Aaron Copland: An Uncommon Man

by Paul Moor / Photos: Library of Congress (1,2) - Paul Moor (3)

Aaron Copland, born in Brooklyn in 1900 and probably the greatest composer this country has ever produced, died last December 2. One aspect of his death outraged me, all over again, about outmoded standards which still hobble all this country's information media. Few artists have ever contributed to American culture as bountifully as Copland. Every villain's homosexuality inevitably gets headlined, trumpeted; every hero's - every national treasure's - invariably gets suppressed, denied. In the case of Aaron Copland, yet once again, future scholars will have to rewrite what still passes, mendaciously, for biography.

During the last 37 of Aaron Copland's 90 years, he accumulated twenty-six honorary doctorates from American and British institutions of higher learning, including Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton; Yale awarded him its Howland Memorial Prize. His native land pilloried him politically during the vile McCarthy era, then in 1964 Lyndon Johnson personally handed him our highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man ennobled (no doubt to his sardonic amusement) the presidential inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Numerous "arrangements" of that little gem have long since brought it pop status with countless people throughout the world who have never even heard its composer's name.

The New York Times considered Copland important enough to devote almost a full page to his obituary. Customarily, of course, the private life of the person written about gets extensive mention. What may future researchers make of the fact that this country's official "newspaper of record", in the case of Aaron Copland, disposed of the great man's private life by tossing in, between commas, only three words: "a lifelong bachelor"?

Accompanying that obituary, a fine-print credit line beneath a 1943 photograph of Copland named the photographer: Victor Kraft. The index in volume I of Copland's memoirs refers to Kraft 13 times; in volume II, 32 times. Vivian Perlis, Copland's expert collaborator on those memoirs, writes at one point: "Friends explained that Victor had been Copland's intimate friend for many years." Aaron himself wrote of receiving the news of Victor's death (in 1976, while vacationing in Maine): ". . . it was hard to believe - Victor had been part of my life for so many years!" - in fact, for 44.

Aaron never came out very far, but I think one can fairly argue that in his memoirs, in his own hesitant, reticent fashion, he did in fact finally come out. Even during my thirty-two years in Europe, Aaron's path and mine crossed many times there, and during my annual trip back to this country I always visited him at his sylvan hilltop retreat in the Hudson valley outside Peekskill. During one of those visits, when he told me he had teamed up with Vivian Perlis from Yale to set down his memoirs, I said I hoped he'd produce an honest book. He giggled the famous Copland giggle and said, rather archly, "It's going to be a musical autobiography."

At the University of Texas in 1943, providence had introduced me to the Romance Languages Department's chairman Aaron Schaffer and his wife Dorothy. Schaffer and Copland had grown up together; Copland subsequently told me that to Schaffer he had first confessed his adolescent decision to become a composer. After my graduation I moved to New York, and the Schaffers did me one of the most important favors of my life by giving me an introduction to Copland. When I met him, El Salón México, Billy the Kid, and Rodeo had begun to win him a wider audience than his earlier, "granitic" works; writers already referred to him as "the Dean of American composers". The cherished and enriching friendship which ensued covered the last 47 years of his life. It also led, in turn, to ramified auxiliary friendships with a glittering list of men and women whose names have long since become permanent stones in the artistic mosaic of New York in the forties, for Aaron knew so many of them, and through him I also met many of them.

As an awed, tongue-tied, 19-year-old Bachelor of Music, I timidly presented my letter to Copland, then a youthful 43, in his loft in Manhattan's west sixties. The famous man actually resided over on Broadway at the Hotel Empire (in one room with bath, for which his rent in 1943 went up from $8.50 a month to $3.25 a week); he maintained that spacious loft as a surprisingly quiet studio, where he composed at his Steinway grand. During that introductory conversation I first heard the name Victor Kraft, whom Aaron casually referred to as "the friend I share this studio with."

As I got to know Aaron better, it quickly became clear that for him most people's sexual preferences remained secondary at best. His closest lifelong friends included (besides Schaffer) such unambiguous heterosexuals as the composer-conductor Carlos Chávez, the writer Gerald Sykes, and the director Harold Clurman; until Harold's death, he remained perhaps the most important person in Aaron's world besides Victor.

When Aaron followed up on his offhand promise to phone me, I could hardly believe my good fortune when he invited me to join him for a concert of Paul Hindemith's music up at Juilliard, with the composer conducting. When intermission came and I made no move, Aaron asked, "Wouldn't you like to go out?" "Not necessarily," I said, delighted to remain there with the great man all to myself. Not many minutes passed, though, before his fidgeting became apparent, and when we did go into the lobby I understood why: Aaron in a situation like that acted as an irresistible magnet for the crème de la crème of New York's bright young musicians of that time, especially composers, straight as well as gay.

His willingness - his eagerness - to help gifted young musicians became legendary. Oscar Levant, marveling over Aaron's generosity of spirit, once asked him in exasperation whether he'd ever felt envious of anybody on earth. Aaron had to think a while before confessing that back in Paris, in the early twenties, he'd envied George Antheil's fluency at the piano. Levant commented, in essence: Imagine having to think back that far to the last time you felt envious!

Aaron's beak-nosed, buck-toothed, somehow thoroughly endearing homeliness, his Jewish origins, his lifelong exclusive homosexuality - those factors combined into a background tailor-made to engender a seething mass of neuroses, exacerbated by social complications which came, inevitably, with fame. By some miracle, Aaron remained about as free of neurosis as anyone I've ever known.

Victor Kraft liked relatively few people; fortunately for the development of my relationship with Aaron, he did like me. As time had passed, it had become ever clearer that Victor in fact preferred women; he later married, and sired a son. Aaron did not have a reputation for going after straight young men, but Marc Blitzstein once said something to me which I found doubly bemusing in view of Marc's militancy against religion: "When Aaron arrives at the pearly gates, he's going to have a lot to account for when St. Peter asks 'What about Victor Kraft?'" One may reasonably assume that Aaron did distract Victor from the course more natural to him, but one cannot question Victor's deep, lifelong love for Aaron, his sometimes fierce protectiveness of him. Over the years, Aaron did have other primary relationships - in at least one, he even shared his house - but as long as Victor lived, he occupied a unique position in Aaron's cosmos.

The second volume of Aaron's memoirs also contains a passage I believe we can regard as another timid gesture of his in the direction of coming out. Towards the end of his long life, he wrote that the arts "offer the opportunity to do something that cannot be done anywhere else. It is the only place one can express in public the feelings ordinarily regarded as private. It is the place where a man or woman can be completely honest, where we can say whatever is in our hearts or minds, where we never need to hide from ourselves or from others."

Post-Stonewall gay Americans have had things unimaginably easier than Aaron Copland and his generation did. How much more might Copland - and so many others - have given the world if circumstances hadn't forced them to waste so much precious psychic energy, vitiated, inevitably, by that deplorable necessity to hide?

Originally published in 1990 in The Advocate.