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Handel, George Frideric (1685-1759)

ONE OF THE TOWERING FIGURES OF WESTERN CLASSICAL music, George Frideric Handel was a native German who lived much of his life in England. Unlike his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach, who never set foot outside Germany, Handel was a cosmopolitan who spent extended periods at aristocratic courts in Germany and Italy before settling into the vibrant urban culture of London.

Handel is widely known for certain of his flashier instrumental pieces such as the Water Music (1717) and Royal Fireworks Music (1749), as well as the large-scale English oratorios with soloists and chorus, above all Messiah (1742). But his prolific output includes many other instrumental works, cantatas, and numerous operas in Italian, some of which, such as Giulio Cesare (1724), attract considerable interest today.

Handel was born on February 23, 1685, in Halle, Germany, into a staunchly Lutheran family. His father was a court barber-surgeon. Handel was powerfully drawn to music from an early age, but his father wanted him to study law and he enrolled at the university in Halle in 1702.

However, the composer left home in 1703, at the age of eighteen, in order to pursue a career in music, in which he was largely self-trained. After a brilliantly successful career, he died in London on April 14, 1759.

One of the few composers to enjoy a large measure of fame and mythic stature in his own lifetime, Handel after his death went on to become a British cultural icon. He became the hero of a musical cult (the Handelians), darling of the Christian choral establishment, and, more recently, a lucrative consumer commodity with more than one album of "Greatest Hits" to his credit.

Given Handel's exalted status and the unwritten rule that no star in the classical galaxy may be homosexual, least of all the composer of Messiah, it is hardly surprising that scholarly investigation into Handel's personal life, particularly his sexuality, has met with resistance. In Handel's case, homosexual panic set in early: Even biographers in his own time appear troubled about this celebrity's apparent lack of interest in women, the more so since he never came anywhere close to marriage but did spend a great deal of time in private, all-male social circles.

That Handel himself maintained strict silence about his private life only fueled suspicions of homosexuality, leading scholars and critics over the years to a general "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

However, neither that policy nor some of the most remarkable feats of invention and denial on record (discovery of "secret" lady friends and lovers, assumptions of chastity on religious grounds or the "holy solitude of the artist," and so on) have allayed the suspicions.

Over two centuries' worth of prevarication-some of it amusing, despite the underlying homophobia-has labored mightily to certify Handel as acceptably straight, a man of "normal masculine constitution," in the words of one of his nervous biographers, or to embalm him in a state of nonsexual purity.

An engraving of George Frideric Handel.

The attempt has been to remove both the composer and his works from the dross of history in order to canonize them into "timeless universality." Thus, around Handel was constructed the first biographical closet, of many to come, for a major composer in the West.

Whether Handel was in fact homosexual (or its eighteenth-century equivalent; the word itself was not coined until 1869) or had same-sex sexual relations will probably never be known with certainty; such records were compiled only for the hapless victims of criminal arrest.

What we do know is that from the time the composer left provincial Germany, especially during his formative years from age twenty-one to thirty-eight, his social orbit coincided with the most important homosexual venues of the eighteenth-century elites: aristocratic courts and "Arcadian" academies, especially those in Florence and Rome (the latter known colloquially at the time as the "City of Sodom"); the English country retreat; and the London theater and opera scene itself.

In these settings, Handel mingled variously with princes, cardinals, and other aristocratic men of means and influence, as well as with artists, whose homosexuality was known in closed circles or more generally as the "open secret."

From these years the picture of a distinctly "private" Handel emerges with striking clarity, not simply because of all this circumstantial evidence but also on the basis of his work.

Especially important in this regard is a set of cantatas- works for various combinations of solo voices with instrumental accompaniment-written precisely during this time (1706-1730). These largely ignored pieces, written for and in the company of private circles of mainly homosexual men, and which (significantly) Handel never published, give rich expression to the pleasures and dangers of same-sex love.

Standing in opposition to the religious view of homosexuality as sin (sodomy), and the political view of homosexuality as exotic threat to the British nation, these texts connect with the classical pastoral tradition in which male same-sex erotic desire is both idealized and celebrated.

The classical and thus "legitimate" pastoral, with its elaborate system of mythical references and coy Arcadian disguises, functioned in much the same way as the coded references to homosexuality in Hollywood film during its censorship under Will Hays and Joseph Breen-that is, as a screen of metaphorical displacements and double meanings through which what was publicly forbidden could be privately expressed, understood, and enjoyed.

The figure of Orpheus, connoting both "musician" and "homosexual," and with whom Handel was often compared, is one salient example.

It is also significant that when a series of crackdowns on the burgeoning and increasingly open homosexual subculture of London began in the 1730s, Handel reworked many of these texts from which he had borrowed liberally over the years. In so doing, he sanitized them of their more obvious homosexual content.

In light of all this, and in the absence of even a shred of credible evidence to the contrary, we must ask the question on what basis-more to the point, in whose interests- can it be argued that Handel was anything other than queer?

Though discomfiting to many, such questions are urgently political, made so not by any "homosexual agenda" but by the persistence of homophobia in our culture. More important, finally, than the question of Handel's sexual identity are the sociocultural contexts and political struggles in which the composer's sexuality was meaningful-for Handel, for his biographers, and for us.

We must take these contexts into account if we are ever to escape the politically suspect myth of "timelessness" and properly appreciate both Handel and his magnificent work.

-Gary C. Thomas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brett, Philip. "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet." Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. New York: Routledge, 1994. 9-26.

Harris, Ellen T. Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hogwood, Christopher. Handel. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984.

Rousseau, George S. "The Pursuit of Homosexuality: 'Utterly Confused Category' and/or Rich Repository?" 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment. Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 132-168.

Thomas, Gary C. "'Was George Frideric Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics." Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. New York: Routledge, 1994. 155-203.

SEE ALSO

Classical Music; Opera; Castrati; Corelli, Arcangelo

Harrison, Lou (1917-2003)

AMERICAN COMPOSER LOU HARRISON ENJOYED A LONG and distinguished career. He is particularly well known for his use of instruments from the East, especially the Javanese gamelan, and for his melodic and lyrical musical style, despite the fact that he studied composition in the atonal musical style of Arnold Schoenberg.

