Sunday, October 23, 2022

Happy birthday …

… The Remarkable Diaries of Composer Ned Rorem (Who Celebrates His 99th Birthday Today). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The end result is a literary achievement unmatched by any other composer. In aggregate, the Rorem diaries are the most remarkable firsthand documentation we have of a musical life—surpassing those of Charles Burney, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, or whomever else you care to cite. Not even Mozart’s voluminous letters can match the scope and depth of Rorem’s six decades of journaling. He operates on a larger sphere, up their with Pepys and Boswell and others at the pinnacle of the diary as a literary genre.

I met Ned once. He seemed to me a very nice person. 

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