An American Lyricist

I heard the song once, and I was hooked. And I stayed being hooked until I bought a CD just for the song. It had, you see, a special meaning for me: I wanted to work through whatever issue was keeping me from passing auditions. I knew I was good, I knew that I was better than the rest, but I also kept, well, fucking up.

And so in moments of despair, I would listen to the song below: “Come Ready and See Me,” by Richard Hundley.

I know it now—it wasn’t to be. I am a racehorse, and to pass auditions requires the temperament of a plow horse. I’m also not an orchestral player; my playing is always just a bit too idiosyncratic, too personal for an orchestral player. So I did other things, and was happy doing them. And I learned, in the last week of my mother’s life—most people never do what they wanted and guess what? It really doesn’t matter. What matters are the people you loved, and been loved by.

I’m at the moment a writer, not a cellist. But who in the world was Richard Hundley, and what else has he written?

It turns out that it’s “is,” not “was”—though Hundley, born in 1931, is at a point where “is” may soon become “was.”

He was born to an itinerant laborer and a housewife; the parents divorced, his mother married and divorced two years later. His was a lonely and stressed childhood, but at age eleven he began studying at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. His piano teacher, a Hungarian woman who had been the assistant of Bela Bartok, was a strict disciplinarian.

Hundley moved to New York in 1950 to attend Manhattan School of Music, but dropped out due to financial difficulties. He continued to study composition, however, but had to take a job singing in the Metropolitan Opera Choir. He used the opportunity to approach some famous singers, notably Anna Moffo and Zinka Milanov; Moffo included some of his songs in her recitals—a definite shot for his career.

And why not?  Opera News called his music “heart-stoppingly beautiful, ” and the Christian Science Monitor said it was a “balm for weary ears and weary throats.”

Check out the next song….

Hundley quit the choir in 1964, saying that he was tired of having dead men’s music in his ears. What does he do next? How does he make his living? The few websites that I’ve seen—and few exist on him—don’t say. He doesn’t appear to be teaching—either piano or composition. He was likely composing and, as well, being a vocal coach or studio pianist. And he writes wonderfully for the piano, as you can hear below.

He’s also remarkably sensitive to text, as you can hear.

One website does mention that he met and socialized with Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Alec Wilder and Marc Blitzstein—and that may provide a clue.

For there’s a curious absence of anything personal in the websites about Hundley; there’s no mention of the marriages, the wives, the children. And all of the five people listed above.

They were reticent but also, some of them, surprisingly sexual active. And they were gentlemen, as a friend used to say, of that sort.