Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry

In this episode of Private Life, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor and mentor, the poetry critic Helen Vendler. The two also talk about “Inside the Music,” Aucoin’s essay from the Review’s November 6, 2025, issue about the decline of music reviews in mainstream media, as well as “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” Vendler’s review, from our May 11, 1995, issue, of o James Merill’s final book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.(1995).

Aucoin is a composer, conductor, and writer. His operatic song cycle Music for New Bodies, inspired by the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in 2024 and was staged at the Lincoln Center in the summer of 2025. He is the author of the book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (2021), and he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2018. Also in 2018 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known most for writing about contemporary poetry. Over a six-decade career she taught English and poetics at Cornell, Boston University, and Harvard, where she retired as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English. Vendler was also a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning in 1975 with an essay on William Carlos Willaims. 

Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest. And today I'm talking with composer, Matthew Aucoin. In 2021, he published the book, The Impossible Art, Adventures in Opera. And last fall brought out a provocative essay in the review about the state of music criticism called Inside the Music. And together we talk about both of these pieces as a way to dive into the possibilities of writing about music specifically. The state of criticism more broadly. We also discuss an essay by his late teacher and friend, the critic Helen Vendler, on James Merrill's final book of poetry called A Scattering of Salts, which was published in the review as Chronicles of Love and Loss in 1995. I will also note that Matthew composed the music for this podcast. The way that I wanted to start, which is a little unusual for these conversations, is to spend some time with a piece that you wrote in the November 6th, 2025 issue of the review called Inside the Music, which really lays out the state of certain conversations around music criticism or criticism for new music or classical music, or we can actually explain the slipperiness of those terms. And has nested within it a lot of ideas and possibilities for what you think criticism could be, what for you as a composer criticism should be, and so like maybe we could just start with that piece and you can tell me how you came to writing it.

Matthew Aucoin: I came to write that piece because there was a very public reshuffling or maybe something a little more destructive than reshuffle at the New York Times last summer when four arts critics were reassigned unexpectedly and somewhat unexplainably. And it's pretty rare, I think, for musicians to respond or certainly to write about the critics who write about us. But this felt like enough of a minor earthquake that I wanted to kind of weigh in and say, okay, well, this is clearly an unstable moment. There's a lot that's scary about that for arts writers. It's not easy to be an arts writer right now. It's probably even harder to be an artswriter than to be a performing musician. But if we're a little utopian, can we imagine what a really healthy music criticism landscape would look like? And I wanted to. Kind of both diagnose and imagine that in my piece.

Jarrett Earnest: There's a scene in the piece that also comes up in your wonderful book about opera, The Impossible Art, where you talk about being in high school or like a teenager and going to the library, getting stacks of CDs and scores, which truthfully, I didn't even know libraries had those, and reading, listening, and looking at them alongside of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise as being a kind of a guide into the possibilities, not just of the landscape of music and composing, but also what criticism can be, which feels like an invitation, like bring you into how to love a thing through this other person who loves it. And I wanted to know more about that early moment for you because when it comes up in this essay, it seems like it kind of captures the best of what you want from writing about music.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, it was a lucky alignment of stars for me because I was a senior in high school and basically convinced my teachers to let me do a senior project, which meant I didn't really go to school for the last quarter or third of the year and just kind of did my own thing. And that Alex Ross book, The Rest Is Noise, had just come out, had just been published. And I think it remains an extraordinary book in the way that it weaves together the catastrophes and the rebirths of the 20th century. With the music that was being made. If I remember right, the the subtitle is listening to the 20th century or something along those lines. And the kind of almost Thomas Mann, like Buddenbrook's like novelistic sweep of, you know, telling the story of music across generations and across continents felt so exciting. And it felt like this this beautiful way of embedding or revealing how music is embedded in the rest of life and the rest history. So that was a real kind of awakening. And I returned to it in this essay in part because I think we're due for more writers with that kind of ambition. We're gonna be talking in this conversation about the great poetry critic, Helen Vendler too. And I came across something that Vendlar said, which was that she sort of thought critics should stop writing about brand new poets after they turned 50. Not that they should stop covering living writers, but that they really weren't in touch with the people who were just emerging. They don't have the cultural references. They don't' have the understanding of what's happening on the ground. You know, what it is to be to be young and figuring things out in the world. And, you know, I think Alex Ross has passed that milestone. And I think we really need arts writers with that kind of encyclopedic ambition to emerge again.

Jarrett Earnest: There was a very gentle criticism that you make in the piece about Alex Ross in which he makes a comment about a young composer or whatever. A conductor, yeah. Conductor and you say, oh yeah, he's actually just a sprightly 49, you know? And the thing I was thinking about that comment is the people, the great critics whom I think we probably both admire, who we think of as really holding the space of criticism in legacy media across the city, across publications in the US, they've held those positions for decades. And as the space has gotten, as the publishing landscape has winnowed and intensified, it's really only held space for those voices. And it has not given a lot of room for new generations of people to come up underneath with the kind of authority and expertise and breadth. And the only of really learning to write like that is to write publicly. And so I think that, I don't think it's like the fault of this generation, but it is something that we're confronting right now around criticism, which is like, okay, so everybody who's a major critical voice has been that for 30 or 40 years. And now who gets to talk and like, do they know how?

Matthew Aucoin: Absolutely, I mean, the number of journalist friends I've had who have jumped ship at a certain point. One wonderful arts writer put it a certain way by saying that there's so much work, but there's no career. So people don't see a path ahead of them. And so they change paths.

Jarrett Earnest: Luckily for me, I never wanted a career, which is the only reason I'm probably still here.

Matthew Aucoin: Okay, that's why I'm a composer.

