On Performing

Beginnings

A prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 sings Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 setting There is a Lady Sweet and Kind accompanied at the piano by his fearsome teacher, a man named Wallace Tomchek, at some rural high school in Wisconsin for three non-descript oldsters checking off boxes without looking up until the end when it is revealed that one is weeping.

In the beginning, performance is what you make of it. In the end, when you finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument. In between comes the performing. And the bear. More about the bear later.

Public Performing: the ritual for which one dresses up (or not) in concert blacks, hits the deck, and participates as performer or auditor in a transformative exercise facilitated by music-making, is undeniably an opportunity to enjoy and explore peak human and aesthetic experiences that, in their rightness, touch peoples’ souls and enrich their lives.

Christmas 1978, as a tenor in the choir during a recording session of, among other seasonal pieces, Holst’s Lullay My Liking I am moved to secret tears of gratitude and joy by the sudden, staggering understanding of how very much I love all the people with whom I am singing, that we are good and that, no matter where everyone’s paths will take them after graduation, we can take gentle, youthful pride in our performances; that our conductor Kay is excellent, and that she and Tomchek have taught us well; that this is a memory, a peak moment, if I can hold on to it, an instant that, if correctly remembered and left unadorned, might help carry me into the future.

Listening to the recording just now, I can still identify individual voices in that long ago chorus, and I am transported in time to who I was then, able to examine the skein of memories that ties the man I am and the boy I was in a way that consoles and admonishes, celebrates and memorializes.  Memory is what makes us human; it is the Madeleine. But it is performance that activates memory and compels us to act.

Private Performing: composer (and former chef) Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez observed to me during filming of the operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall (in which he sang the role of Tony) how alike Family Meal in the restaurant world, chamber music with friends, and ensemble building in the theater are. I have leaned into that with my New Mercury Collective.

I am with stolid deliberation working my way through a new French language edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu — a gift from the Camargo Foundation’s resident director, Michael Pretina — side by side with my mother’s nicotine-stained 1934 English language edition. It is November 1989. The Mistral is marching stiffly down the Alps and sweeping across the Côte d’Azur on its way to North Africa, so I am wrapped in jeans and a shocking pink woolen Benetton sweater purchased a few weeks earlier in Venice with money I don’t really have and in which I have sweated. It still looks good, but it smells a little funky. A few days earlier I had set Paul Muldoon’s poem Holy Thursday to music, and have volunteered to perform it, along with a few other songs—some Barber, Rorem, Bernstein, and a couple of my own—at a soiree Michael is throwing for some donors. I can hear the rhythmic crashing of the waves on the limestone cliffs below the villa and, on a lark,  synchronize to them the thrumming chords of the piano part of my setting of Paul’s poem. As I play for an instant I realize the moment for what it is.

The riskiest performing of all, the ultimate gift that performers can offer one another, is the sharing of unfinished drafts or unpolished performances. Complete trust and inclusion of others in one’s creative space. As a composer who performs, mine is the music room at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sitting next to David Del Tredici, giddily charging through Mozart Symphonies four handed arms like spaghetti on a summer afternoon in the early 90s; David accompanying me as I roughhouse my way through Now You Know — a song with words by Antler and dedicated to me about, among other things, how male babies in the womb get erections, and how many, and how often — to a roaring audience of guests in summer 1998; David’s exquisite accompaniment as I sing my setting of Gardner McFall’s Amelia’s Song in September 2005 for the rest of the guests after dinner while composing the opera; accompanying Gilda Lyons myself in my arrangement of the hymn Angel Band before dinner during an annual board meeting sometime during the aughts; weeping, a few days after Ray Charles’ death in 2004, while singing and playing my setting of Stephen Dunn’s Elegy for Ray Charles (were Stephen or David aware yet that they had Parkinson’s?) for him in the middle of the night.

I may have thought that I was a pianist, singer, or conductor before I landed in conservatory, but that nonsense was knocked out of me the first time I walked down the second-floor hallway at Curtis lined with the sepia-colored group graduation photos (of Gary Graffman, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo and…) to the sound of kids younger than me crushing repertoire that I’d never have the technique to perform. From that moment on, I thought of myself as “a composer who plays the piano,” despite all the piano lessons and some really terrific teachers, with whom I am grateful to have studied — beginning at 7 with a stern Polish Holocaust survivor named Adam Klescewski; then Duane Dishaw at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music; and then Jeannette Ross at the University of Wisconsin; ending with Marion Zarzeczna, a pupil of Horszowski’s, at Curtis, who taught me finally how to not play “like a composer.”

