Langdon Hammer on Merrill and Music

Excerpts from Langdon Hammer's James Merrill: Life and Art (New York: Knopf, 2015).

 A grasp of rhythm and an ability to listen for complicated structures of sound show in the child’s appreciation of classical music. That was encouraged by Zelly and by Jimmy’s piano lessons, which taught him the discipline of practice and performance. (31).

That same summer [1937], Jimmy was introduced to the art form that, besides poetry, would mean the most to him. In the music room at the Orchard one morning, a new friend of Hellen’s, Carol Longone, sat him on the bench beside her at a grand piano (one of two in the room) and played through the score of Leoncavallo’s verismo opera Pagliacci, while making comments on the music, the drama, the staging, and the interaction of these elements. It was his first taste of grand opera, and it captivated him. The story concerns a troupe of comic actors. In the prologue, to a melody that Merrill would always find “unspeakably beautiful,” the clown Tonio addresses the audience. Although he and his fellow players perform stock roles, he warns the operagoer not to think their tears artificial: “We have human hearts, beating with passion!” As the opera proceeds, sexual desire and jealousy erupt when the actors put on a comic play about adultery (a foolish husband, a young rival for the wife’s affection), the real takes over, and one of the clowns murders his wife and her lover. Pagliacci involved comic types Jimmy knew from the puppet theater, but it was closer to the drama his parents  were living than to The Magic Fish-bone.

            Jimmy had a high-level guide in Carol Longone. A Floridian by birth, she had an intriguing, operatic story of her own, having been married to an impresario and “Lived Abroad.” She was a skilled pianist who had been on tour as an accompanist with premier artists like the soprano Rosa Raisa and the tenor Beniamino Gigli. She was best known for her “capsule concentrate” versions of grand operas called “Operalogues.” Presented in hotels and clubs from New York City to the hinterlands, these events were a “fitting prelude to the literature of opera, an enticement to those who would learn of opera without travail,” the Toledo Blade wrote. “Mrs. Longone explains and plays, cues in her singers”— the mostly young but expert singers she collaborated with—“ and calls upon the imaginations of her audience to engender the scenes she   describes.” This is what she did with Jimmy, who began weekly piano lessons with her that fall. Longone meanwhile became a friend to Hellen and Jimmy both. After the death of Charlie’s sister Edith, who had been Jimmy’s godmother, she took on that role. When the fall season of the Metropolitan Opera opened, Jimmy had a seat for every production. Looking back on his youthful fandom, Merrill wrote, “[ O] pera was from the start an education less musical than sentimental. […] Why else had we paid (or our mothers paid for us) to hear Violetta suffer, Wotan turn upon his wife, and Gilda disobey her father?” The sentiments he was experiencing were vivid, even wildly passionate, but expressed through stylized roles, long rehearsed, and performed with poise and discipline before an audience for applause. As in the case of Pagliacci, opera made him aware of art’s potential to give voice to the most powerful feelings— and aware of the rhetorical, performed nature of any expression of such feeling. It was a way to study, within the safe frame of the proscenium, the passions and intrigues that his parents had set before him at home. Opera’s people were prey to primitive, dreamlike violence, but always as an effect of visible artistic choices (stage business, lighting, props), and their characters were safely caricatures— larger than life, just as his puppets were smaller. With Carol at the keyboard and Hellen or Mis’ Annie as his escorts at the Metropolitan, opera was for Jimmy a woman's world, and he was drawn to the strongest woman on the stage.  In Wagner’s Ring cycle, he was fascinated not by the sword-wielding Siegfried, but by Brünnhilde, whom Siegfried awakens from the circle of fire in which she sleeps (the Sleeping Beauty story again). Jimmy heard a twenty-five-year-old Erich Leinsdorf conduct Die Walküre at the Met in 1938. Kirsten Flagstad sang the heroine’s role. According to the Herald Tribune, the Norwegian blonde was “the greatest singer in the world.” She immediately became Jimmy’s favorite, and merged in his mind with this role. Brünnhilde is the Valkyrie who gives up immortality for human love, which she perceives as her father Wotan’s will, though he opposes her, and her actions will bring about his downfall. In A Different Person, Merrill looks back on his early infatuation with this woman warrior: “Her love threw a wrench into the entire celestial machinery; when the flames died down and the Rhine subsided”— at the end of the cycle in Götterdämmerung—“ nothing was left but the elemental powers that prevailed long before the gods (narrow-minded nouveaux riches, like the people we knew in Southampton) sprang up to embody them.” 