Jarrett Earnest: But if you wanted to do something else for sure, um, before we move, we move on, I want to return to that moment of you. I'm always interested in people's like formative experiences, especially about art and artists, like the thing that really like touch them, that made them understand this is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to devote my life, why I'm gonna spend my second half of my senior year reading this book and listening to scores and CDs. So what were the What were the touchstones that really meant opera, classical music to you both in composing and writing and listening that like really have stayed with you or really put you on your way?

Matthew Aucoin: I would return to that library, that scene you mentioned that you didn't know public libraries had scores. Most don't. But I grew up outside of Boston and a nearby town, Newton, has this extraordinary library. I think Newton has like more PhDs per capita than anywhere. So it makes sense that it would have this sort of public library that had what seemed to me like an endless catalog of scores, full scores of symphonic music and operas and. I knew that music as a listener and I loved it and I was trying to write music myself and playing piano, but the score seemed almost like a kind of enchanted manuscript, something that I didn't know exactly where to find it and it seemed that it held sort of the key to everything. And so when I came across, I think my mom took me there when I was nine or 10 and I remember seeing this massive shelf. It was like something out of you know, the Lord of the Rings or whatever. I felt that I'd found like the source of all magic and you know took away as many as we could carry. I think there is something special about that. I'm not sure it would be the same today because you know there are score following videos on YouTube for like every piece ever written. Like that even that slight sense of inaccessibility or mystery that you could fall in love with a piece, ask yourself how was this made. And then have a moment later of encountering the source. That was magical for me. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, but the Mozart operas were super important, especially in Le Notze di Figaro, Marriage of Figaro. Which I do think is a great piece for pre-adolescent kids, strangely, because it's kind of full of a sort of PG version of adult danger and sexuality. End. Sense of the political encroaching on domestic life. It's also very funny. There's this extraordinary character, Carabino, who is an adolescent boy, but who is sung by a mezzo-soprano, sung by grown woman. And so he has this androgynous quality. And even the name, you know, Carbino, it's like he's something angelic and yet kind of mischievous in another sphere. And Carabinio's music really connected with me very early on. And then, you know you kind of graduate. This is something that James Merrill, who we'll also be talking about today, wrote about, but you kind of, if you're into opera, you then kind of graduate into the cosmology of Wagner, which is full of a kind of thorny, overgrown symbolism that doesn't make sense when you're just starting out, but some part of your mind awakens and then that often becomes more appealing.

Jarrett Earnest: So you went to school with the knowledge and intention of being a composer, a musician, a conductor. And in that trajectory, what was it like encountering writing about music? What would be considered criticism of music, both of contemporary music, but also of historical work that like connected to you?

Matthew Aucoin: Think I discovered it pretty early. You know, I come from a family that really values reading and writing. My dad's a journalist. And, you know, I remember reading whatever, a compendium of Pauline Kael reviews of cinema. And it was always kind of part of the ecosystem of experiencing art. And though I knew that I was a composer at heart, I didn't go to a servitory. For college, and so I was an English major. So I was always kind of making music by night and writing about both literature and music by day. So it's always been kind of two parts of my mind. And it's here at the New York Review actually that I'm able to exercise that part of my mind these days.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the things that you break down in the piece, the inside music piece is deconstructing the role of the review in quotes as a form, which is that there is a kind of newspaper review or a quick turnaround review that's sort of expected that's like somebody went to see this thing and the next day they said, this was good but this is not good and her voice was wonky and I couldn't hear it through the hole or whatever. And, and as. Newspapers that are shifting as the role of arts publishing is changing. One of the things that you're at pains to try and work out is like, what is the role this kind of piece and what other kinds of pieces do we really want as a, not just as an audience, but I think you count yourself as an as also someone who's making the music. So could you talk a little bit about like, what other kinds of writing emerge as like meaningful?

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, I think there are two issues here. One is that because most musicians are not also writers, there is a really stark divide between the practitioner and the critic in a way that there's not in reviews of new poetry or novels or history, because writers are writers and many also practice criticism in their own way. And with music that's rarely the case. Case and so there's less of a conversation, I would say, between the performer and the critic and that can lead to, I think, to a certain kind of objectification of the performer. This is especially pronounced in opera, the sort of diva worship that can turn in an instant to scorn, you know, banishment, excommunication. And I think it's just healthier if artists are writing about other artists and like highlighting the work that they love. There have been periods of history where that's been more common than it is today. And though it can be a little socially uncomfortable, I think it's worth it because, you know, I think most of the music that survives, survives because musicians need to play it and composers need to steal from it. You have a feel for what's really alive if you also a practitioner. So I think the voices of those who know what they're talking about in that way should be heard. So that's one thing that I think is like missing. And another aspect is that, as you pointed out, like that kind of day after the show review of like, this singer sounded flat here or whatever. I think it... Functions as reviews of performances but it's really not a great way to review new pieces because if you're writing about a book or an album or any kind of object that you can experience at your leisure you probably experience it many times over before you dare to like really assess it and the crazy thing about new music I guess also like new plays and certain other performance forms is that people are writing about pieces having only the barest impression, and I think it leads to lazy, superficial, knee-jerk writing. And it sort of encourages the art itself to also make the best first impression, which is not the same as the most lasting impression.

Jarrett Earnest: I also think there's something about the social media landscape, which is so driven by hot takes that are like thumbs up, thumbs down, good or bad, or they're very opinion driven. And that's something that for a long time has been synonymous in people's minds with the idea of a review of criticism. I think actually, and this is something, one of the resonances I felt with your essay is that writing about art that we need now, if it is to continue as something that we you. Opinion is so beyond the realm, it's not the criteria, because like, who cares? Oh, you liked it, you didn't like it. Like, what is it? Like, I think like the decision to write in and of itself means that something has crossed a certain threshold of significance. And then it's just trying to convey or understand what that thing is in a way that you can share it with someone else.

