Now You Are Ready

Eyes closed, I felt the tissue paper hugging my neck’s nape, the shawl nestled at my Adam’s apple, the occasional pressure of a single finger adjusting the angle of my head gently, but firmly, like a pianist giving an A. I smelled the orange spice opening of hand-mixed shaving cream, the sandalwood follow-up of hand soap, the tang of Barbicide, the masculine smell of Pinaud Clubman. The shears snipped in thoughtful bursts at a moderate walking tempo. Andante, I thought. “First I do the beard,” he said. “Yes,” I murmured, not opening my eyes.

There had as yet been no electric razor’s angry buzz, no rushed swipes of a “number two” doing the thinking—it had all been done by hand. It has been decades since I’d last heard the intimate, conversational cadence of old-fashioned barbering. It made me think of the rhythm of my mother’s work sounds as she sculpted me when I was a boy.

Pausing, he asked, “Will you check my work on your beard?” I opened my eyes, reached for my glasses, performed the universal male gesture of running my thumb down one cheek, the rest of my fingers down the other, and closing them, like a prayer, below my chin while turning my head left, then right. “Perfect,” I smiled, taking off my glasses and placing them back on the shelf beneath the enormous mirror. 

His jacket was as white as his hair. About eighty, I thought. “I am finding this haircut oddly comforting,” I remarked. “That’s good,” he said. “Something about not using the razor.” “Ah,” he replied, “you noticed.” The silence for a few beats that feels so natural between a good barber or barkeep and his client. “It was not the way I was taught to cut hair, you see,” he explained. I closed my eyes again as he began trimming my sideburns.

On a hunch, I asked, “Where was that?” He stopped. “Palermo,” he said, quietly. “I learned to cut hair by apprenticing for six years in a barbershop there until, one day, my boss said, ‘now you are ready,’ gave me a pair of scissors, a manual clipper, straight razors, and a brush, and showed me the door.”

I recalled my composer friend Norman Stumpf asking Ned Rorem during a lesson in the early eighties whether Ned thought that he was “ready” to begin his career, and Ned responding, “You’re ready whenever you decide that you are.” My barber performed the customary blessing of matching the length of my sideburns with his knuckles. “Italy,” I mused. “Yes,” he said, reading my mind, “it is a shame about Venezia. Have you been there?”

The waves of emotion, followed by a simple, “Yes, many times.” “I have been only once,” he replied. “I took my wife to La Fenice, do you know it?” “Indeed I do,” I smiled, answering, “Venice’s jewel. One of the peak experiences of my life was visiting Ricordi in Milano and seeing the various performance sets for Verdi and Puccini.” His scissors stopped. “Ah.” Intense, shared emotion. “The opera.”

He worked on in silence, struggling with what to do with the thinning fistful of my hair fecklessly splayed across the exposed scalp growing like the hole in the ozone layer. “When did you come to the States?” I asked. “I was 18. My father applied when I was 13. The U.S. government would only allow him to bring one other family member. He chose me. My grandfather had to put a thousand dollars in the bank in order to show that we would be supported if we didn’t get work.” “Did you?” I asked. The scissors stopped. “I have always worked,” he replied. “Me, too,” I said, quietly. “Yes,” he said.

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A new haircut.

“You are a musician,” he observed, simply. “Of course,” I replied, gently. “My three sons all played instruments. They are in their fifties now. Music kept them out of trouble, and at home.” “Yes,” I replied, “that is good. You must be proud of them.” A caesura in which pictures were drawn down off the mirror. I pulled some snaps of my sons up on the phone. Silence. He reached for his tools. The smell of the talc, the pat-pat-pat as he worked it into my hair; the scraping of his comb; the slight twinge of pain as he hit a blemish.

