Beginner’s Luck is a musical snapshot of a precarious moment of arrival: those early years of adulthood with all of their new responsibilities, which might include the beginning of a career or the start of a new family. It is precisely the stage of life where our cast now finds itself. Since a large part of my work is dedicated to helping “emerging artists” actually emerge, I am in daily contact with their sense of discovery, their fears, their enthusiasms and their disappointments. Today’s playlist is somewhat autobiographical too; co-director Bénédicte Jourdois and I both remember grappling with the same questions as my students and younger colleagues. The true theme of the evening is growing up, and I am happy—and somewhat chastened—to report that that process never seems to end.

The program begins with “A Journey,” an evocation of childhood by Andrew Glaze set to music by Ned Rorem. Ned once told me, when discussing the music of Virgil Thomson, “The one thing you cannot fake is naïveté.” Anyone who has read Ned’s self-revealing memoirs knows that he is far from naïve. Yet his simple, lilting vocal line and Crayola-colored piano writing evoke childhood in a remarkably believable way. Ned must have liked this piece, since he later revisited it in order to make an orchestral version.

To evoke the springtime of life, we chose three songs written by composers in the earliest days of their careers. Gabriel Fauré’s “Mai” comes from his Opus 1; he wrote it when he was a lad of seventeen, which is how old I was when I first encountered this lovely song. Fauré went on to write music of greater emotional weight and harmonic density, but his early romances have a special glow, a purity of spirit that has never ceased to touch me. “Wer hat das erste Lied erdacht?” is the handiwork of the thirteen- year-old Ferruccio Busoni. At that age, his teen-age hormonal sap was probably starting to rise, and he was already able to express that new ardor with the musical sophistication of an adult. After all, Busoni had been a child prodigy who made his debut as a pianist and composer in Vienna six years earlier, at age seven. Busoni’s father was Italian; his mother was born in Italy but had German roots. Both of his parents seem to inhabit this song, which blends the open-heartedness of Italian bel canto with the complexity and detail of a German mini-tone poem.

Franz Schubert is the old man of this group—he was all of nineteen when he wrote “Geheimnis,” set to a poem by his roommate and intimate friend, Johann Mayrhofer. The latter dedicated this poem to Schubert, a love-ode to the composer whose preternatural gift for melody seemed God-given and unfathomable. Schubert packs a surprising number of musical ideas into just three pages, as if showering his lover with artistic invention. At the end he sneaks the song from the key of G to end it in the key of D—after embedding subtle quotes from Haydn’s Creation and Mozart’s final piano concerto.

I got the idea of creating an ad hoc song cycle for the women about first love, an experience that seems to generate the same turmoil in everyone across the gender spectrum. While there were plenty of nineteenth century art songs that told tales of the “ruined maiden,” this was a drama that seemed somewhat antiquated for the current era. Luckily, German Lieder also produced a treasure trove of love songs with a more modern narrative: a young woman who begins with traditional fantasies about meeting Mr. Right and having a traditional wedding (in Schumann’s beguiling “Der Nussbaum”), but who soon discovers that life can unexpectedly offer more tempting relationships with far more complex outcomes (in songs by Grieg, Wolf, and Berg). It’s not an accident that these four songs are being sung in chronological order; they tell not only of one woman’s journey, but the historical journey of women from the passiveness of Schumann’s day (1840) to the more sexually liberated atmosphere of Berg’s (1908), progressing from sweet romantic fantasy to sensual abandon. Each song also represents a critical moment in the composers’ lives: Grieg wrote “Die verschwiegene Nachtigall” just as he was emerging from an estrangement from his wife, caused (according to some) by the soprano for whom he wrote this song; Wolf ‘s “Begegnung” comes from his Möricke Lieder, the work that launched his career; and Berg’s “Die Nachtigall“ was one of only seven of his many early Romantic songs that he allowed to be published, before his studies with Arnold Schoenberg set him on the path of atonality.

In an age where we are witnessing a shocking spike in toxic masculinity, we wanted to make a pitch for a healthy approach to manhood. Gaining experience and confidence in the face of self-doubt and the increasing demands of the world is a rite of passage whose confusions I remember well, and there are some beautiful songs on the subject. For an earthy, athletic approach to male bonding, we turn to Jeffrey Stock’s Bernstein-esque setting of Walt Whitman’s “We Two Boys.” Stock composed it in 1996 for a NYFOS program in which we asked ten composers to write an ensemble piece, and then paired the new songs with Brahms’s Liebeslieder-Waltzer. I am proud to say that NYFOS helped to launch Jeff’s career: in 1993 he presented us with a short song cycle for four voices called The Voice of Temperance, which caught the fancy first of John Guare and then George Wolfe (then the director of the Public Theater). One thing led to another, and in 1997 Jeff made his Broadway debut with Triumph of Love, a musical that has now received over 100 productions worldwide.