Matthew Aucoin: Absolutely. When you're writing about a performance of a new piece, it's easy to become stretched very thin because you're reading about, you know, how did the soloist do? How did the conductor do? How did he orchestra do? All those things in addition to what is the piece? What is it trying to say? So I do think we need more avenues for engaging with the substance of the art itself.

Jarrett Earnest: This might also be something that moves us toward discussing this wonderful piece that you've pulled by Helen Vendler on James Merrill. And it gets us into a little bit of complicated territory around journalism and ethics, because I think a lot of those jobs of being a reviewer at like a newspaper, they have with them a set of standards around ethics that are, they don't really make sense for writing about art. They make sense for writing about politics or business or. You know, different things that have different stakes in the world, which is that I think, this is partly about my own experience writing about art, I think if somebody is writing about art and they are not friends with artists and they're not talking with them, they have no business writing about it because they are being held accountable by the artists themselves. Like you can disagree, but you have to live in the same world together. In order to have a conversation. And I think that that's the beautiful ending of your piece which I would love you to open up for us a little bit where you say like, this is a long lonely road that we're on as composers and musicians and like, we really want you as critics to like walk alongside us and like be a part of it. Let's be a of us together. So could you talk a little about the social dimension of that?

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, of course it's complicated, you know, because if you're friends with these people, there's also a temptation maybe to go a little easier on them or whatever, but I think that can be overcome. The most satisfying thing, I think as an artist of any kind is to feel that what you've done has been felt, has been understood, has be heard, which is not the same as being unqualifiedly loved or raved about, but understood or even interrogated. And You know, my favorite critics in whatever medium are those who kind of treat their engagement with an artist as an ongoing friendship and say there are gonna be ups and downs. I'm not gonna love everything, but I believe in you. And this is going to be a lifelong kind of engagement and a two-way street. I mean, because not all artists can explicate their works well. They can't always unfold the layers of meaning. That's a vital part of the system. If they could, they wouldn't be an artist.

Jarrett Earnest: They wouldn't make the work. Like my belief is that you can only ever be partially conscious of the implication of what you've made, not only because of your own unconscious, but also because art is a social phenomenon for others, you know, it lives in the world. And so my real belief in writing about art and criticism is that good art needs it. Like artists need it, the art needs it. And if we're not talking about the ego of the writer and the artist, but we're both subservient to the art, that puts us actually on even playing field with this thing, which is outside of one person and in dialog with thousands of years of human creation. You say something beautiful about Helen Vendler in this essay, and it's clear that she's a real role model for you as a writer and as a thinker in the world, and I want to talk to you about your relationship with her. But you quote something that she says about her friend James Merrill, a review of a book in which she says he's one of those artists that's reached the level of such value in the culture that you look forward to each new book. And it's almost beyond, beside the point of like, is thumbs up, thumbs down? Is this a good book or not? It's just like, this is a contribution to this ongoing body of work that is a part of us, that we have to deal with.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, it's that feeling of this is a voice that I need in my psyche. Like this is voice that will help me constitute my own voice. And I think we all have those people who, if we're weighing some decision or something, we might check in internally with that voice. And I what Vendler's saying there is, here is a Voice who is writing down a life. In our time that's related to my life. And it's a voice that I know I'm gonna wanna keep hearing. And one thing I found so moving, I reread that review from the New York Times book review in the early 70s, is that Vendler who has never been taken to be a kind of radical in any sense. I mean, she has kind of a slightly intimidatingly venerable reputation. She really encourages Merrill to be more frank about his sexuality and his life. In that review, because Merrill, in his first few collections, was so opaque. She, what is, Vendler says this thing about early on, you know, his depictions of love were hidden, almost mummified in swathings of secrecy, that it was this kind of symbolist world where you really had no idea who these people were, what was going on. And slowly he started to inject more of his lived experience and anecdotes and things that were a little bit more overtly erotic and she basically says like come on out like we this is this is the real stuff we need more of this and i think it actually had an impact on his writing for the rest of his career.

Jarrett Earnest: And I don't really know much about their personal relationship, but I assumed they were friends or they knew each other.

Matthew Aucoin: I don't think they were at this moment, but I think they became fairly good friends in the subsequent years, yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: So could you talk to me about you getting to know Helen Vindler and why she is important to you as a critic and as a person?

Matthew Aucoin: I took several classes with Helen Vendler at Harvard. She was an important mentor for me. And because she knew I was a musician, it was hard to even get her to talk about poetry when we spoke one-on-one because she loved music so much. She really knew her stuff. And I mean, just the taste. I remember once she said almost guiltily, you know, sometimes only Wagner will do. I know Bach reaches deeper levels of more profound depths of expression in the Saint Matthew Passion, but she was almost feeling guilty about being a Wagner not. She was a person who was completely free of bullshit, allergic to bullshit, every word counted. And she was one of the only teachers I had who held everyone to this standard of like not a single word of nonsense. I think she treated poetry and language itself as something materially real, you know, every bit as real as wood or concrete or bronze, that poems were these chemical compounds that functioned or did not function according to how their constituent elements interacted. And she had quite an objective way of kind of figuring out how... Components interacted, which I think led some people to accuse her of being cold or distant. I think that's really, couldn't be farther from the truth. I think she just, she cared about being objective about feelings. I thinks she wanted to, you know, she thought of love and passion and anger and every other feeling as kind of objective chemical realities. And she wanted to understand how they functioned in this medium of poetry. So yeah, it was really an example of this kind of. This discipline and passion. She also had the exact same antique New England accent that my grandmother did. I realized this belatedly, but, you know, saying asked rather than asked and, you know words rather than words and all these strange quirks. I

Jarrett Earnest: The detail I always remember from her writing that just seems so indicative of her whole approach is in the introduction to the book on Shakespeare's sonnets where she says, I ultimately just had to memorize all of them so that I felt like I really knew, that was the only way I could really get inside of them. I just needed to memorize them all. And this is what I learned from that process. And I thought like, well, that's one way of doing it. Like talk about the materiality of the language. How do you think the way that she talked about poetry? Language as a material related to the way that you later approached lyric in opera because that's a different way of dealing with sound and music and in some ways it seems like it might be kind of challenging moving from one way of because I think of poetry as really honoring the words themselves and then suddenly you've got words fighting with and against and within and through other sounds.