I thought of an astonishingly personal, cruel, intellectually shallow, and factually inaccurate review of my memoir onto which I had recently stumbled. I had already forgotten the critic’s name. Most kinds of writing don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all—but publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” After a decade working on the memoir, I had spent the first three months of 2019 finalizing the manuscript, and then correcting proofs, making an index, gathering permissions, choosing photos, and so forth. Sending off the final galleys to the publisher, I had thought of the story of the annoyed senior composer who, having just played a recording of her work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his glib vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

I thought of yesterday’s visit to the cardiologist, who, after examining the various diagnostic tests that had been run on my heart, said, “Your heart is getting larger.” When I smiled ruefully, he replied, “That’s not a good thing.” As I do every holiday season, I reminded myself that dealing with grief and depression is not a competition; neither should it be concealed or denied; there’s plenty of anguish to go around.

I thought of my youngest, at the doctor’s office with his mother; my oldest, at school grappling with adolescence. The barber loosened the tissue paper at the nape of my neck and applied a little shaving cream. “Your boys are handsome,” I observed, handing him back the pictures as his straight razor scraped across my jugular. “We are lucky men, yes?” He accepted the snapshots, wiped my neck clean with a warm, wet cloth, spun the chair around and whipped the shawl from my shoulders. “So are yours,” he smiled, “and, yes, we are.”

I looked at the barber’s honest work in the mirror; I took in the aging, soul-weary face of the man who looked back at me, and reached for a way forward. You are not Aschenbach, and he is not the hotel barber; this visit to your barber tells a profoundly different story. I nodded affirmatively to my reflection, and said, “Right, this is how a man does it.”

“Now you are ready,” he said.

Farewell to Little Pete's

Little Pete's Restaurant. Cash only. A Philadelphia treasure, in October 2014. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

Closure #1: OCTOBER 2014

This is a piece about Closure and the closure of Little Pete's, a belovéd greasy spoon across the street from the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. A wrecking ball is set to fly through Little Pete’s. Progress commands that a 300-room hotel must take the place of the parking ramp at 219 South 17th Street in whose corner nestles one of Center City Philadelphia’s treasures. We’re not talking Bookbinder’s (which is now, ignominiously, an Applebee's), chock full of tourists and overpriced, or the smattering of trendy boutique restaurants that surround Rittenhouse Square like hipsters lounging on the margins of a poetry reading. We’re talking about a Genuine 24-Hour Greasy Spoon, Home to Collars Both White and Blue, an Insomniac’s Oasis in the Night, a Caffeine Addict’s Last Resort, a Trusted Purveyor of that mysterious mélange of grill top odds-and-ends, Scrapple. We’re talking about Little Pete’s, for Pete’s sake. I'm afraid that the news is grim.

I’ll forever associate Little Pete’s with my youth, not just as a composer coming into his own, but also as a person whose world was opening up in one Big Bang. My life as it was then, almost impossibly full, was discussed, vivisected, celebrated, dreaded, and mourned at Little Pete’s.

Autumn 1981. This Wisconsin Boy, a tender nineteen years old, had only just moved to Philadelphia. The Grace of Whomever had handed me a lottery ticket in the form of an invitation to study at the legendary, preposterously intimidating Curtis Institute of Music. I was a Brooks Brothers shirt and blue jeans sort of guy. I grooved to Stockhausen more than Rorem, Berio more than Barber, and Bernstein even more than the Beatles. 

Little Pete’s was the setting for countless post-lesson symposia. During my lessons, my mentor Ned Rorem casually dropped priceless aperçu and dry, acerbic criticisms while slashing through my compositions, his pencil waving this way and that like a rapier. Afterwards, a bit shell-shocked by the enormity of Ned’s self-assurance, my best friend, and fellow Rorem pupil Norman Stumpf, and I would head for Little Pete’s, where we would debrief. “Did he tell you that you succeeded in being boring?” I asked Norman, over Pete’s wretched, perennially burnt Joe, one afternoon. “Not this time,” Norman replied. “But he told me that William Flanagan wrote my song better in the late 50s.” “Who was he?” I asked. “That’s what I said,” replied Norman. I already knew what Ned’s answer had been: find out.

