro, representing my first hearing ever in Carnegie Hall. The prize also included a thousand dollars—which would pave the way toward the postponed trip to France—plus whatever copying bills might be incurred for preparing the materials. (I didn’t tell the Philharmonic, but the materials already existed. Seymour Barab, the mensch, had helped me copy the parts prior to Hanson’s doing a run-through at Eastman. Nor did I, in turn, tell Seymour that I was allowing the Philharmonic to prepare a whole new set of materials. You won’t tell them now, will you?)

  Besides the Overture and The Chicken Pox Sonata, I composed in 1948 two perfect songs: “Requiem,” on Stevenson’s famous verses, and “Echo’s Song,” on Ben Jonson’s “Slow, slow, fresh fount” for a party to honor Eva Gauthier. (When “Echo’s Song” was published in 1953, the dedication was changed to “To Xénia Gabis,” which had become Shirley’s name. She had divorced Seymour Barab meanwhile, and while in France, where “Shirley” was unpronounceable, adopted her middle name, Xénia.) Also a suite often simple piano pieces called A Quiet Afternoon, dedicated “To my sister’s children.” Rosemary had gotten married in January to John Marshall, a tall, good-looking, paternal, humorous but solemn conscientious objector and biochemist. They lived in Chicago and were expecting a baby. (By the time the suite was published they had three babies—and three more would emerge with the years. Hence the dedication.)

  Along with these works was a ballet titled Death of the Black Knight on a scenario by Paul Goodman. Music and words were commissioned and paid for by Alfonso Ossorio, but the work was never performed.

  Two other songs, both on poems of Edith Sitwell, saw the light that summer. Though forced to call them “early works,” I can recall so clearly the Manhattan heat wave during which “You, the Young Rainbow of My Tears” was composed, and later that same August the sea air at Truro which was the background for “The Youth with the Red-Gold Hair.” Not till next May did I leave America for eight full years in France, yet these songs now seem Frencher than anything I later wrote in Paris. They also seem like lost children found again. The considerable delay in their publication was due strictly to legal complexities.

  (Cautionary tale: When I completed these Sitwell settings, my publisher, which was then Peer-Southern, said: “Fine. Get the poet’s okay and we’ll print them.” I’d hitherto musicalized any words that appealed to me; my few songs already published had been to verse in public domain, or to Paul Goodman. It hadn’t occurred to me that living poets might have opinions, much less objections, about having songs made on their words. I mailed a genteel request to Sitwell, and received no reply. After four months I wrote again, and again no reply. In France a year later I stated the case personally to the poet’s brother, Sacheverell, and to Stephen Spender, who, after hearing the music, promised to intercede. St
ill no answer. Once more I wrote, taking care, as Spender had advised me, to say “Dear Doctor Sitwell.” Silence. Eventually I received from the Sitwell editors a note to the effect that Walton was the only composer the lady favored, but if I could persuade him to make an exception in my case, they might consider. Walton’s secretary answered me from Ischia stating that the master was deep in Troilius and Cressida, but if I would write again in six months, etc. I wrote again in six months, and so did my publisher. No reply. Finally, exasperated, four years after my first inquiry, I sent off a note to Sitwell calling her a selfish old dragon—I’m not proud of this—from whom I had demanded a simple yes or no, and that I’d go ahead and publish the songs with or without her permission. By return mail her attorneys responded:

  Dr. Sitwell … has referred to us your astonishing letter in which you complain that she has ignored your request to be allowed to use a poem of hers of which you had in fact made use before you asked. Dr. Sitwell receives a constant stream of requests from unknown persons who wish to hitch their wagon to her star and has in self defense been forced to a policy of ignoring them.

  They threatened suit should I attempt to publish. Thirty years later my current and permanent editors, Boosey & Hawkes, applied for and immediately received permission to print the songs.)