Just as composing requires a safe, secure space from whence to create, performing requires that you feel safe onstage. Every one of my teachers observed with wonder how comfortable and at ease I was at the keyboard. It was because, when I was fifteen my mother made my father promise that, if I were at the piano, then he could not summon me to perform any of the numerous random tasks that he demanded of all three of his sons when he was home in what we decided was a conscious desire to keep us from relaxing. For me, the result was that the moment I took to the bench I felt safe. In performance, charged with lifting up and protecting a singer, I was always and have remained, entirely in command of myself as a performer because I’m not there for me: I am a man on a mission.

I made the most of the technique that I had. I performed on hundreds of concerts as a collaborative pianist, made records, coached, and put over from the piano a dozen operas to collaborators, producers, and colleagues. I’ve always acknowledged my place. After hearing me premiere some songs with Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff told me, “You’re a fine collaborative pianist. Soloist not so much.” I am grateful for that.

Middles

Procedural memory is a crucial aspect of being an effective performer. That’s why one practices scales, which, aside from keeping one physically limber (more about that later), create a wealth of repetitive motions that can be executed without conscious management, increasing suppleness of execution, improving one’s technical precision, and even storing history itself in the retained motor skills.

Teachers transfer their muscle memory to their students by passing along to them their personal fingerings. This practical aspect of the oral tradition has a lot of history and poetry to it. Consider that Tchaikovsky was assisted by his composition student Iosef Kotek (a violinist) who provided practical advice that helped his teacher make the solo part more idiomatic. Tchaikovsky offered the piece to Leopold Auer, who rejected it (a ding the piece had to overcome in order to get legs), so the premiere went to Adolph Brodsky; but then Auer picked it up later and passed along his fingerings and interpretation to his students—Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist, among others.

Hmmmm, that’s nice. No wonder the celli sound so plump there, I muse, hearing a bass clarinet doubling hitherto buried in the orchestration. Looking and sounding good during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm Variations with JoAnn Falletta and the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1987, I’ve relaxed just enough during some passagework to let my mind wander. Up I go, my fingers rattling on by muscle memory, hearing things I’m not supposed to be hearing because I am not listening to myself. Even in the moment I am thinking “this is so cool” until I notice JoAnn glancing at me and I plunge back down into my own brain.

In the operafilm I Hear America Singing I have the composer wonder, “Where do people go when they go ‘up?’ Is it heaven?” If the moment of silence between the final sound and the first clap is where the bear lives (more about him later), then I think that the spirit of whomever composed the piece might live “up there,” with angels like Wenders’ Damien and Cassiel, observing and remembering. That’s why I’ve never “gone up” while performing my own music. If I ever do go up playing my own music, who will I meet there?

Sometime in the aughts a pianist colleague who had never heard me play turned to me just as I was about to go onstage to perform some songs with Paul Sperry on a benefit concert at Alice Tully Hall and said, “Please just don’t play like a composer, okay?” Performers aren’t angels; colleagues can be real stinkers. On the one hand, the legitimate criticisms that recreative musicians have with creators arise from the fact that, when we perform, we’re not listening critically. We’re too used to filling in the blanks, to imagining the stuff that is missing; too interested in the sweep of the argument to be careful about the notes. On the other hand, the anecdote reminds me that, over the course of three decades, Paul taught hundreds of singers at Aspen, Juilliard, Manhattan School, and elsewhere, how he and I preferred (with great exactitude) to perform the dozens of songs that I wrote for us. So I guess I am part of a tradition, after all.

Afternoons every couple of months with Paul Sperry over the years in his studio at the Majestic on Central Park West in New York City reading through the stacks of song cycles that composers sent him, enjoying the adventure, the challenge, the overview of what was happening in the art song world, the bits of wisdom imparted, the thumbnail critiques of the vocal writing, the laughter, the wine, quite simply … the playing.

“Playing like a composer” is one thing. Among serious composers and pianists both there is a stigma attached to the ability to “put a song over” at the keyboard — what composer Tevi Eber reminds me is dismissed as playing like a “theater pianist.” It happens that I am very good at it, though I stopped doing it when arthritis made performing more painful than it was worth. When he first landed in New York City in the early 40s, Leonard Bernstein did some work arranging, transcribing, and notating jazz improvisations for Harms under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (I did the same thing, for another publisher, during the late 80s.) Distancing oneself from “hack work” is one thing, but LB was a super-practical musician, and proud of the fact that he could “put over” his shows “the way that Marc [Blitzstein] did.”