Matthew Aucoin: I mean, maybe I loved studying with Vandler so much because her mind is like the opposite of mine. I think I tend to be much more instinctive and you could say musical. So when I'm setting a text to music, these things go out the window. I'm doing something that's so physical. For me, the kind of lyrical act is no different from playing an instrument. It takes longer to write down, but it's an instinctive. I guess all I would say is that in my case it's undergirded by many years of studying poetry as poetry. So that must manifest, but I don't exactly know how it does.

Jarrett Earnest: In your wonderful book, The Impossible Art Adventures in Opera, you set out this really expansive definition of what you think of opera. And could you lay that out a little bit, because I think that it kind of sets the term slightly differently than people might expect.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, in the introduction to my book, I sort of depict the art form of opera as a kind of alternate planet where certain, you know, physical laws that obtain on our planet are reversed or in some other way troubled. For example, pain becomes pleasure. You know, it's this curious fact that the expression of various forms of agony in the is sort of the most pleasurable thing you can do in music is to sing about an agony. There's a reversal there. There's also, I think, a law of gravity, as I put it, which kind of dictates that if a subject sounds ridiculous in everyday conversation, it sounds great in opera and vice versa. Like, you know, discussing, arguing about tax policy, fine in life would not work when sung. Remembering a dream in which your grandmother appears and places an ancient curse on you, awkward in conversation, makes perfect sense in this other medium. It's an irrational Alice in Wonderland-like universe, but it has really strict laws. That's the strange thing is that just like in the universe of Alice, if you cross the caterpillar or make them... I don't Remember, Alice all that. All that well. So maybe I'm referring to the wrong character, but you know, if you make this mythical figure angry, you're kind of screwed. So it's not like anything goes, but the laws are very different.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the other reversals that you make that I think is so intelligent is that you say, so you say the opera's built of these kind of switchback reversals, almost counterintuitive reversals like that you just illustrated. And I love the one that you said is the inside and outside are switched. So all the language that we're hearing is interior subjective language of some, then you have to figure out like, okay, for whom? Is it like a character? Is it the audience member? Where is it?

Matthew Aucoin: This is one of the big open secrets of opera is that the orchestra is the collective unconscious of whoever is present. You know, this very extroverted wave of sound is an interior world. I mean, that's the first thing you have to understand if you're gonna try to write an opera.

Jarrett Earnest: Okay. The part that I really liked when I was asking you about how you deal with sound and music is the description that you give is that it's where art forms collide and transform one another, which is like, okay, that's a pretty excellent definition that can be explicated, but partly it's because opera has all these parts. So it's got instrumental music. It's got vocal performance. It's costumes. It's sets. It's language and like any one of those mediums. Is transformed by its relation to the other. And that it's actually only in that kind of whirling vortex of their mutual transformation that you get what opera is. And so it's like actually taking a really good poem and setting it to music is not actually a recipe for good opera because it's not giving the poem, the space, the language to transform into this other thing. Is that fair? Is that a fair?

Matthew Aucoin: Totally, yeah, I think there has to be a mysterious kind of incompleteness to each of the elements that if any one of them were totally okay by themselves, they shouldn't be involved in an opera. I mean, even the very greatest music in any given opera generally wouldn't work if it were just played on the piano, you know? It really depends on. The words on the dramatic situation, on the total experience.

Jarrett Earnest: The last thing I want to say about this book that you wrote, I'm not really into binaries, but you know, and we resort to them. And I think there are these kind of contrasting critical modes, and both of them have their value, whether or not I like one of them more than the other. And one of the is about expanding the territory of the medium of expanding the audience of saying, I am writing about this in a way that people new people can come and be a part of it. And they can fall in love with this thing. Maybe I don't even know the boundaries of this art form, like maybe we're something we're gonna work on together. The inverse is a kind of defensive position, which is saying I'm protecting the boundaries of this thing. I'm like preventing this art forum, this several hundred year old art forum if we are talking about something like opera from the degradation that happens when you allow different kinds of technology and people who can't look at anything without their phone and like whatever. And her voice was off and like this singer was bad and like, this costume was poorly fitted and that there's this other preservative impulse in the kind of discriminating impulse and criticism that's about saying, let's preserve the sanctity of the thing. And I don't think that they are mutually exclusive but I do think that your writing but your writing for the review and the work that you've done in this book on opera is about throwing open the doors and saying, if this is a living art form, I want as many people involved as possible. So could you give me a little more of a sense of that? Like how you, as a composer and as someone who goes to a lot of contemporary opera, what's exciting to you about bringing new voices into it?

Matthew Aucoin: Well, I'm glad you think I'm on that side of the ledger.

Jarrett Earnest: Stay there.