One of America's most original and articulate composers, Harrison explored a number of interests, including puppetry, Esperanto, tuning systems, the construction of musical instruments, and dance. He was also actively involved in political causes, especially pacifism and gay rights.

He was born Lou Silver Harrison on May 14, 1917, in Portland, Oregon, but his family moved to the San Francisco Bay area when he was a child, and he lived most of his life on the West Coast of the United States. As a child, he was exposed to a wide range of music, including Cantonese operas, Gregorian chants, and Spanish and Mexican music.

Harrison attended San Francisco State University, where he decided on music as his major and his life's work. He studied there with Henry Cowell and quickly became fascinated with melody and its powers, particularly in the music of the Orient. He also developed an interest in the works of American composer Charles Ives, some of whose musical manuscripts he later edited.

Among Harrison's early compositions is a large body of percussion music that reveals Western, Asian, African, and Latin American rhythmic influences.

As a young man, Harrison also worked closely with John Cage, with whom he wrote Double Music (1941), for four percussionists, and studied in Los Angeles with Arnold Schoenberg. His early compositions include Canticles and Song of Queztalcoatl, a reference to the Mexican serpent god.

During World War II, Harrison moved to New York and wrote music criticism for various publications. In the late 1940s in New York, he composed The Perilous Chapel and Solstice, works that reflect his admiration of Mexican music and culture.

Although Harrison was welcomed into the musical circle surrounding composer Virgil Thomson, who promoted his work, he soon decided that he did not really enjoy living in the crowded and stressful metropolis. By the early 1950s, Harrison was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the experimental arts college where Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham also taught.

While at Black Mountain, Harrison wrote his chamber opera Rapunzel (1951), as well as Seven Pastorales (1951) and Strict Songs (1955). This latter series of songs was inspired by the music of the Navajo and indicated his continuing interest in native folk cultures of the Americas.

In 1953, Harrison happily returned to the West Coast- specifically, to Aptos, California, near Santa Cruz-and devoted himself to the study of Asian music. In 1961 and 1962, he lived in Korea and Taiwan, where he discovered various Oriental instruments and became particularly fascinated by the gamelan. He began writing his own music for this instrument.

By 1967, he had found his life's partner, William Colvig. Although not a composer, Colvig shared Harrison's passion for music. They collaborated on the construction of a number of instruments, including two American gamelan, one at San Jose State University, the other at Mills College. Colvig's death in 2000 marked the end of a remarkable and productive relationship.

In 1971, Harrison wrote an opera, Young Caesar, which relies on a group of Oriental instruments. The work deals with both homosexuality and the confrontations of East and West.

For the gamelan and other instruments, Harrison wrote one of his most famous compositions, La Koro Sutra (1972), a work that reflects the East's Buddhist philosophy as well as its musical sounds. He has written three dozen original works for the gamelan, often accompanied by Western instruments.

Harrison taught at various colleges in California, including Stanford University, Cabrillo College, Mills College, and the University of Southern California. From 1968, he maintained an affiliation with San Jose State University.

Harrison's later works include three symphonies and a number of chamber music pieces. His Suite for Cello and Piano (1995) is indicative of the continuing quality of his extraordinary productivity. Also in 1995, he wrote "Parade for MTT" for the San Francisco Symphony, to celebrate the inauguration of music director Michael Tilson Thomas.

For many years, Harrison was involved in the movement for gay rights. He also worked on behalf of the ecological movement and the cause of world peace.

Harrison died on February 2, 2003, in Lafayette, Indiana. He was en route to a festival of his music at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Celebrated as one of America's most accomplished composers, and sometimes dubbed the "Santa Claus" of new music for his white beard, considerable heft, and ready laugh, he was mourned by music lovers throughout the world.

-John Louis DiGaetani

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Miller, Leta E. "Lou Harrison." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Stanley Sadie, ed. London: Macmillan, 2001. 11:64-67.

___, and Frederic Lieberman. Lou Harrison: Composing a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Von Gunden, Heidi. The Music of Lou Harrison. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995.

SEE ALSO

Classical Music; Conductors; Cage, John; Cowell, Henry;

Cunningham, Merce; McPhee, Colin; Thomson, Virgil; Tilson Thomas, Michael

Hart, Lorenz (1895-1943)

BARELY FIVE FEET TALL, BALDING EARLY, AND POSSESSING a disproportionately large head, Larry Hart was the first to disparage his own attractiveness. His jokes, however, masked a deeply rooted inability to accept the possibility of romantic happiness or sexual gratification.

Hart impulsively proposed marriage to several women friends, none of whom thought his offer serious. And when he allowed himself to act upon his desire for other men, he seems to have had difficulty performing sexually. (His biographer Frederick Nolan quotes one unidentified male partner's shock at discovering Hart cowering in the bedroom closet after sex, suggesting that the songwriter was unable actively to pursue homosexual pleasure without being overcome by guilt.)

The result of such emotional imbroglio is that, despite having written lyrics as witty as any sung on the Broadway stage before or since, Hart is best remembered for his songs of unfulfilled desire and failed romance.

Born Lorenz Milton Hart on May 2, 1895, to an immigrant Jewish family, Hart learned from his entrepreneur father that self-assertion allows survival. Never without a business venture, many of which were dishonest, Hart's father provided Larry with a lasting model for the cycles of impulsive free-spending and resulting impecuniosity that characterized Hart's own life.

Hart entertained both friends and strangers lavishly, often living far beyond his means, but with a (sometimes unfounded) optimism that something would turn up. And, like his father, Hart was a ball of ferocious energy, both physically and creatively.

As Oscar Hammerstein II, recalls, "In all the time I knew him, I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his face in repose. I never heard him chuckle quietly. He laughed loudly and easily at other people's jokes and at his own, too. His large eyes danced, and his head would wag. He was alert and dynamic and fun to be with."

As disorganized and undisciplined as he was tirelessly inventive verbally, Hart possessed a nervous energy that could make him an exasperating person to work with. Words poured so easily from him that, increasingly as he aged, he preferred socializing and drinking with hangers-on to working.

