A star rises in the twilight

ASK Leon Kirchner about Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom he knew as a young composer and pianist in the Los Angeles of the 1930s and ‘40s, and he gazes dramatically upward and says: “These people were from some other planet, while I just live on Earth.”

Then come the stories, flowing in a barely controlled torrent that some say resembles his music -- how Stravinsky called to compliment an early piece and invite him to dine, Stravinsky who wrote “orchestration like no other, in terms that were very enormously physical, sensual, like an animal.”

The best tales about Schoenberg, with whom Kirchner studied at UCLA, are the briefest: Kirchner visited his teacher’s house on Rockingham Avenue (“near where O.J. lived!”) and the master flipped through a score by Mahler, a visual “blaze of black notes and white stretches that showed how important it is to group notes and instruments in families, a lesson in orchestration.”

But urged to talk about the upsurge of work that finds him, at age 87, the subject of renewed interest by musicians and critics, Kirchner puts in a rest. “I prefer to listen,” he says, shakily unfolding his tall frame from a sofa, heading to a stack of audio gear. He slips in an unreleased recording of his Piano Sonata No. 2, newly completed in this casually spacious New York apartment where we sit.

Think of a dangerously stormy day with breaks of gray clarity. It’s Rachmaninoff meets Bartok, or Scriabin meets Berg. Or forget others and imagine an often rhapsodic yet unsentimental modernism with “an intense interweaving of material and a lot of very quick changes of character in which each moment is so deeply considered that there are times when it is the same idea, but in each case it is happening differently,” as Jeremy Denk, the young pianist whose performance we’re hearing, says of playing this piece.

When it ends, the composer looks up and states, with a sense of hard-won factuality: “I’m writing better music than I ever have before.”

The challenges of old age -- his ailing heart, sleepless nights, a bruising fall recently -- have been joined by muses bearing gifts. The five or six major pieces Kirchner has written with his sometimes manic perfectionism -- once or twice blowing commission deadlines, badgered by musical friends to finish -- could well add up to a renewed claim for his place as a leading American composer.

It’s a Kirchner season in New York and elsewhere. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has started a selective overview of Kirchner’s career, culminating in a program of all four string quartets on March 7, when the Orion String Quartet will give the new one its New York premiere. His Piano Sonata No. 3 will have its world premiere in Cambridge, Mass., performed by pianist Joel Fan, Nov. 11, and the new CD of his piano works is due out from Albany Records.

At the same time, Kirchner has found promising younger musicians and established older ones (he wrote a cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, who talks about his former Harvard professor’s “rabidly fertile imagination” and his “immense impact on my life”) who are making his music a cause. All this for a man who, though he never lacked for success -- he won a Pulitzer in 1967, taught at Harvard from 1961 to 1989, played a key role at the important Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont -- has never quite made the composers’ all-star team with other old guys like Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, or younger ones like John Adams (one of his Harvard students) and Philip Glass.

There’s even a love story here. Starting in 2001, three years after both their spouses died, Kirchner began sharing an apartment with Sarah Wardwell, member of a prominent New York family. Sally, as she’s known to Ma, flutist Paula Robison and others in Kirchner’s circle, is a retired teacher of classical languages and, at 70, a younger woman. Many who know them credit their mutual affection and her support for his regathering of forces.

Late winter looks a lot like spring on Planet Kirchner.

A perfectionist

“COMPLEXITY” is a favorite Kirchner word, whether he talks about the music of a fellow composer or the state of his life these days. He tires easily, speaking with a strained softness of wishing he could go for a walk through the autumnal lushness of Central Park, though his health prevents it. “I’m very depressed,” he says at one point, but within seconds he visibly pulls his mood up to a level of sheer pleasure at the chance to share a story or insight about writing, playing and -- he is almost prouder of this than anything -- a lifetime of teaching of music.

Born in Brooklyn in 1919, Kirchner moved to Los Angeles with his Russian-Jewish parents at the age of 9 because his father, a dressmaker who had a shop at 9th and Los Angeles streets, had asthma. A self-described “impulsive ... emotional” young man, he took in the energies of a city charged with the presence of Hitler refugees who brought European influences to life.

Influenced by Paul Hindemith in the early years, and by Ernest Bloch, with whom he studied at Berkeley, he went on to teach at USC, Mills College and then Harvard for 28 years. “It was more than any one technical thing he taught,” recalls Morton Subotnick, the Los Angeles-born pioneer of electronic music who studied with him at USC and Mills. “He made you feel engaged. We’d spend hours over something I was writing, and he’d say, ‘It seems like maybe there’s another direction this note can go....’ ”

A major Kirchner theme is how one must intelligently grasp what the past offers and make it one’s own as fully as possible. “One of the intricate aspects of being a contemporary composer,” he says, “is being involved with the past and taking the fundamental materials of composers from the music of the past and using them in a way that they have never been used before.”

Kirchner says he absorbed, but didn’t conform to, Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique for reordering Western harmony. “He never called it a system, but always a technique,” he says. “He said one can still write a masterpiece in the key of C!”

Over the years, he watched styles come and go -- Minimalism and Neo-Romanticism -- but stuck to his own path of using everything he learned on his terms. “I had to do that and face whatever I had to face, criticism for not being another sardine in a tin can,” he says. “People are followers, and they get involved with somebody who has an idea, and they become dead sardines in a sardine can.”

His output has been varied, and quite prolific. Kirchner’s publisher, Schirmer, lists a total of 41 works, including four for orchestra and eight for solo keyboard. These days, in the room at the end of a long hall visible from where we sit, is a Yamaha electric keyboard on which he’s writing orchestral pieces for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a violin concerto for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The concerto, which was to premiere in 2002, ended up becoming a piece for violin and piano, performed by Los Angeles violinist Ida Levin and Denk, and traces of it also appeared in the Piano Sonata No. 2.

