Albert Fuller in the Washington National Cathedral

The executors of Albert's estate generously gave me Albert's framed program from his 1950 organ recital in the Washington National Cathedral, in which he gave one of the very first US performances of Messiaen's Ascension Suite. Below find an image of that program, preceded (above this text and below it) by some illustrated background from the just completed second edition of my book OH MY GOD: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever, which is based on my film Apparition of the Eternal Church, of which Albert is both star and muse.

As usual, remember to click on these images to get a larger and more legible version. Also, the director's commentary at the bottom of page 39, above, continues onto page 40, which isn't included in this blog post. Last, if you're in Dallas, Chicago, Sackville (New Brunswick), Austin, Concord, Washington D.C., Phoenix or London, check this page for screenings between now and the December 10th Messiaen centenary.

Potential Buyers Serenaded

From the "Big Deal" column in THE NEW YORK TIMES by JOSH BARBANEL

Published: February 17, 2008

You never know what a broker is going to find when showing a Manhattan apartment.

Sharon E. Baum of the Corcoran Group came across the unexpected when she opened the door of an apartment at 27 West 67th Street, owned by the estate of Albert Fuller, a harpsichordist and influential figure in the revival of early instrumental music. The co-op was as a haven for artists at the turn of the 20th century.

Ms. Baum and her client were greeted not by dirty laundry or even sweet-smelling cider bubbling on the stove, but by the strains of a work by Heinrich von Biber, a 17th-century composer, played on a Baroque-style violin with gut rather than steel strings by Colin Jacobsen, accompanied by a lute, harpsichord and cello.

Mr. Fuller’s apartment, a five-room duplex with a double-height living room and a barrel-vaulted 17-foot ceiling, had been used for decades as a musical salon and performance space, and while it was on the market, it was still being used for rehearsals.

Mr. Fuller died last September at the age of 81.

Since the first showing, Ms. Baum and James Roe, the executor of the estate and artistic director of the Helicon Foundation, which was founded by Mr. Fuller in the 1980s to support the early instrument movement, have been coordinating schedules. Now, musicians play when many potential buyers walk through.

“The kind of people who look at an apartment like this want to be near Lincoln Center and Juilliard,” Ms. Baum said. “Everyone who walks in doesn’t want to leave; they want to stay.”

The apartment, owned by Mr. Fuller since the 1970s, is decorated in an exuberant style. “The residence retains many prewar details awaiting restoration to their original glory,” Ms. Baum wrote in the listing.

Mr. Roe said that the foundation was supported in its early years by gifts from Alice Tully, a soprano and philanthropist, who died in 1993. Now, he said, a part of the proceeds of the sale will go to the foundation.

Bobby White's remarks at AF's Tribute Concert (12 Nov 07)

ALBERT FULLER - Thoughts in Passing
How do I celebrate the life of someone as remarkable as Albert Fuller? How do I explain those feelings of loss, the loss of truly one of my very closest friends, mentors, best, best buddies in the whole world?

Albert was unique. I--and virtually everyone I ever have known that came in contact with him in the glory years, in Albert's youth and very enlightened older age, before he got ill these past several years and slowed down--all agree that there was no one like him. His radiant sense of humor and appreciation of the offbeat and bizarre, informed so much of what made him special.

His words and insights could sometimes be 'sharp', but they were always to the point. This ability was apparent from early on. Albert loved to tell how he handled a stern headmaster's challenge when he was a mere 9 year old boy in his Washington D.C. grade school. The teacher glowered at Albert in his seat and said, "MASTER Fuller, did you give me a dirty look?" Albert replied, with great calm, "Teacher, you might have a dirty look, but I didn't give it to you!"

The experiences that I had through Albert's kindness, his loving friendship, his caring about me as a human being, as a musician.. as an artist..enhanced my life in myriad ways....Albert reminded any and all of us, students and professionals alike, that we each must be (pause) "The Artist of Your Life". "Don't let people put you down!", he'd say. "Don't let ANY one smother your art! And the biggest person to watch out for in all of this, is your SELF, because YOU'RE the one most responsible for keeping that spark of art alive in your heart!"