Putting over Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Balsam fir” aria from Shining Brow for Lenny on his beautiful Baldwin at the Dakota in 1990, knowing it was good stuff; the absolute I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening thrill of hearing him channel my compositional voice and manipulate it without corrupting it, singing and playing through the same material in his gravelly-schmoozy voice, and by doing so, teaching.

The only way I can perform my own music effectively is to convince myself that I didn’t write it. If I can manage that, then I derive tremendous satisfaction from performing with musicians who are interesting to listen to, who never sing or play anything the same way twice, and who require my backup because they are all in and anything could happen.

Orson Welles captures perfectly the effect that performing the same piece in different venues and for different audiences either on tour or over the span of decades feels like to me in the funhouse mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. “Of course, killing you is killing myself,” says Everett Sloane, aiming his pistol at Rita Hayworth, who he sees in reflection with her gun aimed at him, along with his own face. “It’s the same thing. But, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” Every shot that rings out causes another reflected version of Sloane, Welles, and Hayworth to shatter into a million pieces. I’ve had this experience in my own small way with songs like Holy Thursday, which I’ve played, sung and accompanied hundreds of times in different situations. I can’t imagine how Anne-Sophie Mutter or Joshua Bell feel performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hundredth city, or Paul McCartney performing Hey Jude, but I’d make an operafilm about it in a hot New York minute.

Because I came to music first as a singer — that prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 — I’ve always been entirely at ease as a choral conductor. Hartzell, Tomchek, and Robert Fountain were excellent role models, and I’d been doing it without effort for years by the time Louis Karchin engaged me as his assistant with the Washington Square Chorus at New York University (an interesting bunch comprised of NYU students and community members) during the late 80s and early 90s. When I took over as music director, we had a run of several years during which I joyously deepened my appreciation and love of exploring the rapturously singable part writing of  Monteverdi and Gesualdo by teaching them, week after week; picking up the stick to conduct Mozart — all the great repertoire I had been gifted to sing growing up.

Like most composers, I’ve been called upon to serve as conductor for various reasons, with ensembles large and small, fairly often over the years. I had excellent teachers: Catherine Comet was both terrifying and inspiring; and the help that I got from Lukas made me a respectable technician. Because I’ve only conducted when I needed to, I cannot in good conscience consider myself a conductor.

Stepping off the podium in Milwaukee and shaking the concertmaster’s hand after conducting Suite for a Lonely City— music that, via Bernstein, landed me on the east coast — in 1978 and intuiting that it was the beginning of something; bowing to Norman’s grieving parents in the little balcony in Curtis Hall after conducting the one and only performance of the memorial symphony I wrote for Norman in 1983, crushingly aware of the callow impertinence of my gesture; the feeling of disenchanted vindication I had when stepping off the podium in Las Vegas after having gotten my opera Bandanna in the can in 2000; thirty-eight years after looking down into the faces of my teenage contemporaries and feeling atop Mount Pisgah at the beginning of my story in Milwaukee, leading my fifty-something contemporaries and Gilda Lyons — in music that Bernstein once wrote as a young man for Tourel  — on my birthday in 2016 in Philadelphia, relieved that it would probably be my last time on the podium.

Ends

Once Tin Pan Alley gave way to broadcast pop, songs usually ended by repeating the chorus or the hook while the music faded out, facilitating crossfades on the radio and enabling the band to improvise solos on the “ride out.” Odd how songs just end again in the Internet era. Most importantly, fade outs avoided the dreaded “full stop.” Full stops are downers. Full. Stop. See what I mean?

Transitions are where development and drama happen. Anybody who spins a narrative on some sort of timeline fusses with the transitions between set pieces, the reasoning being that, if you allow an audience to applaud, they’ve been released from the moment and must be pulled back in and their disbelief resuspended. “Exit, pursued by a bear” — the all-time greatest stage direction.

Concert music generally comes to a full stop (either it ends “up” or “down”) when the piece is finished. As a performer one hopes to have been so much in the moment that one’s behavior at the double bar is too crass a thing to consider, just as composers suppose — correctly or not — that the audience will be moved to reflect on what has just transpired and that their anticipation of the opportunity to express their appreciation will mount during whatever silence follows the last note. In that space lives the bear.

