by Daron Hagen

As we — on this lovely September night in 1992 — in this beautiful baronial dining room, in this lovely mansion, all know, in 1900, the financier Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, herself a poet, created Yaddo as the artist's retreat we know today. The story I'm about to tell you is true; it begins as a ghost story and ends as a love letter.

Somewhere near the end of my first visit to Yaddo nearly a decade ago, I was relaxing in a chair near the main hall fireplace, reading Jean Christophe — as I was convinced then and am now every composer of a certain age should — at around eleven-thirty in the evening, when something extraordinary happened. Everyone here tonight has heard stories about the benevolent ghosts haunting this place — from the Puritanical one who keeps watch in the bedroom on the second floor opposite the stairs and opens the windows when something naughty is happening in the room, to the Testy one who slams the closet door in Katrina's bedroom when it's current occupant spends a little too much time relaxing on the chaise longe and not enough time writing. I'm still not convinced that these ghosts aren't simply manifestations of Yaddo guests' over-active imaginations; yet, is it possible to have an over-active imagination at Yaddo? Nevertheless, I feel compelled to share with you what happened that evening.

I didn't then (and I still don't) believe in ghosts. But I do believe in one particular spirit; for that evening, with the water gurgling away in the little fountain beside the front door, my Romaine Rolland slipping from my fingers, I saw what can only have been some sort of manifestation of the shade of Katrina Trask.

My friend Doug Unger, who was then working on a roman a clef about his time as a student in South Africa, was upstairs reading The New Yorker. Across the room from him sat a third person, whose name escapes me. That reassuring quietude particular to this house surrounded us. I didn't know at the time that Doug was up there; one never feels alone per se in this house. I'm a practical fellow from the Midwest; I was neither fantasizing nor in my cups. Inspired by my time here, I had just finished my Walt Whitman Requiem in three creatively white-hot weeks. I was celebrating as many perhaps overly-earnest-minded young composers do — by reading excessively. That is to say, perhaps all of this happened because my eyes were tired.

In the same way that one might glimpse a child streaking out of a suburban front yard and into the street — peripherally, almost intuitively — while focusing attention elsewhere, I perceived a woman descending the mansion's main staircase in a flowing white dress. It was the very same dress with a pretty ribbon that Katrina Trask wears in the life-sized painting hanging outside this dining room. Her right hand was slightly raised, as though holding a candle, a telegram, a poem, or a letter — maybe it was a shopping list, who can say? Furthermore, I can't say who it was but that it felt as though it could only have been Katrina Trask.

At the instant that I noticed the apparition, I heard a cry from the second floor. I leapt to the foot of the stairs to see what was the matter. Looking up, I saw Doug. He looked stunned. 'What did you see?' I hissed. 'A woman in a white dress,' he said. From behind him in the darkness, the third person — who couldn't possibly have seen the staircase — said softly, 'It was Katrina.' We coughed, looked at our feet, chuckled uncomfortably. I never felt frightened exactly. I felt more like saying, 'Quick, clean up the house, Mom's pulling in the driveway!'

The next morning, everyone at breakfast had a story: a limb had fallen onto the front stoop of Pine Garde (there had been no wind); the front door of West House had been discovered swinging wildly (again, no wind); someone had heard whistling near the Tower, stepped out to find out who it was, and found only darkness. It had been some night.

I told Doug Martin and Nancy Brett, the resident Special Assistants to the President at the time. Nancy's reaction was typically gentle and appreciative: 'I'm sure that it happened and that you fellows were very lucky to have seen Katrina.'

Heavens! Since then, I have returned to Yaddo several times. The incident has been repeated to me by other people over dinner as having happened to them, or to someone they know. As for myself, I have stopped telling the story because it has, like my relationship to Yaddo itself, become almost too precious to describe except under very special circumstances. I'm sharing it with you now, because it embodies my relationship to this place. I have quite literally grown up here. From my first visit as a struggling bachelor graduate student intimidated by my fellow guests — even as I trotted out my semi-baked opinions at table — to my most recent, a month ago, when my heart was for the first time coming to grips with tearing myself away from a busy musical career and a spouse to be here, Yaddo has been my home, no matter where I resided.

Home. A place where The New York Times will always be found on the table in the linoleum room, reassuringly mussed from having perhaps just been rifled by a writer looking for a review of his new book. The lunch boxes will always be neatly arranged. There will always be a discrete note or two on the mail table waiting for guests. The complete works of Balzac (with volume thirteen puzzlingly absent) will still be found in the West House parlour, the complete Twain in the drinks room, the bookmarks in them to be found exactly where you left them years ago.

Yaddo is a place where a sane and humble person can see ghosts and believe in them. It's a place where we can be transformed by our talent and the magic of being a guest here into heightened creatures — we're made better than we were. We are borne aloft — no matter who we are or who we think we are — by the conviction that Art matters. The Trask's support of such idealism in the face of the Real World is a profound testament of faith in Mankind's ability to better itself.

Yaddo is a safe haven for souls who are painfully familiar with the deafening Solitude that is an intrinsic part of our corporeal existence. It is a place of Genuine Goodness — imagine that! — in which artists create things of beauty and usefulness which attempt to bridge the gap between people. Artists who are invited to Yaddo aren't 'colonists,' they are guests — guests not of the Corporation, but of the Trasks themselves, who wrote: 'we desire to found here a permanent Home to which shall come from time to time ... authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and other artists both men and women, few in number but chosen for their creative gifts and besides and not less for the power and the will and the purpose to make these gifts useful to the world ... It is such as these whom we would have enjoy the hospitality of Yaddo, their sole qualification being that they have done, are doing, or give promise of doing good and earnest work.'

Yaddo is a place where the fierce discipline of having to fill not only the empty page but the wastebasket reigns. It is a link to the artistic continuum not only for the highly-successful artist, but for newcomers and those who have been living hand-to-mouth because they were compelled to create something that was artistically nourishing but not necessarily 'commercially viable' or trendy. Yaddo is a place of rebirth for the heartsick artist who wonders whether it is worth going on. Yaddo helps artists take creative risks: it is a safe haven from whence life's most terrifying conundrums may be addressed Fashions change, movements flourish and fail, one decade your work is 'hip' and the next it's deemed hopelessly 'uncool.' Yaddo abides.

In eight years, Yaddo shall have existed as a working place for artists for a hundred years. It will thrive because people are willing to support it, willing to believe in the Trask's love letter to the future, their vision. It was a vision, not an apparition. It came true. And it continues to come true every time an artist kicks the road's dust from his shoes, mounts the mansion stairs for the first time, can't believe his good fortune as he's led first to his bedroom, then to his studio, then brought to dinner in this very room. So many things are created here: symphonies and operas, ballets and performance art pieces, novels and poems, canvases and statuary, even humble ghost stories and love letters.