And though Hart seems to have inspired genuine affection in everyone he met, no one who knew him was surprised when he died on November 22, 1943, of pneumonia contracted while wandering the streets of Manhattan in a downpour, badly intoxicated.

Composer Richard Rodgers, with whom Hart began an extraordinarily successful collaboration in 1919, recollected that when he met Hart he acquired "in one afternoon a career, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation." Their early years together, spent writing musical revues and novelty songs for burlesque comedians, culminated in their first Broadway hit, A Connecticut Yankee, in 1927.

Finding their chances of continued financial success in New York severely limited by the Great Depression, however, they followed many of their Broadway contemporaries to Hollywood, where, after the initial success of writing the songs for Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald in Love Me Tonight (1932), they were frustrated by the pedestrian projects the studios assigned them, and by the increasing criticism that Hart's lyrics were too witty and too darkly satiric to succeed on sets decorated with plastic palm trees.

Their return to New York resulted in their final and most fruitful period, which saw the hit productions of Jumbo in 1935, On Your Toes and Babes in Arms in 1936, The Boys from Syracuse (a musicalization of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors) in 1938, and the breakthrough musical Pal Joey in 1940.

Apart from their polysyllabic rhymes and sophisticated wit (master poet W. H. Auden included Hart's "Take Him, He's Yours" in an anthology of light verse), Hart's lyrics are remarkable for two reasons. First, they are amazingly frank about sexual matters. In Pal Joey, the title character openly boasts of the sexual chase in "Happy Hunting Horn"; his credo is suggested by the double entendre inscribed in the title of another of the play's songs, "Do It the Hard Way."

His inamorata, philandering socialite Vera Simpson, sings of her midlife sexual reawakening in "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered": "I'll sing to him / Each spring to him / And worship the trousers that cling to him."

Far from being taken sexual advantage of, Vera is shrewd about the paradoxical nature of sexual desire. Men, she observes, are stimulants, "Good for the heart / Bad for the nerves," or ornaments, "Useless by day / Handy by night." And if she complains that men are "all alike," she's also honest enough to acknowledge that they're "all I like."

In a double entendre that depends upon the auditor's understanding "on" to refer to the missionary position, she accepts that the socially uncouth Joey is "a laugh, / But I love it / Because the laugh's on me." As she sings elsewhere, "Horizontally speaking, / He's at his very best."

And, after ending their affair, Vera celebrates her relief at being no longer sexually dependent upon Joey- "The ants that invaded my pants, / Finis!"-for she is "Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more."

Second, Hart's lyrics are remarkable because they feign indifference to, or casually accept, disappointment. The lyricist is unlike most of his contemporaries who could not imagine a show ending without the boy getting the girl. As songs such as "Blue Moon" and "Lover" evidence, Hart was perfectly capable of writing a traditional love song; likewise, in "My Heart Stood Still" and "With a Song in My Heart" he presents the exhilaration of a love that is freshly, ecstatically, joyously experienced.

But more often-in songs such as "My Romance," "Falling in Love with Love," and "This Can't Be Love"-Hart asserts the reality of a deeply experienced love by mocking the very conventions that other lyricists (and the record-buying public) had grown to rely upon.

Moreover, Hart's most psychologically profound love songs prove to be those in which the speaker laments his or her disappointment. "Spring Is Here," for example, which contrasts the loveless speaker's depression with the natural joy of the season of rejuvenation, might be an Elizabethan complaint.

The speaker in "Glad to Be Unhappy" may well be articulating the fundamental principle of Hart's philosophy of love when he protests that "Unrequited love's a bore, / And I've got it pretty bad. / But for someone you adore, / It's a pleasure to be sad."

Together these reasons explain why, despite one of the most original scores that Broadway theatergoers had yet heard, Pal Joey, Hart's greatest play, did not arouse audience enthusiasm when first mounted. The show was a hit, but it inspired little affection in audiences in 1940. Only when it was revived in 1952 did it garner the kind of enthusiasm it deserved.

Joey, more antihero than hero, is a likable cad who exploits women even as he is himself sexually exploited by a supposedly respectable society matron. When Joey and Vera sing of their sexual bliss in the apartment that she has furnished for him ("our little den of iniquity"), they not only challenge the moral standards that the Broadway musical was designed to inculcate, but implicate audience members in their satire of society's hypocrisy.

The audience's appreciation of Joey and Vera's keeping separate bedrooms, "One for play and one for show," for example, reveals audience members' guilty familiarity with the strategy of disguising supposedly immoral private behavior with a carefully crafted public persona; in addition, the line asks audience members to reconsider their impressions of those in society who appear always "comme il faut."

And if the audience is uncomfortable listening to adulterous lovers singing of the salubrious benefits of infidelity, Hart reminds his audience that things have been this way "since antiquity."

Likewise, when the pair boast that "Ravel's Bolero works just great" as background music to their lovemaking, Hart shocks some audience members with the scandalous use to which a piece of classical music is being put, while alerting others to the deeply sensuous nature of a selection they've been trained to think of as sexless (as canonized by the symphony orchestra that they so properly and mechanically patronize). Little wonder that audiences were left cold by the original production.

After Hart's death, Rodgers began a second great collaboration, this one with Oscar Hammerstein II.

Lorenz Hart (standing, right) with Richard Rodgers in 1936.

Together they produced such important but artificially wholesome shows as Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific . Significantly, Rodgers never composed a song of real longing again; without Hart, his music was just too straight.

-Raymond-Jean Frontain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hart, Dorothy, and Robert Kimball, eds. The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Marx, Samuel, and Jan Clayton. Rodgers and Hart: Bewitched, Bothered and Bedeviled. New York: Putnam, 1976.

Mordden, Ethan. Broadway Babies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Nolan, Frederick. Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Rodgers, Richard, and Oscar Hammerstein II, eds. The Rodgers and Hart Songbook. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951.

SEE ALSO

Musical Theater and Film; Coward, Sir Noël; Porter, Cole; Ravel, Maurice; Sondheim, Stephen

Heath, Gordon (1918-1991)

AFRICAN AMERICAN ACTOR, DIRECTOR, AND FOLK singer Gordon Heath became a fixture on the Parisian cabaret scene from 1949 until 1976. After an early success on Broadway in the play Deep Are the Roots (1945), he went to Europe, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He settled in Paris, where he and his partner Lee Payant owned and entertained at a Left Bank nightclub. Heath performed in theater, film, television, and radio productions and also recorded several albums of folk music.