Matthew Aucoin: You know, I think both the creation of music and the writing of criticism is about sharing your most vital experiences. It's about like, oh my God, I had this experience. I really want you to also, I want to be able to share this. You know in the case of writing music, you're literally kind of creating an experience that can magically be transmuted to another. In the case criticism, I think the best reason to about art is because you've had a transformative experience with it and you want to kind of carve a portal for someone else to hopefully have not the same experience, but a similarly powerful one. Yeah, their own version of that. Totally. And I feel blessed that I've had so many happy or... Illuminating or ecstatic experiences with music of many, many kinds, you know, music written yesterday and music written 800 years ago. And that is what I hope to do when I write prose about it is to kind of capture in a bottle something of that experience. I mean, I speak briefly in the book about a piece called Stranger Love by the composer Dylan Mattingly. I'm hoping to write more about Dylan Matningly's music in a future essay. But, you know, this is someone who has ignored all the good advice every composer gets about, like, write your, you, know, portable 10-minute orchestra piece that can be used as an overture before a Brahms symphony or whatever. Mattingly basically spent his 20s writing one six-hour inquiry into love in operatic form. I mean, I don't even know what it is, an opera, a tone poem, or whatever it is. You know, it's a Dantean act of imagination that also kind of sounds like. An early Bruce Springsteen song heard like three boardwalks over where the pianos kind of sound out of tune and they're wafting across the evening breeze. This is like something new in music, I think, and hardly anyone has heard this piece. And even though there's some small part of my brain that thinks, hey, you know, Dylan Mattingly is a composer who's roughly your age. What are you doing throwing that spotlight over there? The stronger part of my brain and I think the wiser and more compassionate part thinks like this is music that people have to hear, I want to spread the word about it.

Jarrett Earnest: And have you been along for the ride observing its formation?

Matthew Aucoin: To an extent, yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: Because that's the kind of writing that I really value is like somebody who's in the thick of it and they've seen, it's not just like, oh, we share historical frameworks because we're the same age and we both grew up wherever and we love the Spice Girls, which might be my case probably more than his, but it's more that you watch the moves that someone is making over time and how the space between each part shifts the meaning of the piece. And so when someone can, I feel like the real future of writing about criticism and writing about art and criticism, and you talk about this in your essay, are these longer term, more observed, in-depth, almost participatory pieces where you're like, you follow someone's career for a long time. One of the things that I think is so moving about the particular essay that you chose that you wanted to talk about that Helen Vendler wrote is that it is in some ways, the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about James Merrill's work with as a scholar and also as a person as they knew each other. And it's written about his final book called A Scattering of Salts in 1995, shortly after he died, this the year that he died. And so it also has that special kind of energy in the background, the kind of pathos of saying, all right, here's the moment where someone goes from being a person in the world that we are dealing with as a as a peer, as a contemporary, and now all we have are the poems. It's a different thing. And she identifies that as saying that this is a turning point in this life. And I do think that there might be a difference between how we deal with the work of a living artist and how we deal with it differently when they're gone, and if there's almost different responsibilities or expectations. I've never heard that actually disentangled. But this piece made me think about that. Like, okay, now the thinking, all the thinking and writing I've done on James Merrill, it's the beginning of something different.

Matthew Aucoin: Because you can't pick up the phone and say, what did you mean?

Jarrett Earnest: So, could you talk to me a little bit about this piece, Chronicles of Love and Loss, and why you want to talk about it, and what it represents for you, not just about Helen Vendler as a critic, but also about your interest in James Merrill.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, so as you noted, this is a review or an appraisal of James Merrill's last collection of poems, A Scattering of Salts. And one reason I'm fascinated by Merrill is that I think he's one of the few artists whose career is kind of steadily a line going upwards. He just gets better and better and in a way goes from being quite a conservative Writer 2. I think, a fairly experimental one by the end. And he gets more adventurous as he goes. And this last book was published either just before or just after he died from complications related to AIDS, which Vendler does not note in this review, but does in later writings about the book. And the book is full of kind of premonitions of that. And in a way, I think it's his most beautiful collection. I mean, there's... Specific poems, like the one that's just called Body, that I think goes somewhere he'd never gone before as investigations of the materiality of language. And I found it very moving that Vendler doesn't become mockish in writing about it. Her friend had just died, in a way, and yet she analyzes the poems the same way she always would have. She treats it as a real professional responsibility.

Jarrett Earnest: You yourself have composed music to Merrill poems. And what is it about James Merrill as a poet and the language or the life that you really connected to?

Matthew Aucoin: It goes way back. I think the first opera I ever had performed was a really disastrous one act based on moments from his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, which for those who don't know it is a really bonkers 600 page three-part poem that at least ostensibly is largely dictated by spirits via a Ouija board. It begins somewhat modestly. With Meryl and his partner, David Jackson, kind of playing with a Ouija board, and things really get out of hand, and a whole universe is revealed to them, and there are long colloquies with dead friends and the spirits of W.H. Auden and other forebears, as well as revelations about the nature of the universe and this kind of alternate god called God B, who's like God Biology. There are angels, there are bats, there's a unicorn. It's really, for me it does go off the deep end at a certain point.

Jarrett Earnest: Mostly just because I think it stops being a good poem.