Such reconfigurations are not unusual for composers, but Kirchner is known for his perfectionist revisions. “I’ve had to literally take pages away from him while he was working to get him to stop changing things,” says Robison, describing her work with him on a flute concerto he’s nearly completed.

Generally, the music has been well-received, but he’s still haunted by the one big exception: his opera, “Lily,” based on Saul Bellow’s novel “Henderson the Rain King.”

Working on it for more than a decade, he became virtually obsessed with the story of Eugene Henderson, a restless, wealthy antihero who searches for himself on a phantasmagoric trip to Africa. A large black African mask, its mouth drawn tight in a ritual grimace of suffering, or perhaps stretched wide in ecstasy, presides over Kirchner’s living room, and his friends identify him, and even his agitated music, with the unsettledness of Henderson, who keeps repeating, “I want, I want.”

The premiere of “Lily,” a big event in the New York season of 1977, was a critical disaster. “A brilliant failure,” Kirchner recalls wanly, recounting one review. The pain of it lingers. “I wish they’d have dropped the second part,” he says.

He yields occasionally to a general lament of self-chastisement -- “I didn’t work hard enough.... I was lazy.” And he throws up his hands with exasperation at the subject of how he stands among his peers. “Your reputation is always going up and down and you never know why,” he says.

Adams has said that Kirchner has never become unfashionable because he’s never tried to be in fashion. But Allen Shawn, a composer who studied with Kirchner at Harvard and wrote a respected biographical work on Schoenberg, notes that “in spite of the acclaim he’s gotten over the years, Kirchner is strangely marginalized as an artist.

“Most people I run into don’t know his music,” Shawn says. “He’s not, if you ask people, ‘Who are the major living composers who are alive?,’ on that list. People would say, ‘John Adams, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, William Bolcom.’ There’s a slew of people, but I don’t think they’d mention him. The reason, I think, is that there is something in his temperament and in his vision of what great music is that has made him not exactly a team player.”

Kirchner, though, seems unperturbed at the picture Shawn evokes: “I have nothing to prove. I write what I write. I accept my limitations and keep on writing.”

The public response to his work has been more openly excited than his own. On a cold night in March 2005, Jonathan Biss, the 26-year-old piano star, played Kirchner’s Piano Sonata No. 2, and at the end of the concert he motioned to the audience in a ritual gesture of recognition to the composer. An unusual warmth seemed to pass between them. Reviewing the performance, Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote: “Mr. Kirchner is well into his 80s and the piece here only two years old, but its languid, limpid periods bear the seeds of an enormous eruptive energy.”

A summer premiere of a Kirchner string quartet in La Jolla received a similarly warm notice from Mark Swed, The Times’ music critic, who described it as “tightly condensed but with flashes of dramatic intensity and sudden, surprising, fleeting glimpses of stunning radiance.”

The happy couple

SO what’s brought Kirchner so fully to life? Joseph Horowitz, a former music critic of the New York Times and the author of a recent book on classical music in America, credits this new phase to “a confluence of retirement from teaching, changing times and ripened years.” He says the “late Kirchner” period actually dates, stylistically, to the 1980s -- but also notes the nurturing Wardwell factor.

That would be Sally Wardwell. The apartment he shares is hers. The old Steinway grand that Kirchner’s father struggled to buy his son rests nearby as she pauses to hand Kirchner a pill and talk about their relationship.

“I like people who have thoughts that I would never have,” she says.

“She actually loves music and is talented at selecting major points about music,” he says, looking up at her fondly. “She has this elevated way of talking that certain women from New England have -- missing consonants, you know, these women who are very high up in the blue book. I’ve never consorted with a woman like this before.”

“And I’ve never consorted with someone like you before,” she retorts.

“It’s not just sexual or romantic attraction,” he says, still gazing up at her. “It’s talking.”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s talking.”

At one point, he pleads with her: “Oh, tell me, please, I just can’t remember. That philosopher-musician who so influenced Thomas Mann, so completely influenced him and ... oh ...”

She looks at him a moment, then says, “Adrian Leverkuhn,” the name of Mann’s character in “Doctor Faustus,” whom Mann based on Schoenberg. (It was Leverkuhn’s dialogue with the devil, in which the devil tells the composer he can no longer write in traditional harmony, that Kirchner says inspired his new string quartet: “I decided to do everything the devil says you can’t do.”)

Though she is not a musician (“I’m an audience”), the Kirchner-Wardwell relationship emerged from social and artistic connections that music wove for Kirchner through many decades of playing, teaching, conducting and composing and for which the Wardwell-Kirchner apartment is now the hub.

These days, Biss and Denk show up here to cook for them, sometimes to go over new Kirchner pieces they will perform. Robison spent four days in the apartment “literally standing over him” to get him to complete a final version of a flute concerto written for her.

There’s a sense of urgency in Kirchner, whose worries that he faces serious heart surgery are never far from his mind. He increasingly believes it’s inevitable, and he’s clearly afraid. Still, he says he plans to finish the violin concerto for the L.A. Philharmonic and other pieces.

Then, he announces he’s thinking about “Lily” again.

He describes an envisioned scene in which an African king teaches Henderson to roar like a lion.

“I’ve got it all worked out,” he says. “Everyone, as they sing, will be visible only from the chest up. And then the actor playing Henderson will go off stage and come back pulling a rope.”

Kirchner stands, reaching out his long fingers.

“On the end is a real lion,” he says. He’s laughing confidently, as if in the face of such a ferocious idea, nothing in the world could go wrong.