Heath's father, Cyril Gordon Heath, emigrated from Barbados to the United States. He settled in New York City, where he married Hattie Hooper. Gordon Heath, born on September 20, 1918, was the couple's only child. Heath's musical education began at age eight, when an aunt gave him violin lessons. He studied other instruments as well, but was most drawn to the guitar, finding it "friendly and sympathetic...to the touch."

As a youngster Heath also showed a talent for drawing, winning prizes for both art and music in high school. He began performing in amateur theater groups and took first prize in a municipal drama competition.

Heath earned scholarships to two music schools and briefly attended the Dalcroze Institute but decided to pursue an acting career instead. He worked on stage and in radio. When he joined radio station WMCA in New York in 1945, he became the first black staff announcer at a major radio station in America.

In 1945, Heath scored a major success on Broadway in the play Deep Are the Roots, by Arnaud d'Assue and James Gow. Heath starred as a military hero facing racism when he returns to the Deep South after World War II and falls in love with one of the daughters of a wealthy family for whom his mother works as a housekeeper. Heath's electrifying performance won praise from the critics.

When the play closed on Broadway after a fourteenmonth run, Heath went to London and reprised his role in a West End production, again receiving critical acclaim.

When the run in London ended, Heath decided not to return to America. In 1948, he settled in Paris, which he considered more hospitable to blacks and more accepting of his relationship with his white lover, Lee Payant, a fellow actor whom he had met in New York in the early 1940s. Like many other American expatriates fleeing racism and homophobia, Heath found a haven in cosmopolitan Paris.

In 1949, Heath and Payant became co-owners of a Paris club called L'Abbaye, so named because it was behind the abbey church of St Germain des Prés. For nearly thirty years the two entertained appreciative audiences, playing guitar and singing duets of American and French folk songs.

In 1957, Elektra Records released an album of their duets, An Evening at L'Abbaye, comprising seventeen songs, five of them in French. Heath and Payant also recorded an album entitled French Canadian Folk Songs in 1954, and the same year Heath had a self-titled solo album.

Even after acquiring L'Abbaye, Heath continued to act. He toured in Britain in 1950 as the title character in Shakespeare's Othello, a role that he repeated in Tony Richardson's 1955 version of the play on BBC.

Heath appeared in other British television productions, again playing the lead in Deep Are the Roots in 1950. He starred in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones in 1953, and appeared in a television adaptation of Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country in 1958.

Despite the positive reception of his performances on stage and television, Heath did not receive offers for major parts in movies. He narrated John Halas and Joy Batchelor's animated film of George Orwell's Animal Farm in 1956, and contributed supporting roles in a number of movies, including Les héros sont fatigués (1955, directed by Yves Ciampi), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969, directed by Bryan Forbes), and L'Africain (1983, directed by Philippe de Broca). He and Payant also dubbed many films.

In the 1960s, Heath turned his talents to directing, working for a decade with the Studio Theater of Paris, an English-language company that staged plays by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Bertolt Brecht, among others. Payant acted in many of the plays.

Payant died of cancer in December 1976 at age fifty-two.

Devastated by his loss, Heath could not bear continuing to work at L'Abbaye alone. He returned to the United States, where he spent five years doing some acting and directing.

Eventually, however, he decided to go back to France, and there he found a new partner, Alain Woisson.

Heath died in Paris on August 28, 1991, of an AIDSrelated illness.

-Linda Rapp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blau, Eleanor. "Gordon Heath, 72; Co-Starred in Play 'Deep Are the Roots.' " New York Times, August 31, 1991.

Bourne, Stephen. "Heath, Gordon." Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History from World War II to the Present Day. Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 183.

Breman, Paul. "Gordon Heath." Obituary. Independent (London), September 13, 1991.

Heath, Gordon. Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Shipman, David. "Gordon Heath." Obituary. Independent (London), September 2, 1991.

SEE ALSO

Cabarets and Revues

Henze, Hans Werner (b. 1926)

GERMAN COMPOSER AND CONDUCTOR HANS WERNER Henze is remarkable for his ability to employ a wide range of styles, from those of the avant-garde to opulent neo-Romanticism, especially in his many stage and concert works.

His operas include the lush König Hirsch (1955); Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1965-1966), both to libretti by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman; the antibourgeois comedies Der junge Lord (1964) and The English Cat (1980-1982); a political allegory for multiple stages and orchestras, We Come to the River (1976); and Das verratene Meer (1990), based on a dark tale by Yukio Mishima.

Henze holds strong Marxist convictions, as shown in explicitly political works such as the vituperative Versuch über Schweine (1968), the dramatic cantata Das Floβ der Medusa (1968), the Cuban slave's story El Cimarrón (1970), the bizarre "show for 17" Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971), the "anthology" cantata Voices (1973), and the ballet Orpheus (1978). Most of these works juxtapose downtrodden proletariats and rich oppressors.

Other important works include eight symphonies (1947-1993), five string quartets (1947-1976), the remarkable Piano Concerto no. 2 (1967), and numerous concerti, keyboard works, and chamber works.

Henze was born on July 1, 1926, in the small town of Gütersloh in Westphalia. He studied music in nearby Brunswick, against his parents' wishes, and composed from the age of twelve without formal training; as a teenager he was interested in the modernist music banned by the Nazis.

In 1944, Henze was drafted into the German army. He served in Poland before being transferred to a propaganda film unit. In 1946, he returned to his musical education, studying in Heidelberg with Wolfgang Fortner and writing his first acknowledged compositions.

That year, Fortner brought Henze to the first of the summer music courses in new music in Darmstadt, where the young composer was presented as a star pupil. Over the next fifteen years, as Darmstadt became a center of the avant-garde, Henze's reputation devolved to that of neo-Romantic reactionary.

This ambiguous political and aesthetic position- regarded as avant-garde by the bourgeoisie, but as an Establishment tool or "limousine liberal" by the avantgarde-has haunted Henze's career. It contributed, along with his increasing distaste for Germany, to his decision to establish residence in Italy in 1953.