Matthew Aucoin: Exactly. It sort of becomes this nightmare garden party where it's like it becomes weirdly more frivolous the more cosmic it gets. I think there's a sort of inverse correlation there. Anyway, I tried to create an opera out of part of it. I don't think anybody in the audience knew what was going on for even one instant. We had the Ouija board in the form of a super title screen that kind of flashed these messages. That was maybe an okay idea, but everything else was not. Anyway, later in my 20s, I wrote a cycle of songs that set short Meryl poems. That worked a little bit better because I think the poems themselves are clearer and more kind of heartfelt. I'm drawn in his work to a playfulness and an alertness to. The way that language has a habit of making sense of its own accord. His love of puns almost becomes something transcendent, I think, where something that just seems like a pun ends up seeming like a meaning that is embedded in the language. For example, you know, that poem, Body, is this kind of virtuosic look at the word body. You have to kind of picture the word, body, written. Lowercase, and he kind of traces the way that the shape of the O is present in both the B and the D. So he imagines the O moving from B, standing center stage as O, passing to D, and then Y is the question that's unanswered, knocking at the stage door, as he puts it. So you know, the B and D are these kinds of bookends of birth and death, and there's this O that's the singing lyric utterance standing center stage. And the question of why this even happens is kind of irrelevant. It's not allowed on stage. And he extracts all that from a word. So that appreciation of language as material is also, for me, an appreciation of language as music. Because music is the substance of language that's not the signifying part of language. It's the sensual, not the, signifying.

Jarrett Earnest: You know, when I was reading your book on opera and even like the piece on the criticism, like the writer from the times, your collaborators, so many contemporary composers that you're talking about, one thing that's like never said or explicated is that they're gay, like overwhelmingly high percentage of gay guys, including yourself and including James Merrill. Do you attach any importance to that? Is that something that you feel? Has some bearing on the sensibility or a certain attitude toward opera or classical music, or is this just like a chance and happens to be the people that you like to write about?

Matthew Aucoin: I think this has evolved. I mean, look, there's certainly some mysterious correlation between queerness or openness to queer experience and art making. I think that's kind of hard to argue with. But I think things have changed enormously even since Meryl's time when to be a gay man involved codes and the sense of being in a subculture. I don't feel that myself today. I really think it's a different world. I do think that the queer impulse has some mysterious link to opera though, yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, you've composed music with James Merrill, but also with Walt Whitman, which you write about so beautifully. And so it's hard for me not to see that as having some kind of space of reflection or meditation on gay male sexuality.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, maybe it's not a coincidence either that those were the pieces I was writing just as I was starting out. I think about the music I've written over the past few years and I've been setting like Jory Graham and Sarah Ruhl and Raul Zurita, the Chilean writer, none of whom are, to my knowledge, queer writers. We don't know yet. But I think it was really important to me as I kind of was defining my voice as a composer. To engage with those four bears. I mean, Whitman, my God, like that's the craziest thing to do maybe is to write an opera with Whitman as the protagonist as your first step into the professional world. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Jarrett Earnest: Your essay on Whitman and opera in The Impossible Art is so fascinating and also compelling, like about Whitman's own experience of opera and writing to soldiers in the hospital during the Civil War about watching an opera. And you posit that kind of expansive, all-encompassing, multi-sensory epic voice that Whitman invented. Is in some ways informed by or a response to opera and I think that it's absolutely compelling.

Matthew Aucoin: It's super weird to consider, especially in our present moment when opera has this tinge of elitism in the bad sense that Walt Whitman, foundationally democratic poet might have kind of based the sensory world of his poems on the experience of seeing like Donizetti operas. But it seems like that was the case. That was the model for him of total esthetic experience. It was the arena rock experience for him like that was that was as close as as one could get and I think he also thought that it had the potential to be a really democratic art form just because of its of its scale and its messiness and there is that really touching letter where he's trying to describe the musical experience of it to some soldiers who've he's like oh it's it's singing but it's not like the kind of singing you hear around a fire. You have to imagine this vast space and drums and this is what the brass sounds like. It's very touching. He also wanted to share that experience.

Jarrett Earnest: Just that letter as a form of music criticism or opera criticism is a pretty good model. Okay, so to go back to this essay on, again, to the essay on James Merrill, what were the moments of it that really stick out to you? Moments of her reading and analysis that you were just like, this is it.

Matthew Aucoin: Well, to start with one thing that I think she missed, you know, it may say something about her her kind of decorousness that she offers an analysis of the title. She says that in such a phrase, a scattering of salts, there are overtones of tears, savers and fragrances, yet with a clear implication too that these astringent crystals are scattered at intervals in the diffuse and oceanic medium of life. All of that is true, but I think there's also a sexual overtone to a scattering of salts that she perhaps misses. But later in the essay, she has a really extraordinary reading of this poem called The Housefly, which oddly is not even in this book. It's from an earlier collection. But she's so acute in her understanding of the way that Merrill reimagines an encounter with a fly buzzing around him. As a kind of restaging of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and that by picturing the sun as a mist-white wafer, he also figures the scene as a kinda communion. And the way she weaves together these two myths, this kind of Psychie and the Last Supper, is really acute and also made me realize a third myth that she doesn't quite articulate, which is present, which is that Meryl, in his later years became something of a sun worshiper, I think, you know, he, there's a lot in Sandover about the sun as the single source of all life. There are references to Akhenaten and things like that. And this depiction of that sun, that mist white wafer that she and I partake of is also this kind of reaffirmation of this strange solar fixation that Merrill developed.

Jarrett Earnest: So you loved this moment of the reading of the fly, but she uses that to set up a reading of a poem in the new book. So she is sort of saying like, he's re-returning to things in his life that he's engaged with before as an older person and even doing that on the level of form within poems. And so she does this, she explicates. The housefly to set up this poem that she talks about called The Reader. And I thought that that was like a really nice way of adding like real depth and back backdrop to why this book is so the density of it, like how opening it up for a reader to say like, okay, this is like an iceberg, a poetic version of an iceberg. And like, let me give you some view of what's sitting underneath it.