Seated at the piano in Curtis Hall in Philadelphia in April 1984, finishing the world premiere of a big song cycle called Three Silent Things, the performance of which would mark my last appearance as a student on that stage, looking up from my finger on the A key as the pitch decayed first at Rob’s face, hearing the B of his cello, then at Lisa’s face, hearing the D of her viola, and then Michaela’s as she held the F# on her violin, and finally at Karen as she sang, “this shallow spectacle, this sense,” on the tonic, I understood for the first time that Wallace Stevens’ poem A Clear Day and No Memories, which I had read as an elegiac, innig meditation on mortality, was in fact a clinical description of existential emptiness, the loss of love, and the end of memory. After I nodded the final cutoff of that simple Gmaj9#7 chord, it felt as though the silence that followed stretched on and on. I hadn’t until that moment had the conscious self-awareness to accept that we were all basically quits, and that, although our narratives would of course continue, they would diasporate.

At that moment, I was eaten by the bear. I was genuinely unprepared for the emptiness, the sense of loss, of, well, what Karen had just been singing about, to feel so viscerally awful. In this place a performer hears not one beat of applause, one word of congratulations; feels not one hug, smells not a single flower in the bouquet that has appeared in one’s hands. Stage Managers are the caretakers of this liminal space, guiding otherwise capable people past the bear and into and out of the wings, gently but firmly telling them to walk slowly or to rush. The bear has a huge repertoire: the imposter syndrome, performance anxiety, the fear of being deemed unworthy, judged, all the feels; for some performers, the hardest part is never having come to terms with the fact that there will never be enough applause, and that the Real World is still out there past the bear, waiting.

Making myself as small as I can at the piano in Philadelphia, sometime in fall 1982, I am aware that I am not here to perform, but to witness. Periodically, I am called upon to play a few measures of accompaniment, but otherwise I am superfluous. I try to commit to memory everything that Szymon Goldberg is saying to my violinist friend during her lesson. He isn’t just passing along fingerings, bowing, style, bow speed and pressure, and tradition, he is summoning the aesthetic world in which Debussy lived for her and gently referencing for her the way that a half dozen other great violinists have played the piece — some for Debussy himself — so that, as she commits the great Sonata in G minor to memory she will inscribe it in her own poetic memory. As she puts her violin to her neck, the spirits of Gaston Poulet, who premiered it, David Oistrakh, who recorded it, and more join her.

“The Germans were advancing on Paris,” I recall Goldberg observing, “and you can feel the end of the world in it.” Like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, the Debussy Sonata captures in music some essential quorum of understanding of the actuality of the end of time. Even in my early 20s I appreciated the coolness of her hand in mine as we walked home together that fall evening, and how superficial my grasp of Debussy’s last piece was. Understanding it would require a lifetime of study and experience. “To think he died only a few months after writing it,” she mused. “But he left us some breadcrumbs at least,” I replied.

Ned and I have finished a couple of games of backgammon at the red dining room table in January 1999 the day after Jim died and I say, “I’ll throw together something to eat” and he pushes the board away, saying, “I’m going to play something.” His retreating back. I move to the kitchen. When I hear him playing and singing a Hoagy Carmichael song in the living room, I stop what I’m doing, bow my head, weep stupidly, and listen.

Performing is praying, lullay-ing, baying, and kyrie-ing. Sometimes it even involves playing. In the beginning there is the swaddling band and the infant’s reflexive whimper; then, the Whitmanesque song of oneself; at the end there is the winding sheet and the survivor’s keen. Or is it the other way around? William Blake’s “piping, loud” arrival; Dylan Thomas’ raging “against the dying of the light;” T.S. Eliot’s ending “with a whimper.” In the end, when you’ve finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument.

Thanksgiving 2017, I tease out the first few notes of Copland’s dignified, soulful setting of the great hymn Shall We Gather at the River, look up at my partner Gilda Lyons and wait, contentedly, for her to begin. She raises her hand slightly as she often does when she begins a song. I think of the countless times I’ve held that hand; I think about the anticipation of restoration, and how her love and acceptance has transformed my sorrows into joys. Together we perform.

On Music Copying

Movement I (Allegretto)

Along with the obsolescence of the two-thousand-year craft of copying music by hand,  technology has rendered notation itself obsolete, as composers lean into DAW — digital audio workstations. For that matter, as studios like Lionsgate partner with artificial intelligence firms, giving them “access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model,” A.I. is threatening film composers themselves with obsolescence.

American folklore tells us that the locomotive, what Indigenous Americans called the Iron Horse, made the horse itself obsolete. For some. But not for cow punchers. And certainly the art of riding remained.  Eadweard Muybridge’s series of six cabinet cards, titled “Horse in Motion,” captured in stills the illusion of the horse’s movement, but not its essence. Not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a person and their steed.