Henze's career survived detachment from the world of the avant-garde because his theatrical abilities allowed him to become one of the few modernists able to survive as an opera composer.

He was a professor of music in Salzburg from 1962 to 1967 and in Cologne from 1980 to 1991. In 1990, he became the first composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1988, he founded the Munich Biennale, and continues as its director. The Biennale has commissioned many new stage works by young composers.

Henze has been open about being gay for most of his life, as seen in his honest, nonsensational autobiography, Bohemian Fifths (1999). Despite his strong leftist convictions, he evidently does not associate sexuality with politics, though much of his work outlines conflicts between sensuality and repression.

Images of and allusions to homosexuality appear in Heliogabalus Imperator (1972) and Le Miracle de la Rose for clarinet and ensemble (1981), the former a symphonic poem suggesting Roman decadence, the latter an instrumental work that refers to Genet's novel.

-Paul Attinello

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henze, Hans Werner. Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

_____. Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953-81. London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

SEE ALSO

Classical Music; Conductors; Opera

Herman, Jerry (b. 1931)

"IHAVE ALWAYS BEEN DRAWN TO OUTRAGEOUS, LARGERTHAN- life female characters," Jerry Herman writes in a memoir of his career as a Broadway composer and lyricist. So it is not surprising that, though seemingly retired from the musical comedy stage, he remains the best proponent of the "diva musical," described by theater historian John Clum as a musical comedy "about a woman's escape from the humdrum" and pedestrian life to which social convention would consign her.

As Clum also notes, the diva musical allows a gay theater audience "an escape from the oppressive life into magic" through worship of a female star who has no hesitation-in the words of Herman's Zaza-to "put a little more mascara on" and turn the world into something "ravishing, sensual, fabulous...glamorous, elegant, and beautiful."

Thus, Dolly Levi "puts her hand in" and rearranges everyone's life for the better; Mame Dennis coaxes the blues right out of the horn and teaches everyone to celebrate simply because "it's today"; actress Mabel Normand lights up not only the movie screen but every room she walks into; Mrs. Santa Claus restores childhood innocence, advocates gender equality, and saves Christmas; and transvestite extraordinaire Zaza proudly boasts "I am what I am" while teaching sour moralists that "the best of times is now."

Born on July 10, 1931, to middle-class Jewish parents in Jersey City, New Jersey, Herman was the only child of ardent theatergoers who introduced him to the joys of the Broadway musical at an early age. His family ran a summer camp where Herman worked until he was twentyone, in the process discovering a talent for producing musical entertainments.

An audition for Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls) encouraged Jerry to work full-time as a composer, and after writing the music for three off-Broadway plays, he scored a major success with Milk and Honey (1961). Shortly thereafter, David Merrick hired him to write the music and lyrics for Hello, Dolly! (1964; film, 1969), and for the next twenty years Herman was one of the most bankable talents on Broadway.

Megahits such as Mame (1966; film, 1974) and La Cage aux Folles (1983) alternated with box-office failures such as Dear World (1969) and Mack and Mabel (1974) that nonetheless quickly attained cult status.

In addition to a revue of songs from his shows (Jerry's Girls, 1985), Herman has written the scores for the musically less interesting The Grand Tour (1979) and for Mrs. Santa Claus (1996), a television musical created for Angela Lansbury that has become a stalwart of the Christmas holiday season.

Despite a highly popular thirtieth-anniversary revival of Hello, Dolly! and a much-applauded London concert version of Mack and Mabel (1988), Herman laments in his memoirs the end of the era of "upbeat, feel-good" musicals of the sort he enjoys writing. He is no longer creating original work for the theater.

The Three Constants

There are three constant elements in every Herman show:

The Statement Song

First, there is what Herman himself calls the "statement song," in which the heroine delivers her philosophy of life.

For example, Dolly Levi liberates her spiritual nemesis Horace Vandergelder's overworked, underpaid clerks by telling them to "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and venture from rural Yonkers into Manhattan to discover that "there's lots of world out there."

Mame Dennis throws extravagant parties for no special occasion, insisting simply that "It's Today"; in "Open a New Window," she teaches her nephew Patrick that the only "way to make the bubble stay" is by resisting convention and experiencing something new every day.

Aurelia, the Madwoman of Chaillot, counsels the denizens of her quarter of Paris that hope is reborn "Each Tomorrow Morning," which allows her to go on whenever she feels dejected.

And drag star Zaza teaches her neighbors and audience to "hold this moment fast / And live and love as hard as you know how, / And make this moment last / Because the best of times is now."

Herman's heroines do not hesitate to interfere- always generously, always joyously-in other characters' lives, in particular teaching the younger generation how to live more freely and with greater satisfaction. Their philosophy is clearly Herman's own, and that of the chorus in Mack and Mabel, which asserts its refusal to be cowed by disappointment and instructs the audience to "Tap Your Troubles Away."

The Diva's Dramatic Soliloquy

Second, every Herman play allows the diva a musical dramatic soliloquy. The song marks a moment of self-doubt in which she rallies her spirits, even while allowing the audience to see the price that the diva pays for her optimism.

Dolly sings about her loneliness in widowhood and her newfound determination to "raise the roof" and "carry on" as energetically as she can "Before the Parade Passes By."

Stunned when her adult nephew seems to reject all that she taught him in youth, Mame ponders what she would do differently "If He Walked into My Life Today."

Refusing to live in a world without music, laughter, love, or joy, Aurelia passionately asserts that "I Don't Want to Know" that the world has turned ugly.

And Albin, confronted with his lover's son's request that Albin absent himself when the conservative family of the boy's fiancée comes to call, refuses to hide who he is, insisting that "Life's not worth a damn / Till you can say / 'Hey, world, / I am what I am!'"

Such songs are invariably the most dramatic moment in the play, demonstrating the indomitable spirit that makes each Herman protagonist a diva. Similarly, the original actor's extraordinary rendering of them is what made Carol Channing (Dolly), Angela Lansbury (Mame, Aurelia, Mrs. Santa Claus), and George Hearn (Albin) stars, and kept their dangerously over-the-top performances from degenerating into caricature.