I didn’t yet have a telephone in my apartment. I’d use the payphone in Little Pete’s to call home for reports of my mother’s gradual submission to cancer back in Wisconsin, and then drink with a cellist friend until four or five in the morning, attempting to slake the thirst for silence in my head. I cannot recall how many dawns I greeted, my body still young enough to absorb the alcoholic gut punches dealt it during the previous hours, doing my counterpoint exercises at Pete’s lime green counter, “scrambled eggs and“ a few inches away, untouched, the dread of disappointing Ford Lallerstedt in class a few hours later by presenting mediocre work pulling me back from the edge.

I celebrated my first critical triumph as a composer at Little Pete’s; I also received my most gratuitous wing clipping by a music critic there. In 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s august music critic, Daniel Webster gave my string orchestra work, Prayer for Peace, which William Smith had just premièred with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a glowing review in the paper. I’ll never forget my brother Kevin, who had come to town for the performance, spreading the newspaper on the table between us, skimming it before reading it to me, so that, if necessary, he could spare me the worst bits. Seventeen years later—a lifetime, really—my alma matercommissioned a piece to celebrate its 75th anniversary called Much Ado. Made careless by the standing ovation the piece had received the night before, I spread the Inquirer out on a table at Pete’s expecting at least a casual nod from the critic. Instead, my frothy showpiece was dealt a pasting. Composers do read reviews. Well, I used to—until that day, anyway.

I courted my girlfriend for months by walking her each day from Curtis to her train at Suburban Station. The day that she allowed me to carry her violin for her was the equivalent of moving from “vous” to “tu.” Afterwards, a little giddy, downcast, yet hopeful — the way you can be when you are in your early ‘20s and in love and have time and health and just enough money to get by, I bought the Daily News and the New York Times and worked my way through them at Pete’s until I felt the urge to compose percolate up within me like a welcome fever. Then, a man with a mission, I’d head for a practice room at Curtis and spread notes on music paper like jam on bread. God, that felt good. In time, the love affair sputtered. Music did not.

This morning, an old school chum posted the news on Facebook that Pete’s shall soon be no more. The comments following her post were lovely, and they’re still coming in. I shouldn’t be amazed by how much the place meant to all of us. 

No more sentimental reveries over crab cake sandwiches when I return to Philadelphia for the occasional master class, performance, or lecture. One less skein of memory holding me to one of the few places on the planet, and one of the few times, when I was able to summon both the elegia of James Agee and the earnest and callow drive of Thomas Wolfe. “Aw,” a Philadelphia-based friend told me on the phone just now when I called him to confirm the news, “just drive on, old friend. It was inevitable. It had to happen. And it all began the day that they let people throw up buildings taller than William Penn’s hat.”

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At "Little Pete's" on 27 February 2017. The restaurant got a reprieve, and is now scheduled to close in May 2017. (Photo by Neil Erickson)

Closure #2: February 2017

Fully three years after I first contributed the article above to the Huffington Post, still accepting "cash only," the diner holds on. The final closing date has been officially announced and accepted by management, and a steady stream of customers has been coming in to say goodbye for months, said the owner when I stopped in this morning.

Enough time has passed that the Warwick Hotel across the street has passed back into private hands and out of the clutches of the chain that had demolished its once elegant lobby and replaced it with a hideous, Euro-trashy, neon-blue fishtank affair.

My wife and I had checked into the Warwick the day before, our two sons in tow. I'd returned to Philly to hear a performance by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia—Michael Ludwig had given a lovely account of the violin concerto I'd written for him a few years earlier. After Michael's vivid, glowing performance of my concerto with Dirk Brossé and the orchestra, I'd dined with my belovéd writing mentor (whom I'd first met as a student at Curtis in 1982) Emily Wallace and her husband Gregory and discussed my memoirs; I'd enjoyed a quick brunch with my good buddy, rising composer and Curtis faculty member David Ludwig, at Pete's the next morning.  I'd even taken a moment to stretch my legs out before me in a favorite chair in the Common Room at Curtis for a few moments before walking to Little Pete's, spreading the Inquirer out on the green formica countertop, and reading a respectful review of my concerto by the same critic who had panned me all those years back. 