  And Truro—what was I doing there? In June I met, at MacDougall’s Tavern, a compelling young doctor named Ralph Teicher who, like all doctors, was a music lover. Did I want—he asked—to drive up to Tanglewood next morning? Since Hugh Ross was planning to premiere the Four Madrigals in Tanglewood that week (although I’d not planned to go), I said sure. Off we went on a mock honeymoon. Ralph treated me as Glenn Ford treated Gilda, using me to meet other people, leaving me to writhe at his getting drunk and driving out of control. Hugh Ross, recalling a Jacques Callot woodcut with his bony features and Harlequin gestures, performed the Madrigals amiably (as he would perform other of my works through the years), after which I left Ralph Teicher to stagger back to New York on his own, and proceeded to Truro. My host was Jordan Whitelaw, an oafishly languorous music-loving pal of Danny Pinkham, and a Bostonian to the core, who had rented a house there. The other guest was John Ashbery. Overplump and a touch too effete for my taste, John seemed encouraged by my disinterest. Under my door he would slip messages which I mislaid (how could I know he would become John Ashbery?) and I forsook both host and guest for regular forays into Provincetown. From one of these I returned one morning bleary eyed in the car of a guy whose name I didn’t know to find Father parked at Jordan’s house. Up until the end, Father had a way of showing up unexpectedly under circumstances he couldn’t help but have intuited would be painful to both him and me.

  In 1960 at Buffalo University a pupil brought me a song based on an Ashbery haiku:

  I placed flowers on your path

  because I wanted to be near you.

  Do not punish me.

  Ralph Teicher? That autumn, in penitence perhaps, he introduced me to one G., a full-lipped sinewy man, with whom I had what’s called an “open affair.” Just writing this, I can again feel his attraction. Ralph himself was killed in an auto wreck.

  The Poets’ Theater, an honorable and hopeless undertaking, rose and fell in the space of a season. The premise, rightly or wrongly, was this: “There is no song in the theater of today because the earliest voice to speak from a stage has been estranged from it … the voice of the poet.” John Myers, billed as liaison and publicity director, procured me (as well as Varèse, Ben Weber, and John Cage) for the music committee. But the nominal mastermind was the exotic Maria Piscator, who was propounding, undigested, the theories of her estranged husband, Erwin. I liked to watch and smell her, as she floated about in gold lamé pyjamas and Chanel cologne, during the many meetings on East Seventy-sixth. But I never understood a word she uttered. The actual masterminds were the painters: Seligmann, Max Ernst, Cecil Beaton, Roberto Matta (“the matta of others mattas to me matta” was his slogan); and the poets Lionel Abel, Parker Tyler, Cummings, Stevens, and of course Paul Goodman. Maria was the sole female in the enterprise.

  Two programs were envisaged, one for spring and one for fall, at the YMHA auditorium on Lexington. The spring program contained Genet’s Les bonnes—mistranslated as The Servant Girls—directed by Richard Fisher (a friend of Roditi’s who would later marry Maggy Magerstadt), and two Noh plays of Goodman, directed by Maria herself. One of these Noh plays, Stoplight, had music by Ben, the other, Dusk, had music by me, and silver scenery by Corrado Cagli. Four performances were presented, in May and in June. I remember the sensation of greasepaint professionality while snacking in the nearby coffee shop with the hero of Stoplight, fair-haired Dan Scott, Richard Fisher’s lover, with whom I had a fling that endured the space of the run, and whom I’d see years later in Hollywood where he turned into Simon Scott. I do not remember the cast of Dusk; but my instrumental music, for flute and piano, was performed live backstage, by myself and Leslie Oakes, and was effective—or so said Tom Prentiss.