Streetcar locomotives began replacing streetcar horses around 1850; by 1900 electric streetcars had replaced them both as a method for the conveyance of flesh and bone. And then, as the automobile swept across the land on ribbons of concrete, those parallel ribbons of steel that survived did so mainly because they remained useful, at least, for the conveyance of freight.

Hand copying of “scores” with quill and ink on paper for publication gave way in 1851 with the first use at scale of hand (or “plate”) engraving of music on thin sheets of lead. Music typesetting became a thing, and the 1930s brought the Keating Music Typewriter. All these were used for the creation of the scores to be published and sold to consumers. Hand copying of “performance materials,” that is, the individual note-covered piece of paper from which each instrumental performs their “part,” as extracted by a copyist from the full “score” (or “partitura”) for commercial music, music theater, and symphony concert works continued to flourish well in to the twentieth century.

The beginning of the end came in fall 1988, when the software notation program Finale was released. In other words, notation software captured in ones and zeros the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence. For some. And certainly the art of composing (and of hand copying) remained.

The end of the end began in 1993 when the software program Sibelius outflanked its competitor, called Score, by being more “intuitive” as a creative tool for composers. Notation software made possible in ones and zeros a graphic representation so good that it looked better than most hand human copyist’s work: the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence, had been successfully duplicated. For most people. But not for fine art composers. And certainly the arts of composing and of hand copying remained. But not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a composer and their copyist.

Of course, it is all part of the dialectic relationship between creation and destruction. Old ecosystems are destroyed; new ones emerge. I put my quill and India ink aside in 2002. Though some hand music copyists still ply their trade, the craft and art of it are now relegated to history.

Movement II (Andante)

I had the skills. I had a clear, attractive hand. I was fast and accurate. Because I worked for a living, I needed the money to buy the time to compose the music I wanted to compose (and it is safe to say that I composed a lot); and some of my peers had the money to buy my time. It is ironic that, even though composers once had to come and go through the back door, certain composers were happy to look down upon their colleagues who copied music to make ends meet. As though commercial viability of the music or personal financial security were a measure of artistic success! How composers and conductors treat their copyists reveals everything about them as people.

My life as a music copyist began in 1975 with nights spent copying the parts to my teenage opuses at the kitchen table in New Berlin, Wisconsin as the sun rose. By 1982, while a composition student at the Curtis Institute, I was working as a professional copyist for the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. When I moved to New York City to go to Juilliard, I began fifteen years as a professional freelance copyist with heavy concert music private clients (including my former teacher, Ned Rorem, whose copyist I was for nearly a decade), before serving a final stint as a union copyist on Broadway.

For several hundred years, serving as one’s mentor’s copyist was an integral component of one’s training. I do recall learning more about how Leonard Bernstein made the “Profanation” of his Jeremiah Symphony go in spring 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by hand copying the parts for my turn on the podium as a member of Catherine Comet’s conducting class (I could not afford to rent the parts at the time) than I had in my conducting lessons with Comet. For, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — one’s brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when they wrote it.

While a composition student at Curtis, I was able, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Philadelphia Orchestra Associate Conductor William Smith, to connect with the orchestra’s librarian, Clint Nieweg, to attend rehearsals of the school’s orchestra with the PO’s library copy of the piece in hand. Bill collected autograph facsimiles of scores and sometimes brought one for me to follow; and the school’s librarian (my work study boss, as I served as his assistant) Edwin Heilakka used to let me follow in Leopold Stokowski’s score (the school had just been gifted his papers). What a marvelous way to learn the repertoire. 

I guess it is true that I have copied every kind of composer for every musical genre — from pop to film, opera to symphonic, academic incipits to television cues, chamber to salon — and a wide array of composers: Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Ezra Laderman, Enno Morricone, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, George Delerue, John Kander, George Perle, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower, Disney, Really Useful, Radio City Music Hall, and more of my peers than I’d care (or am able) to recall. I just looked at that list and thought of a dozen more but cannot make myself go back and add their names, as it feels unnerving, the way that seeing my handwriting on a set of orchestral parts when visiting an orchestra performing something of mine and not even remembering having done the job does.

In the callouses I still have on my fingers and the damage I did to my vision between 1984 and 2004 as a professional hand music copyist, I have in many ways far more in common with Atticus’ literate slaves than I do their master’s friend Cicero. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it has a lot to do with both earning humility and having it thrust upon one.

