Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003

by Ned Rorem

"When it comes to letter writing, do artists resemble their letters? Yes, except when they don’t." So wrote Ned Rorem in his 1998 review of Prokofiev’s letters. Over the years Ned Rorem has shown us the craft of autobiography in his four five elegant and moving diaries that span the last eighty decades. But besides the publication of his correspondence between himself and Paul Bowles, he has never published the vast correspondence he shared with a sublime mix of people—Leontyne Price, Reynolds Price, Virgil Thompson, Angela Lansbury, Judy Collins, Gore Vidal, Cynthia Ozick. In Wings of Friendship Ned Rorem’s letters to these friends and forty others are assembled in chronological order and reveal the range of his interests and depth of his passions—a heart laid bare, billets doux.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2005

About the author

Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923) is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings.

Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana and received his early education in Chicago at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the American Conservatory of Music and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally the Juilliard School in New York City.

In 1966 he published The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, which, with his later diaries, has brought him some notoriety, as he is honest about his and others' sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson, and outing several others[vague] (Aldrich and Wotherspoon, eds., 2001). Rorem has written extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in anthologies such as Setting the Tone, Music From the Inside Out, and Music and People. His prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about such prominent musicians as Pierre Boulez. Rorem has composed in a chromatic tonal idiom throughout his career, and he is not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.