While Herman clearly has a particular genius for fashioning such dramatic numbers, it is important to note that he has been ably aided by the directors and set designers of his shows. A semicircular runway extending around the orchestra pit in the original production of Hello, Dolly! allowed Channing to sing within a few feet of her audience, winning them over even while towering above them.

The dramatic lighting of Lansbury's soliloquies, especially the amber gel and swirl of falling leaves as she questioned where she went wrong in "If He Walked into My Life Today," transfixed audiences, winning her Tony Awards for both Mame and Dear World.

And, in a piece of inspired direction, Arthur Laurents had Albin, still in drag after a performance as Zaza, pull off his wig at the conclusion of "I Am What I Am" and proudly exit down the center aisle, to the thrilled applause of the audience, at the close of La Cage's first act.

Herman's directors have created big theatrical gestures that magnify the inner resolve of these larger-than-life women.

The Staircase Number

And, finally, every Herman play offers a "staircase number" in which the assembled company, in a pull-outall- the-stops fashion, celebrates its transformation by praising the woman who raises the energy level of everyone around her by her mere presence.

Dramatically, there is no reason why the waiters should be so excited about Dolly Levi's anticipated return to the Harmonia Gardens restaurant that they break into a gallop as they serve and bus tables. But theatrically, the title number of Hello, Dolly! is the occasion to celebrate Dolly's joy in living, which washes over and renews everyone whom she encounters.

Likewise, the conservative Southern community into which Mame seeks to marry is so impressed by her performance on the fox hunt that crusty old Mother Burnside herself triumphantly asserts that, with Mame in their midst, "This time the South will rise again!"

The chorus of Mack and Mabel celebrates Mabel's return to moviemaking in a rousing number that claims every heart beats faster "When Mabel Comes in the Room"; while the chorus of Dear World is in effect praising Aurelia in the stirring finale, "One Person."

The message of these songs is that the woman's presence revivifies the stodgy and pedestrian lives of her contemporaries; she brings imagination, magic, and a screwball-comedy madness to their humdrum existence.

But the songs are great theatrical moments as well. Think of Carol Channing's descent of a red-carpeted staircase in a red brocade gown, with red ostrich plumes in her brassy yellow hair, or the jubilant cakewalk on the terrace of an antebellum mansion as the company sings the title song of Mame, or Les Cagelles in their highest drag forming a sequined constellation around Zaza.

These are moments of glorious, jubilant theatricality that celebrate a woman whose strength of character and comic imagination allow her to resist the pressures of social convention and recreate herself as something bigger, brassier, and livelier than decorum allows. Such moments, like the characters themselves, are a drag queen's dream.

Gay Backlash

While audiences have generally been enthusiastic-often wildly so-in response to Herman's work, a gay backlash emerged in the early 1980s, paradoxically, just as he became most visible in popular gay culture.

In part, the backlash reflects a change in musical tastes that began earlier but was only fully developed in the 1980s. Their very identity as diva musicals puts Herman's plays at odds with the "concept musical," which in Martin Gottfried's definition places greater importance on the weaving of music, lyrics, dance, stage movement and dialogue "in the creation of a tapestrylike theme (rather than in support of a plot)," and so they are less likely to focus upon a single star.

An ensemble ethos marks the groundbreaking musicals of the 1970s, such as Company (1970), Chicago(1975), and A Chorus Line (1975). Indeed, the ensemble number performed by the dancers auditioning for the play-within-the-play of A Chorus Line ("One") seems to parody the staircase number that Herman specializes in, the point of A Chorus Line being that there is no single star, that everyone contributes to the ensemble.

More problematically, the backlash signaled gay culture's rejection of Herman's basic philosophy. Survival, for Herman, is a question of posture and attitude; one simply has to "put on your Sunday clothes / When you feel down and out," or "put a little more mascara on." But while tapping one's troubles away may have appealed to a generation raised on post-Depression-era Busby Berkeley movie musicals, increased public awareness of the spreading AIDS epidemic gave the lie to La Cage's claim that "The Best of Times Is Now."

Resistance through grand gestures is the pose of both the diva and the drag queen; AIDS required a different theater of resistance, black comedy rather than screwball comedy.

Commenting upon the sudden reversal of opinion concerning La Cage aux Folles in the mid-1980s, Mark Steyn-in an aggressively homophobic account of the Broadway musical-notes that "One minute...[it] was the biggest homegrown hit of the day; the next it was gone, " largely because as public perception of AIDS grew, "fags weren't funny anymore; fags meant disease and death."

In the 1980s, Sondheim's questioning of his audience's ability to live with ambivalence seemed a braver and more realistic form of engagement than Herman's asking it to choose self-consciously to ignore tragedy and assert joy. As Herman himself observes, "the upbeat, feel-good songs that I write" no longer resonated with audiences.

Criticism of Herman's optimism as escapist is unfair. There is a strong satiric impulse in such songs as "Masculinity, " "It Takes a Woman, " and "The Spring Next Year" that is every bit as socially engaged as Burton Lane's much-lauded challenge to American racism in Finian's Rainbow.

Ironically, then, the moment when Albin, refusing to fashion himself to suit anyone else's expectations, pulls off his wig at the end of "I Am What I Am" was not only the very moment when gays asserted themselves most openly on the Broadway stage; it was also the moment when American gay culture lost its need of a diva to voice its concerns and became free to raise them in its own voice.

Thus, Herman's plays seem dated to newer gay audiences raised on Sondheim's ambivalence and on the openly gay musicals of William Finn, in which characters do not need musicals to feel good about themselves.

Even as La Cage aux Folles made homosexuality the undisguised subject of a popular musical, challenged the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed moral majority empowered by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and provided gays with a national anthem ("I Am What I Am"),

Herman found himself bypassed by the very parade that he had been leading.

-Raymond-Jean Frontain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clum, John M. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Herman, Jerry, with Marilyn Stasio. Showtune: A Memoir. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1996.

Jordan, Richard Tyler. "But Darling, I'm Your Auntie Mame!": The Amazing History of the World's Favorite Madcap Aunt. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1998.

Steyn, Mark. Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now. New York: Routledge, 1999.