            As that remark about Southampton nouveaux riches suggests, there were analogies for young Jimmy to draw, if only subliminally at this point, between Wagner’s people and his own family, who were blessed and cursed by their gold. Flagstad’s Brünnhilde was an ambiguous figure for the boy to identify with— a rebel who would burn down her father’s house (Valhalla), but redeem it too, singing all the while. To admire her as fiercely as Jimmy did was a not-so-covert gender rebellion. “Next to the powers of such a woman,” he continues in A Different Person, “all male activity— Siegfried’s dragon slaying, Einstein’s theorizing, the arcana of password and sweat lodge— seemed tame and puerile. I longed throughout adolescence to lead my own predestined hero, whose face changed every month, into music’s radiant abyss.” (49-50)

            At Lawrenceville, Buechner recalls, Jimmy wanted to be a musician and a composer “He had a little Mozart act. He would roll up his pants to make knickers”— another of the budding poet’s teenage costumes. The “little Mozart act” was very much a fantasy: Jimmy never composed his own music, and his report cards make it clear that, although he was a skilled pianist, he read sheet music slowly and his fingering needed work. Mozart was a metaphor for the sort of   artist he dreamed of becoming: working on both large and small scales, writing for the theater, for performance, and virtuosic in all he would do, aiming to amuse and move his audience at the same time. The Rococo Mozart’s decorative, insistent lightness appealed strongly to him, but even as an adolescent he knew that the music was “powdered with despair,” and if it was “free from passion,” it must be “passionately played.” Merrill would retain and realize a version of this aesthetic ideal over his poetic career. It became a commonplace for critics to describe his poetry as “Mozartian.” The comparison is only plausible if we are thinking of the Romantic as well as the Rococo Mozart, a composer melancholy and metaphysical even when “daintily debonair,” whose sunlight deepens the shadows. Much later in life, Merrill’s favorite work of literary criticism, frequently recommended to friends, was Donald Sutherland’s eccentric, impressionistic study On, Romanticism (1971), which has a chapter on Mozart. Sutherland mentions that, as Merrill had surely noticed, Mozart’s name “contains the terminal letters of the alphabet (ZA) surrounded by the word MORT. Plainly,” the impish critic deduces, “the name means music from A to Z or from Z to A (reversible like WM), all music, surrounded by death.

            The Marriage of Figaro, Così Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni were among the operas Merrill loved the best and heard most often. But the opera he was most affected by, beginning when he was a teenage regular at the Met and Lotte Lehmann appeared year after year in the role of the Marschallin, was Richard Strauss’s Mozart-inspired Der Rosenkavalier. This work, Merrill later declared, “all but made me who I was.” What influenced him in particular was the attitude of tender, ironic resignation embodied by the Marschallin, the wife of a never-seen field marshal, who at the climax of the opera, in a sublime, soaring trio, accepts her age and gives up her considerably younger lover Octavian so that he can follow his heart and join hands with the equally young and innocent Sophie. Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal set the opera in eighteenth-century Vienna and deployed aspects of farce from Mozart’s comic operas. These included the choice to have Octavian, like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, sung by a mezzo-soprano in a cross-dressed role, which puts two women at the center of this love story. For young   Jimmy, the work constituted “a bittersweet, faintly homosexual, wholly survivable alternative to my dreams of immolation and all-consuming love,” which had been stoked in him by Wagner’s apocalyptic Ring.

             Over time, Merrill applied the moral lessons of Der Rosenkavalier’s plot to new life situations as they arose. But when he came to it as a teenager, the opera resonated with his family drama. The Marschallin’s grand home was easy to transpose onto the Orchard. He could see his father in the absent field marshal, or less charitably in the boorish, lascivious Baron Ochs, the Marschallin’s cousin, while the Marschallin herself was crossed with his image of his mother, who had behaved beautifully in her time of trial. On some level, Jimmy must have hoped that Hellen would one day let him leave and love someone else, just as elegantly— and peaceably— as the Marschallin gives up Octavian. While the plot entered Jimmy’s moral imagination, Strauss’s score set a standard that his poetic music could aspire to. Neoclassical pastiche and Mozartian gaiety, a full, thick, Wagnerian orchestral palette, and an array of atonal effects— vertiginous leaps, turbulent eddies— play off each other in Der Rosenkavalier, constantly shifting the opera’s manner and  mood, and keeping it, despite all the retro decor, from settling on one side of the contest between new and old, modernism and tradition. That mobile, multiform musical texture was an influence on the poet that Merrill eventually became. But it would take years before he could begin to catch up as an artist with this and the other operatic masterpieces that he listened to in adolescence.   (75-77).

In her memoir [Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits] about her friendship with them, she maintains that David lived on “$ 40,000 per year” from his successful businessman father, and that “at UCLA he studied music composition with Hindemith and Schoenberg.” Jackson owed money to his father, who was never a success in business. David learned to play the piano, and he took a course in music composition at UCLA; but he was a novice composer, he did not train as a concert pianist, and he did not study with Schoenberg (or Hindemith . . . . (168).