  Tom Prentiss, Cagli’s apprentice, was a boyish dishwater blond, quite male (the Sterling Hayden type), with a singular mind. He could look at a tree and make you look at it through his eyes by describing, in few phrases, how this knotted artery, that stretch of bark, these frightened veins of syrup could seethe and suffer in silence, and speak without words to other trees, maybe even to us. Tom, a Thoreauvian loner, was highly sexed (as most loners are—sex is not social, nor even necessarily sentimental), but also highly concerned with music and books and painting (all of which are replacements for sex, as our analysts daily informed us), and was himself the most expertly meticulous draftsman this side of Annibale Carracci. Tom despised John Myers as only a landsman (they were both Buffalonians) can despise one who has moved to the same new city where both ply rival trades. Tom was not tony and timely like the View contingent; he eschewed surrealism in favor of a bent for botany and a knack for transferring that bent, visually, to paper. Which eventually brought him a permanent job as staff artist for Scientific American. For the moment he was a mysterious decoration. He would, for example, sidle up to me at the San Remo, and hum the motto of my music for Dusk into my ear, then glide away. He had the layman’s adoration for the composer (the breed has died out), and years later would continue to hum the same tune. Which is why, no doubt, in 1984 I reintroduced the distant theme into my Violin Concerto.

  Paul Goodman was not a playwright; he was not, arguably, even a novelist. His philosophical didacticism precluded realistic dialogue, yet he was always writing realistic dialogue—or so he thought—as philosophy issuing from the mouths of babes. His dramas weren’t flops (a prescheduled run of four performances can’t be billed as a failure when it was an artistic triumph for us all), but neither were they dramas. Stoplight does have one terrific speech that begins:

  For all admit the wages of sin is death,

  come! let me waste no time to freely sin

  and ends:

  how may I lure this horror to my home?

  the grisly death by what adroit mistake?

  Beware all travellers who ride with me!

  A man whose name I’ve forgotten invited me to Cherry Grove sometime that summer. The first glimpse of Fire Island was disconcerting. Like Nantucket, where I’d visited with Morris in 1944, this spit of land seemed deprived, exposed, bereft of the opulence one connects—or does one?—with gay males. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in one of the funniest boners since Freud, claimed that homosexuals were drawn to the island because, like them, it was sterile. Aside from the facts that (1) “sterile” is hardly the word, and (2) I myself was not drawn to the island, I would agree with him. In later years, as with Nantucket, I learned that these unusual and somehow definitively American outposts have all the beauty of Shakers and svelte surfaces and complex hymns. They are not tape-à-l’oeil like Provence or Antarctica; like Debussy’s Pelléas, these islands contain arias galore, but in microcosm.

  Anyhow, the man whose na
me I’ve forgotten was involved with theater, as a small-time agent or producer or something. Immediately I drank too much, disappeared from the beach house, wandered wherever the ocean tide pulled, and at dawn knocked on a door and said I’m lost. As it happens, the person behind the door was George Freedley, head of the Theater Collection at the New York Public Library, and also a friend of the man whose name I’ve forgotten. As always, one thing led to another, and Freedley, who was gray-haired, pot-bellied, and uppity, decided, on learning I was a composer, to introduce me to ANTA once we were all back in the city.

  The American National Theater and Academy, of which George Freedley was chairman, and whose committee contained Aline MacMahon, Alexander Kirkland, and Herbert Kubly, among others, functioned to produce “top theater” on a shoestring in small venues—what would later be termed Off Broadway. Midtown plays in those days nearly always had incidental music by living composers, performed live nightly. Paul Bowles was the most in demand of these composers, having inherited the mantle from Virgil in the WPA days, and achieved fame with The Glass Menagerie. Obviously Paul wasn’t going to touch ANTA’s small fees, but I needed what is known as Experience. I agreed to supply the score (a few songs to be sung by actors untrained as singers, and “mood music” for four instruments) to a new translation, by Leighton Rollins, of Euripides’ Hippolytus. John Reich, an old-world German, would direct. The role of Phaedra would be taken by Muriel Smith, and the role of Hippolytus by Donald Buka, whom I’d never met but had seen in the movies, notably as Bette Davis’s very cute son in Watch on the Rhine.

  Muriel, by a stroke of casting genius, was the only one of ten actors who would not be singing. Yet her vocal presence on stage emitted the power of a prima donna, and, like Callas in Pasolini’s nonmusical film of Medea, Muriel strode and declaimed, breathed and expired, in the mode of the nineteenth-century greats. Better still, she had a way of standing still, of not breathing, of projecting a pulsating inertia that I’ve never seen, except perhaps with Martha Graham.