A tribute to Lawrence Clark Powell: An exhibit in the Powell Library Rotunda, June 23, 2002

Creative Engagement: Drama, Fiction, and Musical Criticism

Lawrence Clark Powell.
The Blue train. With an afterword by Henry Miller.
Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.

Powell’s first novel, The Blue train, was written in 1941, when he was 35. Despite Henry Miller’s encouraging response, reproduced here as an afterword, the author waited until he was seventy to first publish the work.

Lawrence Clark Powell.
Madeleine: an excerpt from The Blue train, with stencil illustrations by Vance Gerry.
Pasadena: The Weatherbird Press, 1990.

This fine press edition, printed by Vance Gerry at his Weatherbird Press, is a selection of one of the five chapters from The Blue train.

Lawrence Clark Powell.
Musical blood brothers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Josef Haydn.
Malibu: Press of the Prevailing Westerly, 1966.

Powell’s two short pieces on Mozart and Haydn were originally delivered as addresses to the Zamorano Club. These were published together as a keepsake for the joint meeting of the Roxburghe and Zamorano clubs in Los Angeles.

Lawrence Clark Powell, compiler.
My Mozart commonplace book.
Tuscon: Privately Printed, 1980.

Lawrence Clark Powell, compiler.
My Haydn commonplace book.
Tucson: Privately Printed, 1983.

In the early 1980s Powell published these two collections of commentaries on Mozart and Haydn, the two composers he referred to as "musical blood brothers." He saw these small books as a "testimony of love for [the composers] whose music has solaced and fortified me ever since the first long-playing recordings of the early 1950s enabled me to begin and end my days with music."

Powell noted in his preface to the Haydn volume, "Although my taste is not limited to Mozart and Haydn, it is their music that best meets my need for the light and the shade, the joy and sadness which, when blended, gives wholeness and meaning to life. In them, the one a worldly failure, the other unfailingly successful, we hear both exalted by the same spirit which, in transcending space and time, created through them music more precious than all the world’s gold."

Lawrence Clark Powell.
Susanna’s secret, or the lost Mozart letters.
Tucson: Press of the Mesquite Harpsichord, 1981.

Powell’s dramatic rendering of the relationship between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace (his first Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro) originated in the fact that Mozart’s letters to her have never been found. This "entertainment for spoken words and music" was the author’s imaginary solution to the search for these letters.

Powell wrote in his introduction, "The work is intended for chamber production with period sets and costumes and music by Mozart and Haydn. In order to provide the audience with some historical and bibliographical background, a spoken prologue is called for. This and the music I leave to the discretion of the director."

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