My first full scores (ambitious 25 minute long juvenaliæ for chorus and large ensembles called Pastoral Mass and The Creation, 1978) were copied with black felt tip marker and black ball point pen (!) back in Wisconsin on that famously canary yellow Passantino 20 stave (Pad 23) and 24 stave (Pad 25) Since first buying a quire of it at Carl Fischer’s beautiful store on Astor Place in 1984, 20-stave King Brand and writing Trio Concertante, my favorite sketching paper has been King Brand. We used Judy Greene vellum from Los Angeles at the Fleisher Collection in Philly, if I remember correctly, but once I landed in Manhattan I became a denizen of Associated Music Service at 333 West 52nd Street. They sold Aztec vellum, which I used for all of my private clients. It’s closed now, but I remember Eileen (it was a family business) behind the counter — always kind, writing up every sale, as there was no cash register — certainly no computers!

There is still some hand copying to be done, but, overwhelmingly, it is done on the computer now. Many composers’ own workflows have come to include writing in digital audio workstations and the young composers who clean up the notation and format the “midi dumps” for composers who don’t notate have taken the place in the ecosystem copyists once occupied. Soon A.I. will do that job as well.

Movement III (Minuet)

Titus Pomponius Atticus (later Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus, 110 BC – 32 BC) was a Roman banker, editor, and patron remembered for his correspondence with and (at his own expense copied by the hand of and distributed by his educated slaves) support of the philosophical and oratorical writings of his friend Marcus Tullius Cicero. The letters between them are an incredible testament to their friendship and moving in their candor and agape. The name Atticus is familiar to most people nowadays as the name of the father in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. As attorney Finch protected and lifted up his children in the American South in Lee’s book with his stalwart moral courage and sense of justice, the historical Atticus lifted up Cicero.

Authors like Lee name their characters’ with precision, alluding to the characteristics of historical figures to instantly summon an array of associations on the part of the reader. Some parents do, too, when a beloved progenitor doesn’t automatically command commemoration by way of passing along their name. Do they do it hoping that their child will take on those worthy traits? Names and the narrative weight that they carry are important. I am, for example, named after a brother who died in infancy just before me.  In any event, moved by the lives of both of these men – one historical and the other fictional — my spouse and I chose Atticus as the name of our first son.

What father doesn’t dream of a better life for their son? My attorney father, reading Mockingbird to me as a child, voice breaking in the final pages — who’s voice wouldn’t? — lived long enough to see his son live the life of an artist, a Cicero to his Atticus, if you will. Reading Mockingbird to my son when he was small made us both feel the power of names, the sense of belonging and continuum, of history and struggle. I will live to see my son burst into the world as an Atticus.

Would we know today who Cicero was if Atticus had not had his writings copied and carried to the far ends of the Roman Empire? It is impossible to forget that the Gospels were copied by hand — as was every scroll in the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks.

While I have trouble visualizing Atticus’ literate slaves, it is easy – perhaps thanks to Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs – for me to conjure the image of a portly friar, his faithful cat at his elbow, a quill in hand, an illuminated manuscript before him awaiting his ministrations.

The years spent as a music copyist have helped me to understand the sense in which the monk’s work was more than a job, more than a sort of literary ablution, more even than a calling. From the modern perspective, the illuminated manuscripts might seem to be more a mandala — a testament to impermanence, an attempt to extend into another dimension the ineffable truth of (in a monk’s case) faith. The manuscript in a music copyist’s hands has as its purpose to facilitate a live performance. Perhaps, afterwards, its existence represents what remains when the animation of human actuation is gone, like a plan for a house built of soundwaves.

As the Bible’s words strive to convey the mystery of faith, musical notation strives to convey the effect of song. “From whence cometh song?” asked Theodore Roethke. “They should have sent a poet,” observes the scientist in the film Contact, realizing that scientific language alone cannot explain or describe something that inspires awe. Composer Slavko Krstic once pointed out to me that his mastery of higher theoretical physics and math were one way to commune with the Divine, but that he had concluded that picking up his guitar gave him a clearer signal.

Notated music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.

I think of my priest declaiming the liturgy on those occasions when, Ad Orientem (celebrating Mass facing away from the congregation), the words of the Mass land differently, the performative, ritualistic nature of the recounting of the Holy Thursday story simultaneously more abstract and requiring of one’s imagination because the congregation, deprived of the facial expressions of the celebrant, is compelled to listen harder.

Movement IV (Finale, Allegro con brio)

Iron horses and fleshly ones; hand copyists and engraving software; composers and “music generator apps” like Soundraw; musicologists and monks. There are mathematician fathers finding bliss by striving to number the stars and sons numbering the stars by finding bliss with a guitar. For every bull a matador; for every scientist a poet. Bring on the Ecclesiastes 3:1.

