Obituary, Ned Rorem (1923-2022)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and writer Ned Rorem has died aged 99.

Born in Indiana and brought up by Quaker parents (a system of values that would remain influential on him and a source of inspiration throughout his life), Rorem’s obvious early talent for music saw him study at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and New York’s Juilliard School.

From his twenties onward, he devoted himself particularly to art songs (with an impressive final haul in excess of five hundred) and was consistently praised for his innate grasp of the genre – in particular, as The Washington Post’s Tim Page puts it, “a clear understanding of what the human voice could and could not do”. A pianist himself, his piano parts are generally independent, equal partners with the voice rather than mere accompaniments. His appetite for texts to set ranged far and wide, embracing Plato, Renaissance French writers from the Pléiade group, Tennyson, Plath and many more.

As well as for his music, Rorem was known – perhaps notorious – for his extensive and deeply candid writings about his own life and relationships. His 1966 Paris Diary was open and frank about Rorem’s gay polyamorous lifestyle and, predictably in such a conservative age, drew widespread disapproval; nevertheless, numerous further diaries in a similar vein followed over the years. Rorem was always emphatic that he was a composer first (“not a writer who also composes”), but the public appeal of his acerbically witty, and often explicit, biographical writing remained significant.

Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau perform Rorem’s Early in the morning, a setting of a poem by Robert Hillyer.

Rorem also wrote extensively on music and music theory, with six anthologies from 1967 to 1996 drawing together his articles and essays and including his negative opinions on, among others, Beethoven and Berlioz. The composition that won him the Pulitzer Prize – 1976’s Air Music, a suite of variations for orchestra – seems curiously unrepresentative of Rorem’s song-dominated artistry; indeed, the work he himself saw as his finest was the sprawling ninety-minute song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen from 1998. He was, however, far from a stranger to other genres, as a number of one-act and full-length operas, three symphonies, numerous concertos, dozens of chamber works, and choral settings both secular and sacred attest.

For several decades Rorem struggled with an alcohol addiction that he eventually mastered in the early 1970s, and about which he later spoke with his characteristic frankness, recounting how he eventually told himself “anyone can get drunk, but only I can write my music.” His own simple explanation for why he composed that music – and perhaps also why his style tended towards the conservative, in an era of deliberately iconoclastic modernism – remains as powerfully eloquent as any wordy artistic manifesto: “Because I want to hear it.”

Rorem’s life partner, the organist James Roland Holmes, died in 1999; Rorem’s death was confirmed by his niece Mary Marshall.

Ned Rorem - a selected discography