Albert helped us achieve this so often by his own enthusiastic example......whether it meant cooking an absolutely FLAWLESS, Glorious, Chinese meal for a dozen friends, or a classic French meal, or an Italian one..or a Belgian waterzooi, (Pronounced vatter-zoy), ..whatever the cuisine, Albert could throw it together at the drop of a toque..(PAUSE) And there'd always be 'Music' following dinner, either live or in recordings of extraordinary performances from Monteverdi to ALMOST Montovani...by that I mean, Aretha Franklin would share the spotlight with Wanda Landowska or Janis Joplin with Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres. If the music-making was superb, that's all that mattered to Albert.

I met him in 1961 when I was 24 years old– can it be nearly half a century ago?- at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, I sang in numerous concerts with Albert at the helm. So many beautiful performances took place as well with Mel Kaplan's New York Chamber Soloists...Albert inventing away at the clavicembalo. As Artist-in-Residence at the NYU Medical Center over on East 30th Street, Albert presented many seasons of extraordinary concerts under the aegis of his great friend on the NYU Medical Faculty, immunologist Dr. Zoltan Ovary.

I will never forget the glorious Baroque operas Albert arranged and conducted here at Juilliard in the 70s, as well as endless instrumental and vocal works performed through the years at his Aston Magna and later, Helicon series. A stunning Platée- of Rameau- radiantly sung by then Juilliard student Barbara Hendricks under Albert's direction- is only one of many events that remain burned in my memory. His beautiful apartment on West 67th street with the two-story living room was the scene of so many wondrous musical evenings. Pianos and harpsichords and viols and lutes were constantly coming in and out of the apartment as young performers took their places for yet another 'soiree musicale' chez-Albert.

Lovely performances took place as well in a number of the several sumptuous apartments lived in by his great friend and musical benefactor, Gregory Smith. I recall a special evening of French poesie and Couperin music at Gregory's french-boiseried home on 73rd street just off Vth Avenue - The Pulitzer Mansion. Albert played harpsichord, Hugues Cuenod sang and Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud read Racine and Moliere texts.

Albert had a great friendship with Alice Tully who was in his home so often for dinners and concerts. Through Albert, young performers got to know and perform for this legendary lady in the most gracious and personal of ways. How fitting that Albert was to be Alice's affectionate and perceptive biographer.

Another great friend and colleague was Hugues Cuenod, the Swiss tenor, who made his Met Opera debut in 1986 at the age of 84 in the Zefirelli production of "Turandot". I heard that performance, seated between Albert and Alice (who was born the same year as Cuenod..1902). Recently this past Summer, to the astonishment of us all, Albert, confined to a wheelchair, flew- ON HIS OWN- to Switzerland to celebrate Cuenod's 105th Birthday(!), and, as Albert put it all too prophetically, "to say 'goodbye' to Huguie."

I'd like to end this note on Albert by reading from an email I received from another dear friend and colleague, the distinguished British pianist Graham Johnson, who too, was devoted to this wonderful man. Graham writes: "..Albert retained voracious interests in ALL aspects of music-making and he greeted those whom he regarded as talented with an openness of heart that will always be unforgettable. Like all great artists he was capable of being moody and self-absorbed, but he remained to the end someone who respected talent when he saw it, and found it, as an utterly sacred thing, to be nurtured, helped, advised and encouraged....One of the greatest teachers, thus, that I have ever known.... After an evening in his company when he was on form, one could be lifted to another place. Whatever our problems, we were artists and part of a family that nothing could destroy. Albert made one feel part of a blessed community of kindred and supportive spirits."

Graham says in closing, "Albert treasured a signed portrait of Mae West that I had bought him at the Argosy Bookstore in Manhattan after staying at his flat in 2000. Couperin and Aretha Franklin.... Alice Tully and Mae West.... that was our incomparably curious, incomparably iconoclastic Albert."

Robert White
12 November 2007

photos from 1992 and 1993

In 1992, Albert led and played this concert by the Helicon Ensemble in Weill Hall.

Playing on gut strings in public scared the daylights out of me, but I was grateful to Albert for the opportunity nonetheless.

