Give ’em what they want

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Composers’ memoirs range from self-aggrandizing autofiction (think Hector Berlioz) to tales of struggle and overcoming (Richard Wagner), nostalgia for the days before music grew too dissonant (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and gratitude for a “happy life” (Darius Milhaud). Arguably the most entertaining – and stylish – of such memoirs is by Vernon Duke, a composer as well as a poet and, for a brief time, a painter. The title, Passport to Paris, is a metaphor for the pursuit of fame, which Duke enjoyed in short bursts. First published in 1955, it is here republished with nineteen poems written originally in Russian and now translated into English for the first time, most dedicated to Los Angeles, the city that became Duke’s last stop in life.

Duke was born in 1903 in a railway station in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. When the Revolution and Civil War spread from Petrograd to Moscow and on to Kyiv, he, his mother and brother fled with assorted aristocratic relatives to Constantinople and New York. (His father, a railroad engineer, had died.) From there, Duke went to Paris, London, again New York and elsewhere – though never back to his homeland.

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Photo credit: Ira Gershwin, left, and Vernon Duke, 1937 | © Bettmann/Getty Images