But before a final goodbye to all that, how about a working song, a roundelay about the joys of the work itself?

The walking into the theater, any theater, and delivering parts, getting a feel from the music team how it is going, the showing up at the reading of a new show, or the bonhomie of showing up for the backer’s audition of a Genuine DOA Flop anyway because you copied the reed books.

Leaning over the orchestra pit’s rail, tapping fifteen, squinting to identify the handwriting of the copyist who extracted the parts as a trombone player reads a paperback novel during the intermission.

The music for a show coming in over the fax machine from London with just lyrics, a melody, a bass line, and chord symbols and the directive to make it go, the cigarette smoke, the diazo machine spitting out ammonia fumes, the electric eraser shavings in your pockets.

Reluctantly giving a pre-performance talk at the insistence of the producer to patrons in an empty opera house in Arizona and looking up to see in the back row for the first time in years my librettist for the show, who, possibly between flights and on his way to somewhere else, has decided to see for himself if the old thing still has legs.

The arrogance of “heavy client” copyists, the gratitude of newbies from the provinces, the surprise of residuals, decades’ worth of canary yellow “Local 802 Music Preparation Invoice” sheets lolling like iris tongues from the file cabinets. And the stories: the stories told by the copyists already in their 70s about Garland, Sinatra, and copying music for the networks: Mutual, CBS, NBC, and ABC….

Six of us laughing and cross-talking in a cab on our way to Manny’s with the just-completed and printed instrumental parts of Kander and Ebb’s sizzling new chart for Liza Minelli’s new Vegas show and spilling out onto the sidewalk across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal like pilsner into a tulip glass.

Copying Lion King parts for the Mouse, who stationed a guy by the front door of the office who looked like he was a member of the Blues Brothers Band who we were pretty sure timed us when we went to take a leak. The Case of the Missing Lucky Electric Eraser that began when Brian Fairtile left his go bag in the Winter Garden pit and ended in laughter and tears when, retrieving it, we read the graffiti on the pit wall that said, “They’ll never get the Cats smell out of this pit.”

Drinking coffee and listening to the Portuguese cast album of Company, wondering how all those syllables could possibly be flying by at the rate that they were while trying to identify who the composers were in some of the older black and white pictures of clients on the walls, the beat-up spinet where emergency songs got written, and, as at Fleisher down in Philly, stories about WPA copyists, hard drinking, and the blacklist.

Atticus commissioned. Cicero orated. The monks illuminated the manuscripts. Those of us who were members of the Local 802 were Teamsters. My copyist colleagues were the most resilient, humblest, kindest, smartest, and wisest musicians I’ve ever known. I am proud that I was accepted by them as a colleague when I finally landed in Gotham. We were more than the batmen to our composers, far more than assistants to our employers. People like Mathilda Pincus and Arne Arnstein were legends for a reason.

For years Brian kept a copy of Wine Connoisseur atop his satchel at the office where we worked until, over seder, he and his brilliant spouse told Gilda and me how he intended to quit music copying and become an import-export buyer, like our friend, composer Stephen Dembski. His personal reinvention, from Broadway horn player to copyist, had now been from copyist to wine expert. The best all-around copyist I ever knew.

We were part of traditions that stretched back to the age of Christ. We were the angels witnessing the act of creation and — when it needed a hand, giving it one. We all remembered every piece we ever worked on until we didn’t. And, you know, even though we were all entirely aware of exactly who our clients were as people and as musicians, and of how little we mattered, and who our clients sometimes thought they were in relation to us, none of us ever ran them down. After all, we all become obsolete eventually. It was an honor to serve. Write on. 

On Singing Beautifully

“YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
         force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action,
         ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
         restoring darkness.”

— Walt Whitman

Long have I unpacked Walt Whitman’s lines, which I first read when assigned Leaves of Grass by a beloved English teacher but which I — all of sixteen and enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem — sped by without taking note. A year later, reading through Ned Rorem’s “art song” setting with a friend as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I’d grown slightly more mindful, and at least made note of the next six lines.

Two years later, during a lesson at his apartment in New York, Ned presented me with a sheet of yellow foolscap on which he had typed (with his trusty Royal portable) the same poem, decreeing that I should “have a go at it.” I had miraculously left Wisconsin behind and settled in Philadelphia where, setting the poem to music myself, I realized that, in life, at least, I had of course skipped lines two and three and was living — at full bore — lines four and five. As the decades passed, the poem stuck with me. My appreciation of lines two and three grew. At the age of sixty, I revisited the poem, and created, with Gilda Lyons, a new setting of it called Restoring Darkness for solo voice, which filmmaker H. Paul Moon and Gilda captured in an extraordinary single shot soon after its completion. The final two lines, of course, were now my focus, and the key to my understanding of this sturdy, wise piece of writing.