The alcove was now a tiny music room with a record player and a growing collection of classical recordings. Merrill listened to song cycles, chamber music, piano, and opera, from Mozart and bel canto to Wagner and Strauss. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Schumann dominated, but there was lots of French music, too, from Rameau to Fauré, Satie, and Ravel. Merrill’s preferred performers were mid-century virtuosi like Pablo Casals and Artur Schnabel (the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in 78 and LP) and the sopranos he’d heard in the concert hall and opera house so often: Maggie Teyte, Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Kirsten Flagstad. Ralph Kirkpatrick, a Yale professor with whom Merrill became friends, performed the complete Scarlatti sonatas and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord. There were only a few lighter touches— such as Ruth Etting, “The Happy Singer of Sad Songs,” the jazz balladeer Don Shirley doing standards like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” or the Neapolitan folk  Watch Over Me,” or the Neapolitan folk singer Roberto Murolo, whose gentle strumming Merrill evokes with envy and irony in a poem written three decades later, “Self-Portrait in Tyvek ™ Windbreaker.”  (253-54)

            [The pianists Arthur]Gold and [Robert] Fizdale . . . offered the spectacle of two men in matching tuxedos, who were former lovers and lifelong companions, making music on the same instrument while sitting side by side and often on the same bench. Their playing was touching and showy, golden and fizzy. The special charm of it lay in how, like Peschka and Murdock, they drew on the energy of childhood play. Fittingly, Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals was a showpiece for “the boys.” They performed the whole repertory of piano works for four hands and two pianos, including the concerti for two pianos by Mozart and Poulenc (which they recorded with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic) and works commissioned for them by John Cage, Paul Bowles, and Ned Rorem. Merrill’s favorite in their songbook was the Dolly Suite by Fauré, “a lemony, edgy, sometimes sad, sometimes frothy duet written for Debussy’s stepdaughter.” Their concerts were events in New York’s gay high-culture calendar, followed by parties hosted by Jerome Robbins or Lincoln Kirstein, with a crush of guests. In fall 1961, Merrill heard them perform Schumann’s Spanische Liebeslieder (a work they recorded for the first time) with the baritone William Warfield. The evening was so affecting that, Jimmy laughed, it made “an entire audience (Marianne Moore and 1200 white faggots) think twice about their love lives.”  (293-294).

“The Thousand and Second Night” suggests an artistic program, then, but it does so by leaps and implications, rather than claims and assertions. It projects, as Merrill said in an interview, a “musical” rather than a logical sense of the relations between its parts. These he fits together in a collage, placing heterogeneous materials in evocative patterns. This method required a tolerance for loose ends and a relish for seemingly arbitrary, offhand connections. It enabled Merrill to move boldly outside the constraints of the tightly packaged New Critical lyric he had been trained in.  (326-327).

Merrill saw Puccini’s Tosca at the Met [1965] with Maria Callas in the title role. “Welcome Home, Maria,” banners read, greeting the great Greek-American soprano’s return to New York at the height of her fame in one of her signature   roles, her voice to be relished for a new reason now, being in decline, frayed and corrupt. “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” (I lived for art, I lived for love), Tosca sings. Merrill remembered how, long ago, lying “face-down on the floor” in the Music Library at Lawrenceville, he’d “lip-synched” Tosca’s aria, a lovelorn adolescent. In the life that he imagined ahead of him, he wanted to be able to look back and sing the same words. (376-77).

Merrill's taught a creative writing class at the University of Wisconsin, Spring 1967:

He brought to one class a   recording of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, and played the setting of Heinrich Heine’s “Ich Grolle Nicht,” a lonely, lovelorn lyric if there ever was one. The assignment he gave his puzzled students was to translate Heine’s poem into English in a form that could be sung to Schumann’s music. The point was to look not for meaning, but for “the sound of meaning.” Much of what he had to teach was communicated when Merrill met his students individually in the English Department or at a table in the student union, a lugubrious ratskeller selling cheap food and drinks with a view of the sailboats on Lake Mendota. Here he discussed their writing and sang their translations of “Ich Grolle Nicht,” showing them what succeeded and what didn’t. (414).

[The spirit] 741 began to discourse on the nature of male homosexuality. “It is a union usually productive of mind values. It was engineered 2 make a more fertile bed 4 growing the flowers of music + literature,” which are “the principal lights for God Biol.” By contrast, the visual arts are a lower-order discipline, “more accessible 2 the common mind.” Painting, sculpture, and architecture are “physical celebrations,” whereas poetry, music, “+ their union” are “celebrations of the mind.” (580)