If “We Two Boys” captures the confident joy of a young man in the prime of life, “In the Clear” revisits him a few years later as he comes face to face with his vulnerability. The song comes from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 musical No For an Answer. Like many of Blitzstein’s projects, this musical suffered from bad timing caused by a slew of delays caused by the composer’s own intransigence, as well as his obsessive need to rewrite and edit. By the time the show opened, four years after Blitzstein began it, it enjoyed a two-performance run—a pair of Sundays in 1941. While Blitzstein was finally happy with his new musical, its subject matter—the fate of non-unionized workers in the off-season—was no longer a hot-button issue as World War II raged. Still, some of the songs catch Blitzstein at the top of his game, as we discovered when NYFOS did a concert reading of No For an Answer in 2019. Among the gems is “In the Clear,” in which Blitzstein describes a dilemma about which few have written: the fate of creative people whose promising early work brought them to the public eye, but who lose their way and are unable to progress when they are no longer so dewy-eyed. This piece describes Blitzstein’s own impasse perfectly—an impasse that many other artists face during their careers.

Equally rare are honest songs about a young man’s sexual awakening. “I Knew a Woman,” by William Bolcom and Theodore Roethke, describes a summer love affair between an inexperienced guy in his early 20s and a woman who initiates him into the ways of love—a version of “How to Handle a Woman” with the heat turned up to broil. Roethke had been Bolcom’s professor at the University of Washington during the 1950s, and the composer maintained a deep connection to his mentor. “I Knew a Woman” exhibits the poet’s magisterial command of formal verse. The poem, composed of seven-line stanzas, is both erotically frank and dazzlingly witty, with a devilish double-entendre in practically every line. Bolcom sets Roethke’s “blue” text, appropriately enough, as a blues, matching the poet’s technical mastery with sweet, swinging rhythms leading to a wild climax, followed by the loveliest of afterglows.

No matter what today’s politicians tell you, life is not a zero-sum game. Frank O’Hara’s poem, “I’m so much more me,” puts forth the idea that encouraging another person to fulfill himself is a path to one’s own fulfillment. O’Hara dedicated his poem to Edwin Denby, a renowned American dance critic who also dabbled in poetry. Denby had become close to all four of the New York Poets (including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler), but he had an especially strong bond with O’Hara which combined elements of father, brother, and teacher. O’Hara’s poem pays tribute to his mentor, whose friendship helped him realize himself as an artist and as a person. Robert Beaser’s setting, a 2003 NYFOS commission, is unusually transparent for a composer given to dense, almost orchestral textures and full-throttle singing. In an uncharacteristic act of boldness, I asked him to write something more delicate, less notey, to conclude his three-song cycle Followers. He obliged with this lovely intertwining duet. Beaser describes himself as a “non-tonal modalist,” and I was initially struck by the folky Irishness of his music. But doesn’t it also have a tinge of middle-period Sondheim? The rhythm of the first line is the same as “Not a Day Goes By,” and the sentiment of “I’m so much more me” would have elegantly coalesced all the themes in Sondheim’s Passion.

If you want to be an opera singer, chances are you’ll find yourself taking up residence in New York City at some point in your early twenties. To transport our cast to the Big Apple, we chose a song by Christopher Berg, “I’m Going to New York,” set to a poem by that quintessential transplanted New Yorker, Frank O’Hara. Berg’s music captures O’Hara’s jaunty humor with an expert sense of timing and musical spacing. Who else would have set the word “eschatology”—the theological study of the end of the world—with such perfect vaudevillian panache and irony?

“Take Me to the World” is a song from a 1966 TV musical that starred Tony Perkins, with songs by the young (33-year-old) Stephen Sondheim. While the show itself has been relegated to the category of Sondheim marginalia, a few of the songs have joined the American Songbook. Anyone who says that Sondheim “can’t write a melody” has never heard the ecstatic “Take Me to the World,” the plea of a young woman who longs to escape her strange, imprisoned life. It finally entered the canon of American standards during the Covid era, when its message of liberation struck a chord with many singers who also longed to be outside in the company of their loved ones again.

Chea Kang left Korea for the States as a teenager, and she has remained here since her high school days at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Her next stop was Juilliard, and then San Francisco Conservatory. For this section of the program, I asked her for a Korean song—something about homeland and travel. She offered “Gagopa,” or “Longing to Leave,” written by Kim Dong-Jin in 1933 to a poem by the poet and historian Lee Eun-sang. The composer was still in college when he wrote the song, and its enormous success launched his career. Within a short time, it became Korea’s national song; later, in the 1960s, it was the theme song for a movie with the same title; in the 1970s Dong-Jin returned to the original poem and set more of its verses to fashion a song cycle; and in the 1980s it was voted Korea’s most beloved song.

