Two Approaches, Each Equally Valid

There is no love lost between Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter.

Rorem contends in his provocative diaries that he can’t make heads or tails of the “crusty cerebrality” of, say, Carter’s Third String Quartet. And Carter, the master of complexity, apparently couldn’t care less about the beguiling (and often deceptive) simplicity of Rorem’s songs. At one point in his “Nantucket Diary,” Rorem grumbles that in all their meetings over more than 30 years, “[Carter has] never asked me beans about myself.”

Elsewhere, Rorem explains that if he had in the past written admiringly of Carter it was only because “I too was duped.”

Clearly, Carter, who at 91 has never seemed more puckish, and Rorem, who at 76 has finally stopped celebrating an extended sybaritic youth and become a bit testy of late, can seem poles apart musically. But they may not be quite as far apart as they think.

In the early months of 1998, both gave the world great, summing-up works. Carter’s is a three-movement symphony, “Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei,” his most massive orchestral effort. Rorem’s is an epic song cycle, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which he calls, without exaggeration, an “Art of the Song.” Each is a masterpiece and more--not just a significant achievement in an important career but an actual monument of American music, a great work of the century past. And both masterpieces have quickly become available on recording.

As for the actual music, these works might seem to have nothing at all in common. There are probably more notes in the first five minutes of Carter’s 45-minute symphony than in all of Rorem’s 90-minute song cycle. Yet look at the titles. Carter’s Latin subtitle, which comes from “Bulla” (The Bubble) by 17th century British poet Richard Crashaw, translates as “I am the prize of flowing hope.”

The poem celebrates the short life of a beautiful bubble as a metaphor for our own transitory existence. “Why did it live?” Crashaw asks. Because its death is necessary to make its life meaningful: “Indeed it was time then to have been able to die.”

Rorem takes his title from a text by an American near-contemporary of Crashaw, William Penn, with which he closes the song cycle. Faith, for Penn, is the “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” and death, then, “the Way and Condition of Life.” Rorem ends with Penn’s line “we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.”

Carter’s “Symphonia,” in a performance conducted with breathtaking grandeur by Oliver Knussen, is music of granitic certainty meant to inspire awe. Each of its three movements was written as a separate piece and then put together, and no American orchestra has yet had the courage to attempt it complete (Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a compelling version of the final movement, Allegro Scorrevole, last season).

The music is not easy to digest, especially for anyone who wants to understand the purpose of every gesture, to unravel every intricate rhythm, to get a sense of the convoluted melodic outlines. That might seem to confirm Rorem’s contention that no one, including its creator, really likes Carter’s music. To Rorem, critics and performers who prize Carter are really indulging in self-satisfaction, in exercising their own intellects and taking artificial comfort in finding order out of chaos.

Rorem is, however, mistaken in refusing to believe that one can find Carter’s music immediate, moving and seductive and can treasure the opportunity to ponder its profundities. To me, this symphony is like nature, with pleasure to be found in the immensity. Those wonderfully irregular and rugged massed sonorities have the feel of mountains. The soaring, zigzag melodies in high flutes and violins are as fascinating as birds in flight. And the fluidity of the rhythms makes the music surprising with each hearing. This is a score, whatever underlying systems are responsible for determining its notes, that takes its impetus, just as Rorem’s does, from a powerful poetic sensibility, from a close examination of the ways society and nature operate. I can’t say I understand the San Gabriels, but that doesn’t prevent me from feeling at home in them.

“Evidence of Things Not Seen” sounds nothing like “Symphonia.” The cycle contains 36 songs for four singers and piano. It divides life into beginnings, middles and ends. The texts are poems and prose by Penn, Whitman, Auden, Stephen Crane, Paul Goodman, Yeats, Colette, Langston Hughes, Frost and others. The only living poet is Mark Doty. Paul Monette and Jane Kenyon both died shortly before Rorem set their poems; Julien Green just after.

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For all his vaunted directness, Rorem has, by creating a synthesis of these many distinct voices, made something that is, in its own right, arrestingly complex. Rorem’s songs may be utterly lucid musically--especially when as captivatingly performed as they are in the recording by the New York Festival of Song, the ensemble for which they were written. Sometimes just a bare melody or chord hangs in the air. There is empty space. Rorem’s rhythms and charismatic melodies bring words to life, make the texts resonate with the perfection of a Schubert, Wolf or Gershwin. Yet, after a while, this music also gives the impression that these poets from different times and places are all present, and talking at once, at the same party--Rorem’s!

In Carter’s symphony, musics of different character interact, producing the famed entanglements. Perhaps Rorem’s music approaches the same condition, if through radically different means.

Carter and Rorem take a listener through a lifetime in these pieces. Rorem is more obvious about it; his songs tell us right off they are about the promise or sorrows of love, about life, war and death. But listening to the recording repeatedly, I find there is much hidden subtlety, much deceit. As one closely notes the fleeting mood changes, the cycle reveals a more meaningful ambiguity about the nuances of life. Listening again to “Symphonia,” I find that there is less deceit, the music seems more direct and intelligible with each rehearing. Eventually, I suspect the poetic intent of these works, their powerful reflection of a long life lived, will be what matters to audiences, not their individual musical styles. After all, people used to fight over Brahms and Wagner.

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Don’t expect Rorem and Carter to change their attitudes, especially at this late date. I can just see the “Symphonia” disc getting Rorem’s goat. It is beautifully packaged; it has all the publicity machinery and class of a prestigious German record label behind it (Rorem, the Francophile, hates all things associated with German music); and it will inevitably win all the international accolades it deserves.

Rorem’s disc, blandly packaged but with superior notes, will have a harder time getting such attention; it is the product of an essential but low-budget, nonprofit American label.

But time will level the playing field. These are works that are here to stay, and it glorifies American art that we can have both.

Mark Swed is The Times’ classical music critic.