Matthew Aucoin: And I think she understands and appreciates something that she may have brought into being by encouraging Merrill, you know, a couple of decades earlier to be more open about depictions of his own life that Merrill unusually, for I think any writer, becomes only more engaged with the world of his time as he gets older. So in this book, there's this extraordinary poem called Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker, which includes a kind of satirical look at what feels vividly to me like a mall in the 90s. Yeah, would you read it? I want to read this bit of it. He's describing a kind of slightly gaudy or trashy windbreaker that he's just bought. I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile Emporia catering to the collective unconscious of our time and place. This one featured crystals. Cassettes of whale song and rainforest whistles, barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins, recycled notebooks, mechanized lucite coffins for sapphire waves that crest, rake, and recede as they presumably do in nature still, which to me is like a mall in 1996. I can smell it. And there are also hints of real terror about climate change. In the book that Wendler notes in her review, that he's writing about the Ring Cycle at the Met and all of a sudden it's about Texaco and you know, Texaco has underwritten this production but Texaco is also doing exactly what the gods in the Ring cycle do which is plunder the earth and leave it barren for the rest of us. And you know he'd written about opera before but he had not connected it to you know the cycles of industry. In that way. And I just find it very touching that as he's approaching the end of his life and thinking about the fragility of the body and the planet, that it kind of pulls him out of this abstract symbolist space into the physical world.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the things I was so delighted by when you wanted to engage with this essay was the great return that's kind of organizing structure that Wendler makes in her reading has to do with his engagement with seeing the Ring Cycle. And having encountered it first as an early teenager and it having a catalyzing effect on him and then him revisiting it, not just revisiting that opera in the present, but revisiting the memory of of being formed by it decades earlier. And I just wanted to hear you talk about that particular moment within the essay and within James Merrill's work.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, I love this section of the essay. What Vandler does is she kind of guides us through what we might think Merrill's going to do and then what he actually does. She sort of says, it looks like pure nostalgia. It looks like an opera queen of a certain age saying, I'm getting to see the ring cycle again. And there are elements of that. She kind of traces the way that he remembers this music, bringing him to his senses, and that focus on that beautiful phrase, bringing one to one's senses, one's sense is being awakened for the first time. Merrill describes Wagner's music as significance itself, which is a paradox, because if something is signified, it means something else. But that's the weird thing about the music of the ring is every motif kind of stands for something in the psyche. And when you're, you know, as Merrill was, a precocious 12 or 13 year old, it is a bit like watching the Lord of the Rings at that age. You kind of have this identification as he lists the motifs. A music in whose folds the mind at 12 came to its senses. Twin, sword, forest bird, envy, redemption through love. So anyway, Van Ler kind of says, it looks like we're just gonna be resubmerged in this 12-year-old's experience. But then he kind of lets in the almost grotesquely comic aspect of realizing that he's surrounded in the theater by people he went to school with, but everybody's old. He says, you know, old as mothers, we're all sitting here. It's like the cemetery scene in our town, he says, that it's like we're ghosts already. And then that leads him into this meditation on the resonances of this story for this time and the kind of unexpected. Sense that the corporations are the gods and, you know, Erda, the spirit of the earth, disappears into a gas blue cleft in the earth. And Wendler, in her forensic way, notices all the words that he wouldn't have been able to find a place for two decades earlier. You know, too weird, high-tech, hairdresser, major funding, overweight. Listing the strange names of the donors, or Trude Fogel song, which of course means bird song, that this mingling of registers and dictions is something that took him a lifetime to achieve. That it would have been, it would've all been the sword and the forest bird if he'd written this poem when he was 25. But now there's this agility that shifts between myth and the contemporary, high and low. You know, the gods and your aged former school fellows. And she kind of unfolds that as it unfolds in the poem.

Jarrett Earnest: It makes me think of a question I have for you about repertory and how things get performed in various times. So for instance, if I wanted to, if i'm a poet and I want to return to a poem of James Merrill's, I can pick up a book anytime and it's there authentically in its true form for me. I think because I write about art, visual art, I think about. Painting's availability as being extremely important. And so if a painting lives in a church in Venice, it has its own narrative around when you get to see it and how you get see it, and then the intervals at which you encounter it are imbued with the meaning of your life as the story unfolds. But the painting always stays where it is, unless it's moved for a traveling exhibition. But every generation, we need to have access to these touchstones. So it's like. Every 10 or 15 years, you want a big show of like the major artists, so you can see it. When it comes to musical repertory, like in opera, as a young musician, as a younger composer, how do you think about that? The restaging of, the cyclical restaging of these major operas, which has been, the most famous ones are done very, very often, and then the other ones that get done at various historical intervals. How do you think of that as part of the education not just of an artist, but also as an audience member?

Matthew Aucoin: I think the first thing to say is that a great recording is a really great resource. I fell in love with this music without having ever seen a really great performance of any of it until I was in college basically. So I wouldn't undervalue recordings. They are available to us. And when it comes to live performance, I think every generation has to really ask the questions of which pieces feel worth preserving because it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to perform even a single opera. I mean, the hundreds of hours of work and the number of people involved, we shouldn't be doing this out of a dry sense of obligation. You know, it's not worth it. There was a time when Gounod's Faust was the most performed opera. In the world, I think. And now I'm not sure I know anyone who would rate that as like the most vital piece. So these things do change. Any piece that sticks around needs to have something to say that no other piece says. You know, I thing like Berg's Lulu is a piece that captures like the catastrophe of the 20th century in a way that no piece does. And I think it'll be around forever because it just captures something about that dangerous. Moment that it was born into. I think Wagner's operas also do something that no other piece does, but it's really not fixed. And again, I want to highlight how important the musicians and the singers themselves are because they know what feels worthwhile to live in because they're the ones living inside of it as nobody has to live inside a painting for it to be made viewable.

