Intersections

(continued)

by Chris Wright

DODGING TRAFFIC: Schwartz gets a bumpy ride in Egypt.

WBUR

In 1988, Terry Gross invited Schwartz to be the classical-music critic on her NPR interview show Fresh Air. Though he could lollop blithely across a stage wearing nothing but a toga, his first stint before a radio audience left Schwartz stricken with a bad case of stage fright. Sitting in the canteen of WBUR in Boston, where he records his Fresh Air reviews, he explains why. "I think it had to do with being too conscious of the size of the audience," he says. "In theater, it's usually a few hundred people, at a poetry reading you're lucky if it's 50, but here, even if you couldn't see them, it was something like a million people. That puts a lot of pressure on you."

Twelve years on, Schwartz is a far cry from the man who sat in the WBUR studio sweating bullets. "I have a lot of faith in my own taste," he says. "And I have passionate feelings. I want to convince people that the things I value are the most important things.

"I believe in emotional expressiveness over technical finesse. Maybe they aren't mutually exclusive, but technical finesse isn't worth anything if the performance isn't about something, if it doesn't have an emotional content or dramatic shape. Not necessarily that this piece is telling the story of what happens when the violin gets up in the morning, but that there is a kind of emotional trajectory that leads to something, that means something, that reveals something. When I hear performances in music that don't have those qualities, then I can't value them, and I don't think anyone should. There are certainly people who don't agree with me a lot of the time, but I have to say what I think. And I'm in a position to do that, which is great."

Schwartz is acutely aware, meanwhile, that his audience doesn't want to be lectured to or spoken down to or, heaven forbid, bored. "I can be very opinionated," he says. "But one of the positive things about my not being a musicologist is that my weakest area as a critic has to do with technical vocabulary. I've never studied music in that way, so I don't have the vocabulary to be pretentious.

"One of the reasons I feel so good about being on the show is that I want my reviews, my written reviews, to be a kind of conversation with the reader. I want you to be able to read what I wrote and have it sound as if I'm talking to you. And when you're having a conversation with someone, you want to entertain them."

EMMANUEL CHURCH: "the moral center of musical life in Boston."

Emmanuel Church

You don't generally think of Newbury Street as being the moral center of anything. But according to Schwartz, Emmanuel Church, located at the ritzier end of Boston's ritziest shopping district, is "the moral center of musical life in Boston."

As we sit in the hushed chapel on a Monday afternoon, Emmanuel seems too small, too decorous, to be a major music venue. Yet, as Schwartz says, "some of the best musicians in the world play here." In this respect, Emmanuel serves as a microcosm of the city itself. "One of the wonderful things about Boston, for a city so much smaller than New York or Chicago, [is its] unbelievably rich musical tradition," he says. "If I had to be a music critic anywhere in the country other than New York, Boston is it."

Indeed, Boston's music world proved to be a rich vein for Schwartz. After a stint as the classical-music critic at the Herald in the early '70s, he found a permanent home at the Boston Phoenix in 1978. According to Schwartz, the Phoenix gave him the time and space to flourish as a essayist, rather than a journalist. "The thing that I discovered about my own writing when I started writing at the Phoenix," he says, "was that I had a gift for metaphor which I do not tap in my poetry. When I write about music, I can be very metaphorical, because I don't know how else to describe it."

In any case, he was doing something right. In 1994, Schwartz's Phoenix work won him a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, an event that he says changed his life.

Schwartz first heard about his Pulitzer, he says, in the middle of teaching a poetry workshop at UMass Boston. "The department secretary came down from the sixth floor, which was already a shock, and told me. I was just astonished," he recalls. "I called my mother and said, `Do you know what the Pulitzer Prize is?' And she said, `Why, did you win one?' "

Suddenly, Schwartz was as close as a classical-music critic gets to celebrity. But the triumph was tinged with regret. "One of the first things I said in an interview was I hope more people read my poems now," he says. "Suddenly, what I was known for being really good at was this criticism stuff. It's nice to be rewarded for something that you work hard at and take seriously, but I don't take criticism as seriously as I take my poetry."

"But I love it," he adds. "I do. I love it."

UMass Boston

Another thing Schwartz says he loves is teaching, which he has done at UMass Boston since 1982.

"One of the things that makes me believe so much in this institution is that it's very much like the one I went to as a student in New York City," he says. "I went to a public college that cost me 10 dollars a semester. I didn't have to work because I lived at home, and I did well. If my parents had had to pay for my education in any other way than just feeding me, then I couldn't have gone to college, because we couldn't have afforded it. So I owed my future to public education."

Working at a public college, though, is not without its frustrations. "Public higher education in this state gets so little support," he says. "Every time the legislature cuts the budget by a few hundred thousand dollars, it's just a catastrophe for us. Since I've been here, there's been a history of battling those catastrophes."

Occasionally, Schwartz will fantasize about getting a job at Harvard or BU: "It would be nice to get a huge salary. To be at an institution where I don't have to worry about whether the creative-writing program is going to exist in two years. It would be nice to not have to fight for everything every inch of the way."

Yet the most difficult aspect of Schwartz's job has nothing to do with money. "One of the painful things about teaching," he says, "is that you get attached to your students, and the thing about students is that they're always leaving." The students at UMass, Schwartz says, "are absolutely the most interesting bunch I've ever taught, partly because they are older and all of them have life experiences up the wazoo -- horrible things, often, but rich subject matter. There's always something new and exciting. So I feel fortunate. I'd hate to leave."

The Hebrew Rehabilitation Center

The final stop on our tour is the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center, a nursing home in Roslindale. We've come to visit with Schwartz's 95-year-old mother, Ida. Though she's suffering from an Alzheimer's-like condition that has ravaged her memory, Ida Schwartz has a sweet, serene, intelligent face. "Who be me?" she says from time to time. But when Schwartz starts singing some old standards, Ida follows right along: Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed. . . . And, despite her obvious confusion, she seems happy to have us here, her "special visitors."

"You're a nice man," Ida says to Lloyd as he sits stroking her hand.

"Well, I have a nice mother," he responds.

"Is she a nice lady?"

"It's you," he says. "You're a nice lady." At this, Ida smiles and takes a sip of ginger ale. This exchange takes place perhaps a half-dozen times over the course of our visit.

"My mother has always been my main support," Schwartz says. "I was the center of her life. It's so sad that she can't remember me."

And yet something seems to be passing between them, something that pierces the gauze of incomprehension -- an enduring emotional sense that exists outside cognition. Between Ida and Lloyd, between mother and son, there is an understanding of the blood. You're a nice man.

Just how important Ida and Lloyd are to each other is made clear in his latest collection of poetry, Cairo Traffic, which features several poems explicitly about his mother. The volume is suffused with a sense of melancholy and mortality that clearly arises from her current condition.

"These poems," he says, "are her last gift to me."

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Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.