After Alice Tully's stroke in 1993, Albert brought his students the Italian pianist Marco Rapetti, the Swedish cellist Johan Stern and me (whom Albert had collectively introduced to his Helicon audiences as the "Testosterone Trio," or "The Testostertones") to Miss Tully's apartment in the Hampshire House to play for her. I'm almost certain we played Brahms, though Albert has it as Schumann on p. 147 of his Alice book, among other elaborate improvisations on the facts of that extraordinary afternoon.

Article by David Fuller, Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo

For half a century, I have watched happy faces fall as they tell me how pleased thay are to meet me and how much they have enjoyed my recordings, my concerts, and even my books, and I tell them, I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong Fuller. It happened easily, since we moved in many of the same circles, he was less than a year older, and I even played the harpsichord, sort of. In fact, that was how we met. It was 1953-4. I had come back from three years abroad and had developed enough curiosity about harpsichords to want to get one. Since I was knocking around Boston and Cambridge, I bought one of Hubbard & Dowd’s first four instruments, already second-hand, and joined the little club of which Thomas Dunn and Albert were the principals. Albert had just come through the hands of Ralph Kirkpatrick at Yale, and was willing to give me lessons (like him, I had begun as an organist). The setting of those lessons, spaced out informally over two or three summers, was one of the great shingle-style “cottages” at Manchester-by-the-Sea on Boston’s north shore, belonging to the brilliant and infinitely cultured Gregory Smith and his family, one of Albert’s very closest friends from his Washington days to Gregory’s death. I never spent more than a night or two there for my lessons, but those visits were non-stop party-time with non-stop music. Albert, who spent summers there, christened it “Nerve-Ending-by-the-Sea,” exactly right for bunches of high-powered people living on the edge. He was the Smiths’ window onto the world of professional music, to which in those days their social position decreed that they must ever remain fascinated outsiders. Albert was then playing on and off with the New York Chamber Soloists, and I remember one party that culminated in a couple of Brandenberg Concertos in the living room with both Albert and Tom at their harpsichords (which normally lived in a sort of conservatory they called the “tile pile”), the orchestra, and invited guests. No matter whom the house-guest list included during my visits, it was clear that that it was from Albert that the fun and the life radiated.

This capacity to illuminate whatever he touched reached its culmination in the enterprise that he called “Aston Magna,” after the Berkshire estate of Lee Elman where it began in 1972. An idea of its pioneering importance in the period-instrument movement in this country can be had from the article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001). I knew it for the interdisciplinary Academy it spawned in 1978, and at which I lectured on aspects of French harpsichord music in 1979, 1980, and 1982. Why French? Because I had been sufficiently ravished by Albert’s playing of this elegant and elusive music in the old days at Nerve-Ending to make it my career and write my dissertation and a great deal more besides on it—and to dedicate an edtion of music by Armand-Louis Couperin to him (A-R Editions. 1975, and still in print!). The original mix of disciplines and outlooks at Aston Magna was enormously stimulating, but what was so peculiarly “Albert” about life there was the cooking. He managed to find chefs who could turn out three meals a day for weeks, each one different and each one sensational, and this for dozens of people in an institutional setting. He was a first-class cook himself, by the way, and developed a particularly violent passion for Chinese food, becoming a close friend of the New York restaurateur Sheila Chang and even learning a bit of restaurant Chinese to use with waiters. I had a lot of this cooking, since for years I used his apartments at 162 W 54th St. and 27 W 67th St. as my New York hotels. In 1968, I stayed with him a few days in a rented house in Fire Island Pines, whither he had brought a clavichord on which to prepare his recording of Bach’s E-minor partita. I shall never again be able to hear that toccata without the remembered sound of the surf almost drowning out the whisper of the clavichord.

The reader who would like to experience something of the rich, enveloping personality of this extraordinary man can find it reflected in a remarkable and engaging way in his memoir of Alice Tully (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For the sake of his memory I hope that it, too, is still in print.

David Fuller (no relation), September 23, 2007.

photo: AF at work on his Alice Tully book

We were at Fire Island, where Albert had rented a place in the Pines--his very own writer's retreat--to finish his Alice Tully book. As you can see in the picture (click on the image for a larger version), it was then called "Alice Tully: A Period Instrument," which was in fact an improvement over "Alice Tully: Edwardian Supergirl." The third try, "Alice Tully: An Intimate Portrait," was certainly the charm.