Arts and Letters

Sifting through our occasional correspondence, about concerts of mutual friends, about the trials of latter-day Fontainebleau, about the death of my father whom she never knew, I fall upon these words: "In the lonely quest for notes it helps to know that one's colleagues think well of what one is doing. I am particularly grateful for your last paragraph which sets the record straight. I'm heartily sick of being on programs just because I'm a woman. The work is the only thing that counts."

I had thought it might be stylish to write this epitaph without mentioning that Louise Talma was a woman. But the fact is crucial. As of today there remain, among 45 men, only three female musicians in this Academy, where Louise, as late as 1974, became the first woman composer. Thirty years earlier she was the first woman composer to receive a Guggenheim. Yet another first came in the mid-1950s when Thornton Wilder, after turning a deaf ear to many a male petitioner, including Aaron Copland, agreed to collaborate with Louise. Her passion for that writer, equaled only by her attachment to her mother with whom she lived all her life, was requited in an opera, The Alcestiad. Premiered in Frankfurt in 1962, the work was the first by an American woman to be produced in a European opera house.

Musical composition is the one art in which, until lately, women have not shone. The reason is not mysterious. Writing notes, with its attendant chores of copying, orchestration, and the cajoling of the mostly male entrepreneurs who might bring these notes to life, simply takes more time away from child-rearing than, say, writing poems. Today there are perhaps as many women as men composers. But since in today's world—even in the elite intellectual world of this very Academy—few give a damn, it's safe to say that indifference to female composers is no more evident than to males.

American, born in France in 1906, Louise, while still a teenager, fell under the spell of our century's most persuasive pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger, a spell that for the rest of her days stamped not only her rigorous technique and emotionally controlled expression, but physical posture, wardrobe, and hair style.

The first time I saw her was 53 years ago, in the vast rehearsal room of the old City Center where offbeat concerts were held. She strode onto the platform in a no-frills black gown, didn't bow, sat quickly at the keyboard and, without missing a beat, slammed into her Toccata which brought down the house.

The last time I saw her was one year ago. We sat together to hear our pieces at a choral concert and said pleasant things to each other. Always abrasive, Louise at ninety now seemed frail and far away, while straining to keep hold. Her every allusion was musical. But her lack of small talk had always belied her crafted talk, and the nature of her music, which was witty, ironic, touching, sometimes heroic, often gorgeous, always healthy and heart-on-sleeve, as in her Terre de France on verse of Péguy, or La Corona or John Donne.

Two months later when Russell Oberlin phoned to say that Louise had left us the night before, during her sleep at her beloved Yaddo (in the very bed where I, too, and many another solitary composer, once wrestled with insomniac dreams), I was moved to consider the intervening half-century.

Claudette Colbert, who died the same day at the same age, had something in common with Louise by being the last of a breed. Louise's breed, profoundly feminine in impulse, was of the wilful musician made flesh. Women in the 1930s, no doubt to prove their equality, could write music far more aggressive than their counterparts, those men who meanwhile compose sheer languor, having nothing extra-musical to prove. Louise was a torch-carrier for Boulanger and the French tradition, she was also the real thing as an individual. (By French tradition I mean vulnerable leanness, with all tones exposed, and a way of turning the quotidian into magic.) We musicalized many of the same poets, notable Dickinson and Hopkins and Cummings and Auden; for me to say that her versions were as valid as mine, is to say everything. Maybe the biggest compliment any composer can pay another is one of affinity: you did just what I would have done, if I'd been canny enough to think of it.

Suddenly she had become our vanished sibling, but with the consolation—I think it's a consolation—that she will continue to communicate in a thousand shifting forms. It is all very well to say that Louise Talma was second to none in her ability to make a piece go. What counts, as with everyone here, is not her virtuosity, but her involuntary knack for making her works bleed and breathe. At her best, she gave off a sense of necessity, the one ingredient an artist cannot guarantee, but without which no art is art.