as his finest work. For this massive composition, which lasts more than an hour-and-a-half without intermission, Mr. Rorem selected 36 disparate texts, mostly poems but also fragments from sermons, journals and autobiographies, and set them to music for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone and piano, with solo numbers interspersed with ensembles of all kinds.
“The Paris Diary” set the tone for the diaries that followed over the next four decades. They combined inspired cultural criticism and purple prose, set down in episodic, anecdotal manner and tempered with an ironic wit. He grew up in Chicago, where he was introduced to the music of Ravel and Debussy by his first piano teacher. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, he spent a year studying with Gian Carlo Menotti, at the time America’s most popular opera composer.Mr. Rorem graduated in 1946 from the Juilliard School in New York, from which he also received a master’s degree in 1948.
By the time Mr. Rorem was in his mid-40s, he was an alcoholic, and a sometimes disputatious one. His early diaries are full of self-pity and self-recrimination for his condition.
R.I.P.. almost a century.
Looks like Jon Hamm's dad.
QEPD