SEE ALSO

Musical Theater and Film; Divas; Finn, William; Laurents, Arthur; Sondheim, Stephen

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, MYSTIC AND POET, PROPHET and playwright, composer and scientist, lived all but the first few years of her life in the company of women.

Born in 1098 in the Rhineland, Hildegard, the tenth child of a noble family, was offered by her parents at the age of eight to the community of Benedictine nuns in Disobodenberg, where she became abbess in 1136.

Hildegard's spiritual gifts were evident early in her life: At the age of three, as she reveals in her Vita, she saw a brightness so great it made her soul tremble. In fact, according to the documents prepared for the process of Hildegard's canonization (a process initiated but never completed, though she has been listed as a saint in the Roman martyrology since the Middle Ages), she had already perceived a vision of the "living Light" while still in her mother's womb.

In 1141, Hildegard experienced a remarkable series of visions, accompanied by a heavenly command to write what she was seeing. Although she initially refused the command, a devastating illness (sent, she believed, from God) persuaded her to begin writing her first visionary text, the Scivias (Know the Ways of the Lord). Her corpus eventually included two other visionary works, a song collection, a musical drama, and several scientific treatises.

In 1148, anxious to win spiritual and economic independence for her community from the monks of Disobodenberg, Hildegard entered into what was to be a difficult battle to relocate her nuns to the Rupertsberg, on the Rhine near Bingen.

It was about this time, as well, that Hildegard's most difficult personal struggle began. As a spiritual leader and writer, Hildegard necessarily supported the Church's teachings on same-sex desire; nevertheless, her Vita and her surviving letters demonstrate a remarkable emotional intensity for the women with whom she came into contact.

In particular, her affection for her disciple and assistant, Richardis von Stade, and the betrayal she felt when Richardis left her, threatened Hildegard's professional credibility and her inner calm.

In 1151, Richardis was offered a position as abbess in a distant convent. Although Hildegard refused permission for her to leave, Richardis did go, and the depth of Hildegard's feeling is revealed in the letters she wrote imploring her young friend to return: "I loved the nobility of your conduct, your wisdom and your chastity, your soul and the whole of your life, so much that many said: What are you doing?"

Hildegard's efforts to force Richardis to return to her included an intense and far-reaching letter campaign, but her efforts was unsuccessful. However, after Richardis's sudden, early death in 1152, her brother revealed in a letter to Hildegard his sister's tears at their separation. He told the abbess, "if death had not prevented her, she would have come to you."

Modern readers of Hildegard's works and her life have delighted in the images of female desire and the positive representations of female sexuality that survive in all aspects of her writing, from her medical texts to her letters. Particularly noteworthy is the homoeroticism of her liturgical cycle, the Symphoniae, which expresses physical and spiritual desire for the Virgin Mary.

Hildegard's visionary works are also remarkable for their attention to the feminine aspects of theology. With considerable justification, many contemporary scholars have claimed Hildegard as a premodern instance of a "woman-identified woman."

Since Hildegard's spiritual powers and pronouncements mostly met with approval from the ecclesiastical authorities, and since Hildegard rarely hesitated to exploit either her high social status or her spiritual position as the "Sibyl of the Rhine, " she enjoyed a range of possibilities and freedoms unavailable to most medieval women.

-Jacqueline Jenkins

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cadden, Joan. "It Takes All Kinds: Sexuality and Gender Differences in Hildegard of Bingen's 'Book of Compound Medicine.' " Traditio 40 (1984): 149-174.

Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Holsinger, Bruce Wood. "The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)." Signs (1993): 92-123.

Kraft, Kent. "The German Visionary: Hildegard of Bingen." Medieval Women Writers. Katharina M. Wilson, ed. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984. 109-130.

Murray, Jacqueline. "Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages." Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, eds. New York: Garland, 1996. 191-222.

Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Wiethaus, Ulrike. "In Search of Medieval Women's Friendships: Hildegard of Bingen's Letters to her Female Contemporaries." Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics. Ulrike Wiethaus, ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993. 93-111.

SEE ALSO

Classical Music; Opera; Conductors

Hindle, Annie (ca. 1847-19??)

ANNIE HINDLE WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO GAIN SIGNIFICANT attention as a male impersonator in the United States, and most likely introduced this performance style to the American variety stage. In 1891, the New York Sun declared that she was "the first out-and-out 'male impersonator' the New York stage had ever seen."

Born in England in the mid- to late-1840s, and adopted by Mrs. Ann Hindle, Annie Hindle arrived in the United States in late August 1868. According to the Sun, Hindle had been active on the provincial English and London music hall stages since the age of five.

Hindle performed on the American variety stage from 1868 to 1886, and during this time she was rarely idle. She was a flexible and resourceful performer who appeared in variety as a solo act and in minstrel shows. On occasion she also took roles in the short dramatic pieces that appeared at the end of each variety bill during that period.

During the 1870s, Hindle worked, very briefly, as the manager of the Grand Central Variety Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, but poor attendance caused the theater to close. This failure was due in large part to effects of the 1873 financial crash, which lasted into the late 1870s.

Hindle's reviews, and steady bookings, attest to her popularity with American audiences. A reviewer in the New York Clipper for December 19, 1868, described one of her early performances at the Metropolitan Music Hall in Washington, D.C.: "Miss Hindle is of medium stature, with a pleasing figure and voice. The Lingard style of business [that is, playing both male and female parts] is the lady's forte.... The changes were cleverly executed and the songs given with a vim and dash that was really refreshing."

Some eight years later, the great skills of this performer continued to astound her audience. A reviewer of an 1876 performance at the Adelphi Theater in Galveston, Texas (printed in the New York Clipper for December 16, 1876), noted: "Annie Hindle has proved a great success. As a male impersonator her sex is so concealed that one is apt to imagine that it is a man who is singing."

Hindle's career began to decline in the early 1880s and ended in 1886, when she married for the third time.

Hindle's first marriage had been to the character and ballad singer Charles Vivian, the founder of the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks in America, which was originally a theatrical fraternity. The couple married in 1868 but after six weeks they parted ways.

