When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Grass that he had bought at the Harvard Coop in 1911. He was fourteen and a freshman at the college. Though born in Brooklyn, he is by heritage and temperament a New Englander who refers to Hadley, Massachusetts, as “my ancestral hangout. ” He started studying piano with his mother at four and began composing at twelve, realizing as he was biking home one day that the music he heard in his head was his own. A year later he had written his first opera, Lancelot and Elaine. About then, he was also ready to admit his vocation to his parents: I suppose they were a little anxious about such a decision, and so, surreptitiously, they asked the advice of a lot of musicians including Humperdinck, who was in New York at the time. My father was going to see Puccini, but he didn't succeed. I heard, years later in Italy, that Puccini had told a story of having been asked to see the music of a young boy in America and to advise his parents whether he ought to go on with it. He paced the floor all night and decided he couldn't take the responsibility, so he called off the appointment. I don't know whether it was I or not but I assume it was, because Puccini did call off the appointment. The reports being “generally favorable, ” Sessions did go on, first with Archibald Davison and Edward Burlingame Hill at Harvard, then, because outbreak of war interfered with a plan to go t