SEEING THROUGH

The noted composer and doyen of modern opera writes, brilliantly, of the many obstacles life has thrown in his path.

“Music, sex, and addiction have intersected or collided in my life, catalysts for confusion, beauty, and restlessness.” So writes Gordon, the author of such acclaimed operas as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and My Life With Albertine. The music runs throughout this episodic memoir as “the cause of most of my joy in life, as well as much of my unhappiness. Sometimes it’s a bed of nails, at others, a field of clouds.” It does not emerge easily, but when it does, it often does gloriously, fed by a diet that includes Neil Young and Joni Mitchell as well as Paul Hindemith, Olivier Messiaen, and Stephen Sondheim. As to the last composer, Gordon writes about a tangled relationship that began and ended with admiration but numerous missteps, including getting drunk enough in his home “to go vomit so violently [that a friend] has to peel me up off the floor of the bathroom.” Gordon’s reconciliation with Sondheim is one of many supremely touching moments in a text laced with pain: the loss of friends, family, and lovers to AIDS, addiction, and age. Regarding AIDS, Gordon’s frontline memoir is as valuable as Larry Kramer’s. He writes that as a caregiver, he had essentially been given carte blanche from the medical community to commit murder when the suffering became too great to bear: “We were all basically assigned euthanasia, and it was up to us to decide when to do it.” Gordon’s scars are many, but clearly he has recovered from those wounds, as from his addictions, well enough to produce a body of work that, though born in difficulty, is revelatory all the same.

A superb memoir that reveals the pleasures—but far more, the pains—of the creative life.