daron aric hagen

‘Ahi, caso acerbo! Ahi, fat’empio crudele!’ he implored, face livid with passion: ‘You’ve got to feel the music! Do you have any idea what these words mean? You’ve got to make them real!’ The six of us were crammed into a tiny practice room with our junior high school choir director, Wallace Tomchek. He was terrifying and inspiring, possibly mad. We sang some more, and disappointed him again. ‘Monteverdi lives. He is right here with us. This isn’t just music. This is something more. If you can’t understand that, I don’t want to hear you!’ Frustrated, he flew out of the room, swept to his office, slammed the door, and left us in silence.

Thirty years later, sequestered in rural Virginia, and working on my new opera, Amelia, the invitation to attend a concert performance at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the version orchestrated by Respighi for La Scala in the early thirties was simply too good to pass up. As the Nymphs and Shepherds sang ‘Ahi, stele ingiuriose! Ahi, cielo avaro!’ I thought of that extraordinary teacher, his rages, and his silences.

As the soloists sang ‘Non si fidi uom mortale dib en caduco e frale…’ and the orchestra and audience listened, we sang the same words as children in my memory: ‘Let not mortal man trust in fleeting and frail happiness, for soon it flies away…’ It occured to me as I listened that it is in the hundreds of pages of manuscript paper sitting on the piano back in my studio that I put my trust.

As the second act ended, I couldn't help admiring the enormous love Respighi showed Monteverdi by limning Monteverdi’s original intentions with his own in the way composers traditionally have for learning and demonstrating their regard for each other’s work.

‘Art,’ Wally would rail to a roomful of adolescents craving acceptance, ‘is not a popularity contest!’ ‘…che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso.’ ‘… and often the precipice is close to the highest summit.’

My father brought Wally (who I had not seen for two decades) to Chicago to attend a revival there of my Shining Brow during the nineties and we visited beforehand — I snapped his portrait (left) as we had tea at the Hilton. I’ll forever treasure hugging him afterwards at the stage door, both of us weeping, and his words, ‘I am so proud of you.’ He swept away into eternal silence shortly thereafter, but I think about him every time I compose a few measures of music that remind me of Norman Dello Joio’s lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind, which he taught me in 1974, introducing me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined.

And I thought of him with profound gratitude this afternoon, as the seed of understanding and love of opera that he planted in me thirty years ago blossomed on a Blue Ridge mountaintop, a decade after his death, and exactly four hundred years after Monteverdi composed it.