A black and white photograph of a person with a handwritten note beside it on a page.

▪ Author James Baldwin inscribed this note, signed “Jimmy B.,” to Ned Rorem in 1958. Music Division

A man in a dark outfit and knitted scarf standing in a doorway, with framed drawings on the adjacent wall.

▪ Composer and diarist Ned Rorem, photographed by Nancy Lee Katz in 1992. Prints and Photographs Division

Brilliant, Beautiful and Wild

Composer chronicled his life in artistic, indiscreet diaries and scrapbooks.

By Neely Tucker

Ned Rorem could never stop thinking. Or writing, composing or socializing.

He kept datebooks, scrapbooks and diaries, the last of which went for thousands of pages over decades. He composed over 500 art songs, three symphonies, four piano concertos, over half a dozen operas and on and on. These fill volumes and folders and boxes in the Library’s Music Division, a dizzying testament to one of the great musical lives of the American 20th century.

A bon vivant in Paris and New York for more than half a century, Rorem seemed to know all the high-brow artistic set — Pablo Picasso, Balthus, James Baldwin, Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward. Openly gay when that was a shocking rarity, his published diaries were wildly indiscreet, creating a sensation when they were published six decades ago.

“The mediocrity of this ship’s passengers,” he tartly noted on one trans-Atlantic voyage in 1955, “is beyond belief.”

He won a Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, music commissions from famous foundations and ASCAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award and served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Time magazine once declared him “the world’s best composer of art songs.” In 2004, the French government awarded him the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for his “significant contribution to the French cultural inheritance.” His works are still widely performed and recorded.

He was born in Indiana in 1923, got his master’s degree at The Juilliard School in New York and was soon off to Paris, the talented boy wonder. He lived there for nearly a decade.

Here he is in that city, writing in his diary on Halloween of 1956, with ominous strains of the Cold War beating down on Europe: “Winter is terribly here. And another war seems well on its way, war like a searchlight wail of mammoths straining the sky. All around in Africa and Hungary is this positive and bleeding unrest. I’m scared.”

A scrapbook page from 1948 featuring typed and handwritten notes, black-and-white photographs, and a colorful abstract drawing on the right. The central section lists cast and crew details for a theatrical production of Hippolytus, with annotations and names such as Virgil Thomson and Paul Bowles noted alongside candid images from Fez, Tangier, and Morocco.

▪ Left: Pages from a Rorem scrapbook chronicle both his time in Morocco in the late 1940s and early ’50s as well as his work on a production of “Hippolytus.” Music Division Right: Artist Jacques Dupont drew this colorful sketch in a Rorem scrapbook and inscribed it, “Pour Ned.” Music Division

Here’s a page from one of his scrapbooks, in which he was forever getting guests to write, scrawl and sketch. It’s a casual snapshot of Baldwin, the famed novelist and activist, who scribbled on July 8, 1958: “for Ned — In the hope that we will work together, soon, & long.” He signed it, “Jimmy B.”

Rorem, who died at age 99 in 2022, had been slowly donating his papers to the Library over the years. They are dazzling, in-depth and insightful. The scrapbooks are both portfolio-sized and in small notebooks, all of them filled with drawings, signatures, witty one-liners from famous friends.

“The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem,” adapted from his journals from 1951-55, wrote the New York Times in its obituary of the man, “mentioned hundreds of the famous and the obscure while serving up a pastiche of explicit reports on his sex life, pieces of music criticism and charming anecdotes.”

“Name-dropping is one thing,” the article said. “With the gossipy Mr. Rorem, it could reach the level of carpet-bombing.”

Late in life, he paused to consider it all, this relentless minute cataloguing, this constant self-examination. In “Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999,” he wrote on Jan. 15, 1996: “Why keep a journal? To stop time. To make a point about the pointlessness of it all. To have company. To be remembered. For there is much to be recalled, with no one to do the recalling.”

—Neely Tucker is a writer-editor in the Office of Communications.

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