Jarrett Earnest: No, but a lot of people still have to like, take care of it. Absolutely. There's this incredible vulnerability, um, though, which is a kind of agreement by a lot people to like say this thing should be taken care of rather than like put in a basement in your piece about music criticism, you advocate for critics returning multiple times to pieces or saying that like, this Something that sometimes happens, but it doesn't necessarily acknowledge its accumulation. But this actually might be a viable model. And I really liked when you said that because most criticism is encountered on websites, that these kind of reviews can be updated sequentially and unfold differently than we were limited with in print-exclusive culture. And because we have talked kind of circled around Wagner and because there was such a recent incredible attention that was placed on the new production of Tristan and Isolde at the Met with a lot of critics going back multiple times and considering it from different vantages. I just wanna know in the year, almost use it as a case study in the years since you wrote this diagnostic piece about the possibility, you know, what you thought of that production and how the critical, a huge popularity of it and the critical reaction. We could use it to think about the state of the present around criticism.

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah, well to start with the state of at least this little corner of criticism, I wouldn't say that things have gone quite the way I would hope.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah, you hoped it would get better!

Matthew Aucoin: Yeah I hoped we'd move in the direction of more depth and more coverage and I certainly see it at major outlets like the New York Times that it seems like there's more of a focus on kind of profiles of artists or like previews as opposed to considerations of the music itself. It sort of sometimes feels like anything but the piece itself is getting coverage, which I know the incentives of our moment all push away from in-depth consideration of pieces music. So that's a little bit disheartening. That Tristan production was a real bright spot though, I think in the attention that it drew for wonderful reasons. I should say that the director Yuval Sharon is a friend of mine, but I think I can look fairly objectively. I've had a whole range of reactions to Yuval's work over the years. I happened to love this production. I think that there was a really reconciling of conflicting energies in the piece, just really kind of elegant solutions the way that the lovers were kind of in these strange ear-like orbs that floated around in the second act and that sometimes they were one and sometimes they were two and it kind of just captured the contradictions of the piece. Also acoustically, you know, I've had an opera at the Met and I know the space's acoustical challenges and one of the smartest things you can do is to move the action downstage. And to build in reflective surfaces that will bounce the sound out because the backstage space is so vast and so tall that if you don't reflect it outwards, some of that sound is gonna get sucked away from the audience. And Yuval and the set designer, S. Devlin, I think managed that really brilliantly by creating a kind of amplifying device. Maybe it didn't hit every seat, that's what I hear, but I saw the production twice and both times it felt like one of the most sonically vivid things I've ever heard in that space.

Jarrett Earnest: In this piece on James Merrill, as we've said, written right after he died, towards the end she, there is something quite beautiful about where she reflects on his death. And she says, the loss of Merrill for those of us who have been reading him for 20 or 30 years is more than the loss future poems. It is the loss the voice behind the poems, the voice that had won our confidence over many decades of our lives. It was a voice adequate to the confusions and elations of modern experience as most voices in verse are not. And comic voices are especially rare in lyric poetry. Voices that vote, one might say, for joy in spite of the emotional and physical worst that life has to offer. Highly intellectual voices are rare, too. And she goes from there. And it made me think about you wanting to do this conversation about this piece as a tribute to Helen Wendler, who died recently. And I don't think that critics necessarily get the same kind of confi- consideration or appreciation of their work as a body of work, as a voice, because what Helen Bendler really had was a voice. And it was a voice that hugely shaped contemporary poetry discourse. And I guess wanted to end by asking you to reflect on that a little bit, like what it means to you to continue talking about her writing.

Matthew Aucoin: You know, I think the example she set was she had the boldness to always say precisely what she thought a poem meant and to believe that there was kind of a right answer. She knew that she could be wrong, but she gave all of her energy to understanding what a poem was seeking to express and to kind of reflect that to her readers as lucidly as she possibly could. And it's a really rare example of, again, a faith in language as something real, not something decorative, but as a kind of living organism. And I find that example really moving. And I think her affinity with Merrill in their shared belief in the structures of language as being like the structures of living organisms meant that it was, in a way, a more natural affinity. Than her and Ashbery, who she also loved and wrote about, but also occasionally seemed befuddled by. With Merrill as with like Wallace Stevens, there was a kind of identification and depth of understanding that had a reciprocal influence on Merrill's poetry and I think enlarged it and made it stronger.

Jarrett Earnest: Beautiful. I remember hearing an interview with her near the end of her life that I thought was so wonderful. And part of what she was saying about talking about contemporary poets was she's like, I don't think most of these people know what poems are. Like, they don't see the evidence that this is a poem. You know, this is like words. And I think there are two things. One is the intelligence of her to sit to recognize as she said you that actually maybe it's not my place as a critic to write about young poets. But there is something that is her place, which is to say, like, this is what I believe poetry is, is like, with all the depth I spent my entire life thinking about this, and it has forms, it has structure, it has a particular relationship to language. And I was, when she said it, I was like, yeah, I agree with that.

Matthew Aucoin: You know, in the last email I ever received from her, she was raving about Ocean Vuong. You know she was still reading and discovering writers she loved right up until the end. And you know, there's one other thing I want to share about her which is that she could be so generous. I remember she came to a performance of mine and there were several of her students involved. It wasn't just me. But she wrote this note that's always stayed with me. Where she's, I was a senior in college at the time. And she said, you're too young to know what it feels like to be so happy for younger students or colleagues and to be overjoyed that the world is in their hands. But that's how I felt. And it was this beautiful way of telling all of us the world was in your hands and I'm happy about that.

Jarrett Earnest: You can read Matthew Aucoin's essay, Inside the Music, and others by him with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants access to our complete archive going back to 1963, all searchable on our website. You can subscribe today for a discount at nybooks.com slash PLSUB. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio was edited by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Aucoin. And it is a production of the New York Review.