Remembering David's (and my) digs
David Britton died on September 22, 1992. As AIDS continues still to take its toll, one thing we survivors can do is to make certain that our stories and shared memories are not totally lost. Herbert Howells once said to me, "The worst thing about growing old is that all your friends are dead." Perhaps we have come to realize this earlier than those of some previous generations. So, remembering David, here is a bit of mutual history.
My memories of David Britton are anchored most securely in their connections to places we both lived. A college generation apart, David and I first met when he came to Oberlin Conservatory as a freshman in 1959, my senior year there. I remember him as a very cute young organist who appeared, eventually, in the ear-training class I was conducting for the Con's demanding theory professor Robert Melcher.
In David's unfinished autobiography he reminisced that I had "passed on" my living quarters to him when I left Oberlin. This was such a unique situation that it requires some explanation. During my final year at Oberlin I had succeeded to the "organist's room," a downstairs bedroom in the home of Oberlin's most distinguished professor of history, Dr. Frederick Binkerd Artz. His house at 157 North Professor Street was a Cape Cod cottage designed in 1940 for Artz and his friend, psychology professor Raymond Stetson. They shared the space until Stetson's death, after which a roomer became part of the Artz establishment. Since I had just returned from participating in Oberlin's first obligatory junior year abroad in Salzburg, I especially enjoyed the cultured ambiance of Artz's elegant home, with its 14,000-volume private library and collection of rare books on architecture. The wood-paneled book-lined living room, with its floor-to-ceiling shelves and full-length French windows opening to a tree-filled back yard, had been dubbed "the most beautiful room in Oberlin." A formal dining room, with antique table, chairs, and oil paintings, was on the opposite side of the entrance hall, a passage presided over by a marble bust of Queen Victoria. Any hint of student hijinks or impropriety would be met with Artz's quasi-humorous but austere quoting of Victoria's "We are not amused!"
The student's room adjoined hall and living room. There was a couch bed that had to be made up and covered with its tailored brown bedspread during daytime hours. This room's shelves contained porcelain and china, much of it ugly to my taste, but, of course, all of it hideously valuable and expensive. With David's interest in crystal and fine china, he probably found the decor more felicitous than had I.
Artz was the soul of propriety. An oft expressed tenet of his life was "The neighbors mustn't talk," so, for the most part, visits by fellow students or friends could not be made at indiscreet hours. The elderly professor, an opinionated, self-centered man, was known for his rigid adherence to schedule. Bedtime for him was 9:30 p.m. If he should have guests, it was not unusual for him to leave them sitting in his living room as he abruptly went off to bed to get his rest at the appointed hour. Artz was also lonely, a kindly host, a stimulating conversationalist, and a landlord who occasionally left small gifts or brief notes on his lodger's bed.
Artz always solicited recommendations for a successor from each incumbent. A personal interview was obligatory. If Professor Artz was satisfied with the candidate, the proposed student gained a gorgeous room at a very low rent. David did not succeed me directly, but he did become Artz's roomer during his own senior year, after returning from his year abroad.
Just before moving to 157 North Professor Street, David had completed the "happiest time of [his] life"—nine months of study in Salzburg. He spent the summer of 1962 touring Italy and Germany on his own, and it was in the small town of Himmelpforten where we met again. I was there to play a recital on the restored Scherer organ of the Lutheran Church, and I remember vividly the recital, and the following good times, complete with a fresh strawberry feast given for my parents, fellow Eastman graduate organ student Cameron Johnson, David and me by church pastor Schomerus and his wife. David and I spent the next several days and nights in Hamburg, exploring that exciting and historic north-German seaport.
As graduate school loomed on his horizon, David's decision to audition for David Craighead at the Eastman School and for Arthur Poister at Syracuse University brought him to Rochester in February of 1963. I gave a small dinner party for him at the apartment of my best friend, Cameron Johnson. I don't remember the menu (or much else) for we all drank an inordinate amount of warm Japanese sake. David, in good shape from his dance classes, began jumping over sofa and chairs; I am told that the rest of us emulated his activities. If so, it would have been the only time in my life that I have accomplished feats of such athletic prowess unassociated with organ pedals!
This visit was also David's introduction to the lodging that was to become his Rochester address, 20 Sibley Place, then a living space much favored by Eastman graduate students. This spacious neo-Georgian house was on a cul-de-sac just off East Avenue, within a relatively comfortable walking distance of the school. The owner was a grandmotherly widow named Marian Anderson. Landlady and den mother, she was renowned for her lamb curry dinners and her devotion to Jack Paar's Tonight Show on television. An unflappable woman, she didn't mind if her student roomers had overnight guests, but she did ask that we introduce them to her so she wouldn't encounter absolute strangers at her downstairs telephone!
Another Marian, Miss Powers, added an endearing air of zaniness to the place. A lady of "uncertain" age, Miss Powers worked at Sibley's, the downtown department store. She would come home from work quite exhausted, with tired feet. Immediate R&R consisted of replacing her high heels with pink "mules" and consuming large quantities of alcohol. By dinnertime, or, at least by TV-watching time, she would putter up and down the hall staircase muttering the incomprehensible phrase, "Three bags full," under her breath if she were greeted.
My room at 20 Sibley was a tiny attic space into which I had somehow crammed my two-manual Sperrhake harpsichord. Perhaps the most notable of the several private concerts given there was the jam-packed event in the spring of 1962 when Austrian harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm, teaching at Oberlin for her first American residency, came to Rochester and played the entire first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier for an invited audience.
Upon his arrival in Rochester David was offered a spacious second-floor room at 20 Sibley Place, a space which had become available due to the death of its former occupant, an elderly relative of Mrs. Anderson's. David lived here during his entire Eastman career. Just before he arrived I left to begin my professional career as a university professor far to the south in Virginia, but I was able to observe David's absorption into the fabric of life at 20 Sibley on several return visits.
The coincidental concordance of our living in the same houses came to an end with David's move to Columbus, Ohio. But there was yet another shared experience from our student years: David ended his doctoral organ recital with Hugo Distler's Partita: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, the same work which had concluded my own Eastman doctoral recital four years earlier.