As an American composer born in 1961 I am a Latchkey child—a member of the first year of what is typically referred to as Generation X—sandwiched between the Millennials and the Boomers, my relationship to what constitutes “beautiful singing” has matured along lines parallel to my maturation as a person.

As a sixteen-year-old composer manque, I was enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem. Singing was just that. I was taught to sing “correctly” and “well” in the Lutheran and Anglican choral traditions by superb chorus teachers, but I also grooved to (and appreciated the artistry of) “off the voice” folk singers, Bob Dylan, and the first generation of amplified rock musicians whose vocal training was often nil. By the time I landed in Madison, I was earning beer money plowing through the Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias with voice majors, having for years appreciated the exhilarating vocalisms of Cathy Berberian, the magnificently balanced tone of Barbara Streisand, the splendid phrasing of Frank Sinatra, the emotionally undeniable wisdom of Maria Callas, and the nuanced, Fellini-esque meta-authenticity of Peter Pears.

Two years later, studying with Ned, I learned (but was not taught) why Samuel Barber’s vocal writing was considered more “elegant” than Gian Carlo Menotti’s, and, with gently relentless reminders, encouraged to find Menotti’s vocal writing somehow “theatrical” in nature and therefore less refined. I had already accompanied many of Ned’s early, Billie-Holiday-meets-Francis-Poulenc songs (which I adored) and had begun to process why, when prominent “vocal coaches” were invited to coach Rorem or Barber, they usually chose Barber. But I was in the full flower of lines four and five, composing my first big opera, Shining Brow, and, from today’s standpoint, the vocal writing that I consciously emulated combined Benjamin Britten’s muscular modernism and Stephen Sondheim’s theatrical practicality.

Age came to me “with equal grace” when I rejected the hierarchization that vocal partisans place on “singing styles.” I remember the moment. It was in Texas sometime during the 90s. I had been engaged to present a masterclass at a college that was producing one of my operas, and was coaching a young singer on a performance of Ned’s “Early in the Morning,” which I had been coached on by Ned a few times over the years with various singers. The delightful vocalist was crooning away at a moderately slow clip (I approved—after all, the Holiday factor, on which Ned doubled down when he sang his own music at the piano), finished, and it was time for me to speak up. I recalled that Ned — every single time I played it for him — always had two things to say: “play it faster, and don’t ‘sell’ it.” So, I told the singer the same thing, making it clear that the comment came from Ned, not me. The singer sang it again, faster, and without the Holiday vibe. It sounded more like the way Ned would have liked it; but it didn’t sound the way that singers like to sing it, and audiences, by and large, prefer to hear it. Behind me, in the back of the room, the singer’s teacher (or coach—I don’t recall which) nodded vigorously “no-no-no.”

Ever since, all “singing styles” have had, to me, “equal, grace, force, fascination.” There is “beauty of sound” and there is “beautiful singing.” The two can coincide, but don’t have to; they can co-exist. I mix “singing styles” not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate characters and to subvert the conception of what constitutes “class,” but to invite audience members with preconceived notions of what constitutes not just “good” and “bad” singing, but “good” and “bad” taste out of their intellectual and aesthetic complacence—to move them to embrace a broader conception of what constitutes “beautiful singing.”

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, musical theater acting singers typically lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

To maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

So, what’s the point? I don’t compose for the singers that I can afford, I write for the people singing. Sometimes I get it wrong. But I try to learn from the experience. Once I wrote a role for a Big Star who, in the practice room, sang the role for me as I wrote it for them, but—when they stepped on to the stage—reverted to the way they had sung the role before I had coached them. It was a heartbreaking moment, because I had given them material that would have changed the course of their career, paving the way to the character roles that would have continued to feed them artistically into their sixties, even seventies. But they had mouths to feed, management with which to contend, a public that had decided who they were. Singing is a brutal profession.

Now I am at the “millions of suns” stage of my life as a vocal composer. Long as my stance has been that there is only singing that lands and singing that doesn’t, and that abstract “beauty of sound” is a precious thing, but it is not the Only Thing, I have come to feel a bit like Gusteau in Ratatouille, who feels that “everyone can cook.” No, I am not a gourmand; of course I can tell the difference. But I am drawn to authenticity above all. The rest is exquisite artifice. If I hear you sing, and I tell you that I think you sing beautifully, I mean it.

On Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

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.