June 2017. The original Little Pete's is literally no more. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

A few nights before, I'd sung my "Elegy for Ray Charles" at World Cafe Live in University City, a few blocks away, putting over my good friend Stephen Dunn's lovely words breathily into a hot mic and accompanying myself publicly in this town for the first time since the last time I touched the keys as the lounge pianist in the Barclay Hotel lobby in fall 1982. Then, I was about to make my Curtis debut, conducting my music with the Curtis Orchestra next door, Mother dying of cancer, my life just beginning. The other night, my wife and young sons sat at a nearby table. First, she took the stage and rocked the joint with a spiritual, and then rocked it again by singing the trumpet part(!) of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question in an arrangement by local composer Andrew Lipke. When Gilda and I laid down my new arrangement together of John Henry, I knew that I'd finally licked my ghosts in this town. 

I was awakened this morning by the sound of my son's voice: he was singing the trumpet solo of the Ives as he relieved himself in the bathroom. I knew at once that it would be a good day. After checking out of the Warwick, we celebrated by visiting Little Pete's a final time. The four of us squeezed into the booth in which I first sat tha September 1981—the night I first hit the east coast— and ordered breakfast. The waitress who had presented me with a free piece of blueberry pie and said, "Welcome to Philly, honey," has long since passed away, and the boy I once was has become a man who can no longer eat most of what is on the menu. I couldn't resist introducing my eldest to the mysteries of Scrapple.

I love him anyway.

This essay originally appeared in its original form the Huffington Post on 31 October 2014. Click here to read it there.

Remembering Gian Carlo Menotti on His 105th Birthday

This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 7 July 2016. You can read it there by clicking here.

The Curtis Institute of Music, where Gian Carlo Menotti met Samuel Barber, ultimately joined the faculty, and where Daron Hagen went to school.

Today would have been American composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s 105th birthday. His operas were awarded not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes—the first for The Consuland the second for The Saint of Bleecker Street—in the 50s, when the award meant very different things than it does today. An Italian by birth who, despite retaining his Italian citizenship, proudly referred to himself as an American composer, he wrote for NBC the infectious Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, along with two-dozen other operas.

The attitude most “serious” musicians have towards Menotti’s music is neatly summed up by an exchange I spotted on a colleague’s Facebook wall this morning: “You’ve never seen my eyes roll more than when I had to, under contract, conduct that miserable Amahl,” wrote one person. The next comment in the thread offered a very, very dry response: “Well, Amahl is, for better or worse, in the repertoire, and you were paid, weren’t you?”

The Medium was the first opera I saw live. Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera sent its young artists out in a touring production to junior high schools. It was evident to me even at the age of fifteen that the money had been drummed up to bring them by my fearsome chorus teacher and guru, Wally Tomchek. The performance, on the school stage before the entire student body, was riveting. To this day I remember the haunting refrain, and the music to which it is pinned: “Toby, Toby, are you there?” A composer who can manage that feat deserves complete respect.

In fall 1981, fresh from Wisconsin, I began the happiest six months of my youth. My elation, following acceptance to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music to study composition with Ned Rorem, was generated by the wild knowledge that my childhood dreams were in fact coming true, that the sky was the limit. I possessed the nascent understanding that, with unstinting hard work and commitment, anything was possible. It was incredible; an Icarus-like high that, being my father’s son, carried with it a specific sort of dread that the bottom was going to fall out, and that everything would turn to bad—which it did, twelve months later, when I cradled my mother’s head in my arms as she succumbed to cancer.