I made a similar request to Jamal Al-Titi, who comes to us from Montreal via his native Belarus. Something about homeland and travel? What else but Glinka’s “Traveler’s Song,” an 1840 classic which is at once a romantic ballad, a hymn to the glorious new train system in Russia, and a tribute to Italian opera buffa (one of Glinka’s great inspirations). If this is not the very first song about train travel, it is probably the first art song on the subject and certainly the first one in Russian. It comes from a cycle called A Farewell to St. Petersburg, a city Glinka was himself eager to leave—his marriage was on the rocks. The locomotive of the “Traveler’s Song” hurtles the now-joyous, now-fearful narrator towards a new love affair, full of both promise and pain.

The songs in the final group come from the realm of popular music, jazz, and Broadway musicals, but in spite of that—or more likely, precisely because of that—I feel that they delve the most deeply into the spiritual and psychological issues of young people.

Singers have to spend a lot of their creative energy trying to get work by singing one audition after another. This process involves choosing a snazzy yet practical list of arias and songs, strategizing which piece to start with, and absorbing a lot of rejection and conflicting feedback. To capture that unavoidable rite of passage, we chose a scene from Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 musical The Last Five Years. This autobiographical work tells the story of a young writer, Jamie, who has become an overnight success, and his actress-wife, Cathy, who is still struggling to get her career off the ground. Brown thought up a brilliant conceit to dramatize their courtship, marriage, and eventual divorce: Jamie’s story line moves forward in normal chronological order, while Cathy’s moves in reverse. Her first song is a lament for Jamie, who has just left her; at the end of the evening, we see her anticipating their first date. The only moment where they are in sync comes at the midpoint of the play when they get married. In what is known as “The Audition Sequence,” we become privy to Cathy’s inner thoughts as she sings a faux-Jerome Kern tune for a series of bored audition panels; we also get to hear her vent her frustration to her father over lunch.

Couples usually deliberate over the optimum moment to start a family—unless the decision is taken out of their hands. For classical singers it is even more complex, since their work might involve a great deal of travel. A pregnancy can change the color and range of a voice, too—even male singers have reported a darkening in their middle register after they attain fatherhood (although they usually confess that this is because they are absolutely exhausted). Such concerns do not trouble Enoch Snow in Carousel, who seems to relish the pleasures of a large family just as much as the act of making babies. His extended duet with Carrie, his bride-to-be, “When the Children Are Asleep,” parallels the famous Bench Scene earlier in the musical, which climaxed with “If I Loved You.” For Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein brought some of the elements of European operetta into the heartland both to extol traditional rural values, and to grapple with the problems of traditional gender roles. Charming as this scene is, one can already see how Carrie’s marriage to Mr. Snow will ultimately sour: like a good duet partner, she repeats Mr. Snow’s verse, but quietly omits the part where he gloats over his ambitions. She won’t be able to overlook them so easily in Act II.

The concert ends with a pair of benedictions, “A Child is Born” and “Forever Young.” The first of these is a collaboration between two American legends: jazz trumpeter Thad Jones and composer/lyricist Alec Wilder. Jones was known for his beautifully crunchy band arrangements, which blended the mellow sounds of the 1940s with the acerbic dissonance that became popular in the 1960s. Wilder is probably best known for his landmark book, American Popular Song, the Great Innovators 1900-1950. This work was one of the first serious examinations of our nation’s popular music. Wilder dissected the compositional styles of Gershwin, Porter, Kern, and their colleagues, and he came to some controversial conclusions. But everyone who loved Broadway musicals and jazz—including me— pored over Wilder’s book obsessively in the 1970s, and we were both enriched and (pleasantly) infuriated by his insights. His ear for detail and his bold writing style opened my eyes to the craft of songwriting.

“A Child is Born” is a prayer for the next generation. “Forever Young” was also intended as a parent’s blessing to a child. Bob Dylan wrote the song after he became a father, and its piercingly sweet music and lyrics made it an instant classic. Johnny Cash, Jerry Garcia, Harry Belafonte, and (most touchingly) Joan Baez adopted it quickly into their repertoire. My vantage point on “Forever Young” is a bit different, because I experience it as a child’s prayer for his parents, teachers, and mentors. Bob Dylan offers wise counsel to us all: live generously and purely, and maintain the clarity of your youth, your beginner’s luck. It is a lesson that I absorb over and over again from all the young people who fill my days, and it has made my life inestimably richer.

Beginner’s Luck will be performed at The Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts (Katonah, NY) on Sunday, March 16 at 3pm and in Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center (NYC), March 20 at 8PM. More info.

Caramoor’s Terrance W. Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program is made possible by generous support from the Terrance W. Schwab Endowment Fund for Young Vocal Artists.

The Merkin Hall performance has been underwritten by Eileen Caulfield Schwab.