The Diabelli Variations by Beethoven are “a wretchedly difficult work,” remarks Lawrence Perelman. That’s how he starts his book, and there will be more such details.
Recounting a friendship based on music, American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character is too specialized to deliver much on its grand subtitle. Yet it’s a gem, richly insightful on two of Buckley’s deepest qualities—his love of classical music and generosity as a mentor.
Admirers will be delighted to see how brightly these burned even in his fading last decade. Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published long biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, notes these qualities, but not emphatically or in much depth. Perelman does them full justice by thoroughly describing his years of warm contact with Buckley.
The son of 1970s-era Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, Perelman felt a visceral loathing of communism, so he had that special reason for admiring him: “Everything he had done … as a great Cold Warrior.” He was also inspired by Buckley’s recent short book In Search of Anti-Semitism. Serious reasons indeed. The importance of anti-communism in sparking and defining Buckley’s long career as the American right’s great articulator cannot easily be exaggerated.
The author began earning his friendship in the mid-1990s by offering, out of the blue, to perform something on the piano for him. Excited and nervous, the college-age Manhattan School of Music student, who aimed at a career as a concert pianist, brought two pints of freshly squeezed orange juice—and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “I was taking a Russian literature class at Columbia … and wanted to emphasize my intellectual side.”
The piano at the elegant, “magisterial” maisonette was a huge old high-quality Boesendorfer, but not in tune. Firmly instructed even on this point by his tough music teacher—whose family “survived the Siege of Leningrad by boiling the flour off wallpaper”—young Perelman believed in not complaining about a piano. He played a selection from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and finished with Liszt’s “hyper-virtuosic … Transcendental Etude, which ends like an intense blizzard fading to black.” Buckley and a young guest applauded after each piece; discussions of the music and the composer followed. After it all “sped by,” Perelman “walked out of that Narnian door” onto East 73rd Street and immediately “asked myself, ‘How do I get back in?’”
Their relationship grew with more such performances, then with Buckley’s offer to provide him with much-needed grant money to research the significance of students’ exposure to classical music—and especially the longstanding lack thereof—in the New York City schools. He wished to know what people missed in their adult lives by having learned nothing about it, by never hearing it. In a letter, Perelman had “declared boldly” that he wished to do for classical music what Buckley did for conservatism, and here was a possible start on that. (He eventually became founder and CEO of Semantix Creative Group, a strategic advisory firm specializing in business strategy, management, and communications “for a wide range of artists, institutions, and companies in the performing arts.”)
He found it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the amorphous question, also stated as: “What does the lack of art cost you?” But that didn’t matter greatly to Buckley, who graciously accepted the lack of solid results. More important was that someone who knew classical music had tried, that a worthy young man had the opportunity to research the point. It’s equally significant that Buckley wanted very much to know about this: what people in general, not just potential musicians, miss from having no musical education.
Perelman also played repeatedly for National Review people, plus family members and social friends of Buckley’s, at the maisonette. The richly appointed palatial room, the outsider as star of the evening making exquisite music after so much practice, all suggest Western civilization at its finest. Perelman’s palpable delight in this setting, his refreshingly open enthusiasm for it, continued many years later.
Buckley’s zeal for classical music is especially remarkable because it was originally imposed on him by a formidable parent. “My father enjoyed the kind of music he heard as a young man living in Mexico” in his years as an oil prospector. “He knew nothing about serious music except that it was serious. … His instructions to our teachers were to expose us to: serious music.”
Buckley’s ability to respond to all those letters, his commitment to playing and hearing classical music in his busy schedule, and indeed his whole adult life, demanded a striking efficiency in his use of time.
They learned on the five pianos at Great Elm, the Buckley estate. Weekly private lessons, practice 45 minutes daily, “listening sessions of great works of music curated by Penelope Oyen, one of the children’s tutors.” As Buckley later wrote: “Miss Oyen … would weep when listening … not for every composer; but almost always for J. S. Bach.” These sessions were four times a week for an hour, using a giant, advanced phonograph player. “The absolutely decisive feature of Miss Oyen’s system was very simple: Darkness … Too much light, and we’d have managed to read … anything to avoid just … sitting there.” There was “no escaping” the music.
Perelman conveys the elder Buckley’s great success in this respect:
“For Bill and his nine siblings the sound of music … was ingrained early on, leading most of them to become classical music enthusiasts.” Bill and his sister Trish were “the most serious” in this, actually contemplating careers as musicians. “Bill even devised a new notation system … published in 1994 titled Getting Back to the Piano: Of Course You Can Play! … This quirky volume—now out of print—shows just how passionate he was about the instrument and encouraging people to learn it at any age.” He also loved playing the harpsichord.