That winter, Curtis invited Gian Carlo Menotti to come for a few weeks. During his time in Philadelphia, he coached performances of his music, attended a concert of his orchestral works (including the hauntingly beautiful ballet score Sebastian), and gave my best friend Norman Stumpf, me, and Robert Convery composition lessons. Norman and I took Gian Carlo to lunch at the once magnificent, still dustily opulent Barclay Hotel, then home to Philadelphia Orchestra music director Eugene Ormandy and his wife. The almond-mauve, curtained dining room was appointed like an interior from Visconti’s film of Death in Venice crossed with the funeral parlor in Tony Richardson’s film of The Loved One. “So what would you like to know?” Gian Carlo Menotti asked, taking a seat and wiping his lips delicately with a napkin.

“Opera,” Norman said, “we’ve got to talk about opera.” “Right,” I agreed. “Why don’t we talk about la parola scenica?” I asked. “Ah,” Gian Carlo smoothed the tablecloth with his long fingers as though creating a space, “you are referring to Verdi’s phrase—well, let me tell you….” He began with Verdi, pinpointing the key phrase of music in his favorite scenes; then he moved on to Richard Strauss. His description of collaboration was trenchant: “A stage director looks at a scene one way,” he began. “The composer looks at the scene in another way. The librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.” 

Dessert demolished, coffee drunk, Gian Carlo called for fruit. Eyes twinkling, he said, “Boys, I know that you invited me to lunch. But this is my hotel, and I have already told them to charge it to my room.” He raised his hand peremptorily. “Don’t spend your money on an old man; spend it on something fun.”

After making us promise to remain in touch, he rose gracefully from his chair and glided out of the dining room. Deprived of his gravity and glamour, we felt like men in a lingerie shop, surrounded by elderly Ladies Who Lunch poking at their salads and stout executives tucking into their steaks. I slipped a pear into my jacket pocket on our way out. Walking down Locust Street, Norman and I were pleased to have unanticipated mad money in our pockets.

Literally skipping down the sidewalk, I began, “I feel…” and Norman continued, “…As though the world…” patting first his tummy and then his wallet. “…Is our Oistrakh,” I completed.

Five years later, in lieu of enrolling in Arnold Arnstein’s hand music copying course at Juilliard (on to which I had moved after graduating from Curtis), I agreed to join his team of union copyists in preparing the performance parts for Gian Carlo’s Goya —his final, giovane scuola-style opera and, in the event, a star vehicle for the great tenor Placido Domingo. It was a harried, hair-raising project: music sometimes arrived from Gian Carlo on the day that a scene was scheduled for rehearsal. In November I travelled to Washington to attend the world premiere.

Scarcely a soul argues that most of Menotti’s later musical work (his libretto for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is the equal of Onegin’s, in my opinion) was substandard, but New York Times music critic Donal Henahan’s astonishing cruelty in describing Goya as “a rather stupefying exercise in banality ... a parody of a Menotti opera” was, even then, so brutal that it shocked people. At the time, I found the review (slipping the word “rather” in like a shiv before the word “stupefying,” as though Menotti had failed even at being entirely stupefying) insolent. But I was still too young to understand how profoundly disrespectful Henahan was being, and how wounded to the core—after two-dozen operas and a lifetime of service to his art—Gian Carlo really was.

The pain in his voice on the telephone when I reached him at his hotel the morning it ran in the newspaper was heartbreaking. “He’s just a critic. You’re Gian Carlo Menotti,” I sputtered uselessly, unable to believe that somebody who had accomplished so much could be so hurt by someone whose opinion mattered so little in the end. I realized during the next three or four beats of silence on the line that I had overstepped. What did I know about life at his age, his level of achievement? What did I know about his art, his soul, really? Nothing. I was twenty-five and had accomplished little; he was seventy-five, had founded two music festivals, written two-dozen operas, and won two Pulitzer prizes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that what I say doesn’t matter.” “Ah, caro, someday you’ll understand,” Gian Carlo sighed.

Thirty-five years later, I do.