Hindle and Vivian did not divorce, and Hindle later claimed he had abused her. In 1878, the Clipper reported that she had married the minstrel performer W. W. Long, but no confirmation of this event has been found. If this marriage did occur, it is likely that it was a marriage of convenience for Hindle, as she never performed, lived, or traveled with Long.

Hindle's third marriage took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while she was leading her own troupe on a tour through the Midwest. A local Baptist minister married Hindle and her dresser, Annie Ryan, one evening after Hindle's performance. Hindle gave her name as Charles and dressed in male clothing while her bride wore her traveling gown.

Gilbert Sarony, a female impersonator in Hindle's troupe, acted as best man, and a local bank clerk, presumably pulled in off the street, was Hindle's second witness. This marriage, which was discovered almost immediately, caused a stir in Grand Rapids and was also reported in the Clipper as well as in the scandal sheet National Police Gazette.

Both papers declared that Hindle was really a man and her career as a male impersonator was ended. Upon the collapse of her variety troupe in the wake of the marriage, Hindle and her wife retired to Jersey City, New Jersey. The two women lived there until Ryan's death in late 1891, both dressing in female clothing.

In 1890, Hindle attempted to return to vaudeville. She found small-time bookings and continued to perform into the early twentieth century, though she seems never to have appeared in big-time vaudeville. It is not known when this remarkable woman died.

-Gillian Rodger

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Man or Woman?" Grand Rapids Evening Leader, June 7, 1886.

"Married as a Man." Grand Rapids Daily Democrat, June 8, 1886.

"Married Her Maid: The Strange Story of Charles and Annie Hindle, a Man Masquerading as a Woman." Grand Rapids Telegram-Herald, June 7, 1886.

Rodger, Gillian. Male Impersonation on the North American Variety and Vaudeville Stage, 1868-1930. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1998.

Senelick, Lawrence. "Male Impersonation." The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Martin Banham, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 674-675.

"Stranger than Fiction: The True Story of Annie Hindle's Two Marriages." New York Sun, December 27, 1891.

SEE ALSO

Drag Shows: Drag Kings and Male Impersonators; Variety and Vaudeville; Cabarets and Revues

Hunter, Alberta (1895-1984)

BLUES SINGER, LYRICIST, AND ACTRESS ALBERTA Hunter, a distinctive stylist and one of the top recording artists in the 1920s and 1930s, experienced a dramatic comeback in her old age.

Alberta Hunter was destined to become a legend. Born on April 1, 1895, in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was reared, Hunter left home at age fifteen for Chicago, where, lying about her age, she launched her singing career in the city's nascent saloon and club scene, performing first with King Oliver's legendary Creole Jazz Band.

Possessed of abundant talent and stage presence, Hunter rose quickly to become one of the city's leading attractions in the 1910s and 1920s. Noted for singing the blues over troubled love affairs, she also wrote some of her own material, including "Down Hearted Blues."

Buoyed by her success in the city that had become the premier center for blues entertainers, Hunter began making recordings in 1921. She made more than 100 recordings for numerous labels, occasionally using pseudonyms to record while under contract with rival companies. Among her best-known recordings are "'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do" and "Aggravatin' Papa."

Having been molested as a child, in disturbing incidents that she would recall later in life, Hunter was largely disdainful of men, particularly those who would control and manipulate her.

In part because she was fiercely independent, rumors began to circulate regarding Hunter's sexuality. In 1919, possibly to quell these stories, Hunter married Willard Townsend. However, the couple never slept together. After the wedding they moved in with Hunter's mother, Miss Laura, and Hunter slept with her instead. But even this degree of marriage was not for her, and Hunter left two months later and obtained a divorce in 1923.

In the days of Prohibition, almost anything went, and in the notorious "buffet flats, " where many of the saloon singers also entertained, homosexuality was, if not fully accepted, at least tolerated and acknowledged. Although Hunter never discussed her lesbianism, she also did not keep her relationships hidden.

During her long-term relationship with Lottie Tyler, they shared apartments in New York and traveled to Europe together. Friends later recalled their relationship as volatile. Hunter was notoriously tight with money, while Lottie was something of a dilettante without much income of her own. Eventually, Lottie fell in love with another woman.

Hunter also maintained serious flirtations with men, but none developed into a lasting relationship. During her later years, rather than pursue the company of either men or women, Hunter focused her attention on caring for Miss Laura.

Although her love affairs failed to develop, Hunter's remarkable career flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. Her recordings and her performances throughout the United States on the black vaudeville circuit and the T.O.B.A. (Theater Owner's Booking Association) made her famous.

Like other African American entertainers, Hunter traveled to Europe, where racism was less oppressive. She performed in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. In 1928, she was featured opposite Paul Robeson in the London production of Showboat. Hunter credited herself as the "first colored girl singing in languages."

During World War II, she led several USO companies on missions to entertain American troops. She even gave a command performance for General Eisenhower at the war's end.

By the 1950s, however, the bookings had dried up, and the ever pragmatic, humanitarian Hunter sought a new career in nursing. She conned her way into a New York hospital's training program for licensed practical nurses by subtracting a dozen years from her age.

Hunter devoted tireless energy to her new profession, which she vigorously pursued for twenty years. No one ever suspected that she had been a star, and she was not one to recall those days.

She broke her vow not to perform only once during her tenure as a nurse, in 1961, to rerecord her signature composition, "Down Hearted Blues, " with pianist Lovie Austin, who wrote the music.

Hunter was forced to retire from nursing in 1977; the hospital believed she had reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy. (She was actually eighty-two.) The same year, the indefatigable Hunter embarked upon a remarkable return to performing.

Her voice deepened and enriched by the intervening years, she proved a sensation. She performed regularly at The Cookery in Greenwich Village and was a hit with audiences worldwide. A tiny woman swinging large, dangling earrings that seemed to weigh more than she did, Hunter became the toast of the talk-show circuit as well. She was full of energy, life, and humor.

During the last six years of her life, she recorded two new albums and oversaw the rerelease of her older material.

She died on October 17, 1984, at eighty-nine.

-Carla Williams

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Taylor, Frank C., with Gerald Cook. Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987.

SEE ALSO

Blues Music; Popular Music; Jazz; Cabarets and Revues; Smith, Bessie; Waters, Ethel