More than half a century later, Buckley’s interest in classical music still thrived, even as his engagements with politics waned. For this reason, he let the unknown Larry Perelman into his busy life. Perelman frankly admits to dwelling, in the book, on the mere fact that Buckley made the effort to answer his letter and later ones. He dwells on it because he deems it a profound reflection of Buckley’s character:
“His first letter … in 1994 gave me so much belief in myself, in him, and in humanity. It was only an invitation to play piano … but it reverberated … [and] gave me an incredible amount of confidence.” The experience “also represented something very American.”
With sharp regret, Perelman notes that this practice, treating a would-be correspondent as something like an equal, now seems to be dying: “Today … one mostly writes into an abyss expecting no response and being shocked or heartened by a response. If there is a lesson to learn from Bill and the virtue of communication, it is to respect the time that someone took to write you. … I believe Bill felt a responsibility to answer any letter he received. That is a virtue which today is lacking in the American character … leaving the person on the other end questioning why there’s no reply. That emptiness and void, silence and selfishness, is something that begins to define a nation and its people.”
Buckley’s ability to respond to all those letters, his commitment to playing and hearing classical music in his busy schedule, and indeed his whole adult life, so quantitatively productive, demanded a striking efficiency in his use of time—a habit that easily could have spoiled his generous, aristocratically relaxed demeanor but didn’t. “Bill’s discipline was … known to all his friends and colleagues. He was up at 5 a.m. … How else could he have accomplished everything … without the gift of discipline? … He never could have built the movement and the following he had.” Buckley also retired at an earlyish hour, and a “conversation with him at a party was like a flash of lightning.”
Plausibly, Perelman speculates: “From where did this discipline spring? I believe that a major element was rooted in Bill’s quest to become as accomplished a musician as possible.” Even good amateur playing, as he shows when discussing his own extensive practice for the Buckley recitals, is hard work like the efforts of an accomplished athlete.
The Great Elm drill may also have enhanced Buckley’s “ability to speak and write melodiously, as a musician plays, sings, or composes. … Bill’s prose was musical. … Colleagues have commented on how words flowed from his fingers on a keyboard or typewriter much like musical notation flowed from Mozart’s mind, … already complete and edited into a score.”
Buckley thought classical music was among “the major achievements of our civilization,” Perelman writes, so he used his iconic television interview program to share its “importance to him and humanity”—taking “any excuse to bring up Bach, most notably with the Firing Line ‘jingle’ for many seasons … the opening of the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.”
“It is not necessary,” Buckley wrote in a column on the composer’s 300th anniversary in 1985, quoted by Perelman, “to believe in God in order to revel in Bach … though there is a need for such human modesty as Einstein expressed when he said that the universe was not explicable except by the acknowledgement of an unmoved mover.” Bach’s music “disturbs human complacency because one can’t readily understand finiteness in its presence.” The book shares a key observation by Perelman’s mother Celia after one performance: “how Bill sat behind me and reacted with amazement at each challenging bar of music. He was always the most involved member of the audience.”
Perelman notes, too, the centrality of classical music to Buckley’s social life. The fortnightly dinners at his city residence featured standard invitations to the National Review editors and included friends of Bill and his wife Pat, a pre-eminent socialite, with “guests of honor ranging from writers to politicians, musicians, and clergy.” Often they would hear classical pianists and harpsichordists. Through these performances that preceded dinner and its political discussions, “Bill aimed to convert those who weren’t musically attuned.” In the early 2000s, Perelman played there about once every six to eight months, later playing occasionally at Buckley’s home on Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut.
It was here that Buckley died, after battles with emphysema and other ailments, on the morning of February 27, 2008, at work in his adjoining study—just hours before another scheduled performance. Perelman had asked to stay overnight so he could “get some good practice in” the next day. ”I woke up from a deep sleep,” Perelman recalls. “Ugh. 6:30 a.m. Footsteps in the hallway? It must be Bill going downstairs.” As he remained briefly awake, Perelman thought of “the glass as half-full. … As difficult as it was to watch him struggle to walk and breathe every few feet, it was still our Bill who was with us.”
He means at least partly this: “In Bill’s final two years … our interactions became more frequent and his requests for performances multiplied. In a particularly … unvarnished interview with Charlie Rose in 2005 … Bill conveyed … that he was ready to die … [and] seemed dejected,” yet that Buckley was “very different from the one I saw during musical encounters. There was something about music that gave him life, or the willingness to live.”
For this reason and more, a book with so much on his engagement with music provides a valuable part of the Buckley story. The American Impresario title, however, refers to far more than Buckley’s extensive contact with the music world. It’s about his strong, lasting instinct to build relationships among people who interested him or provoked his admiration—and to assist them.
“The goal of these pages,” Perelman explains, is “to shine a light on the importance of Bill the impresario. … That role was actually where we as a society can still learn from him.” Buckley was “the great connector always bringing people together and letting the sparks take on a life of their own”—always seeking “the opportunity to create opportunities for others.”
“As we wander in this age of uncertainty,” his friend and protégé urges, “we should look to Bill as an example of what to emulate.”