Composer Elliott Carter at 99
As he nears the century mark, the composer delivers new work at an astonishing pace. As always, he experiments. Each piece, he says, is 'an adventure.'
STOCKBRIDGE, MASS. — ON THE morning I visited Elliott Carter last month, he was staying in a red cottage in this quaint village in the Berkshires. Five miles up the road is Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony, which was in the midst of hosting a 10-concert, 47-work festival of Carter's demanding music. Just down the road from the cottage is the Norman Rockwell Museum.
The weather was miserable. Audiences trudged through downpours to get to Seiji Ozawa Hall. A terrifying lightning storm threatened those trying to reach the restrooms in a neighboring building during one intermission. Still, good-sized audiences turned up, and young fans and musicians swarmed around the composer as if he were a rock star.
Despite the gloom, Carter appeared ever sunny. I told him how I used to be able to follow his career either through live performances or with the help of recordings. But that was when he used to write a major piece on the average of once a year. Now works large and small come in such a torrent I struggle to keep up with him.
"I wish I could write so much more that you couldn't keep up with it at all," Carter replied with a mischievous laugh. This morning he was 99 years, 7 months and 3 weeks old, yet he wasn't exaggerating about his output. He contributed two new pieces for the Tanglewood festival, and the retrospective included more than a dozen works he had written since he turned 95. In September, a flute concerto will have its premiere at the Jerusalem Festival. In December, the Boston Symphony will unveil his third piano concerto, "Interventions," which the orchestra commissioned for its music director, James Levine, and Daniel Barenboim as soloist.
A few days later -- on Dec. 11, Carter's 100th birthday -- the Boston Symphony will give the New York premiere of "Interventions" in Carnegie Hall. Also on that program will be Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," in honor of the fact that the seminal score inspired Carter to become a composer when he first heard it as a teenager in Carnegie in the early 1920s.
The constant remark made about Carter during the Tanglewood festival was that he is unique in music history. No major composer has ever been so vital for so long. Verdi was 80 when he wrote his last opera, "Falstaff," which has always been considered a marvel of old age. Richard Strauss was 84 when he ended his career with his autumnal "Four Last Songs." Wearing a red shirt and suspenders in his cottage, Carter looked as though he might have stepped out of a Rockwell painting. But although Rockwell was born only 14 years before Carter, the painter glorified a bygone era. Carter, on the other hand, remains as unapologetic a Modernist as ever, tirelessly composing what many still think of as music of the future.
- L.A. Joins the Celebration of Elliott Carter's Music Dec 10, 1988
- A deserved recognition of Carter Dec 08, 2004
- Southwest Chamber Plays Early Carter Jan 24, 1994
