26/10/2024
"To the young, s*x is what grown-ups do. To the old, s*x is what the young do."
Ned Rorem
– October 23, 1923
In 1969, when I was an impressionable 14-year-old, I snooped a bit in my piano teacher's home library while waiting for another pupil to finish his lesson. I came across Ned Rorem's PARIS DIARY (1966). I asked to borrow it, and somehow it never found its way back to my teacher's composer bios section, but it still lives on a shelf at my home. That afternoon, I began reading and became a bit dizzy when I got to some of the s*xy passages. Rorem's diaries brought him notoriety because he was so candid about his gayness and the s*x lives of his friends, describing his liaisons with Noël Coward, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Samuel Barber, John Cheever, and Virgil Thomson, and along the way, outing at least a dozen other famous figures. Gay THE NEW YORKER writer Janet Flanner called his diaries "highly indiscreet".
Rorem composed symphonies, piano concertos and other orchestral works, chamber pieces, 11 operas, choral works of all sorts, ballets, and music for the theatre, plus literally hundreds of songs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He published 20 books, including six volumes of those diaries, along with collections of lectures and criticism. Now, he is remembered for his art songs, typically for a single voice and piano using the poetry of writers such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Howard Moss, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whitman.
You might think the insulated classical music world, noted for stereotypes like "the Opera Queen", would have plenty of open closet doors, but Rorem was one of the first to dare come out. Rorem was openly gay during an era when even writers like Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote were treating their gayness as a literary device disconnected from their personal lives.
Over the years Rorem published highly readable memoirs, juicy diaries, and collections of letters from a life well-led over eight decades, including an entire volume devoted to his correspondence with gay writer/composer Paul Bowles. His diaries include memories of the times he shared with a sublime mix of creative types including the legendary Black opera singer Leontyne Price, Angela Lansbury, and singer/songwriter Judy Collins. His WINGS OF FRIENDSHIP (2005) is a collection of Rorem's letters from 1944 to 2003 to these friends and others that are assembled in chronological order, revealing the wide range of his interests and the depth of his passions.
Rorem lived an extraordinary life. As a beautiful talented young flaneur he found himself moving in a social circle of gay artists such as Jean Cocteau and John Cage. His diaries don't hold back in name dropping, gossip, or scandals, with Rorem recalling many of his naughty exploits. They also offer a remarkably frank insight into the creative process.
In 1999, Rorem's partner of 32 years, James Holmes, died after a long battle with HIV/AIDS. In LIES: A DIARY 1986 –1999, Rorem writes about Holmes' long decline along with his own mortality, plus a look at his everyday ups and downs. It's his most poignant book.
After 2010, Rorem ceased composing music, writing: "I've kind of said everything I have to say, better than anyone else" There are a pair of exceptions, a 2013 song HOW LIKE A WINTER, based on William Shakespeare's SONNET 97, and a final work, RECALLING NADIA, a short piece for organ piece from 2014. Rorem noted that by then he had stopped receiving commissions. His last years were instead spent playing piano, doing crossword puzzles, and walking through Central Park. Rorem died at home in Manhattan in November 2022, gone at 99 years old, a nice age to take a final bow.
Rorem wrote this about our own modern gay times: "I don't approve of g**s in the military. I'm a pacifist and a Quaker. To spend all of that time to get into the military so you can kill people, rather than spending the time to get rid of the military, is not what gay men, or all men, should be doing. I don't approve of gay marriage. Well, I don't approve of any marriage, except if it can help legally with adoptions, to legally inherit and that sort of thing. But to fight to be legally married, I don't think it's very important."
S. Rutledge
