The Heart of a Composer

Over the years, Getty’s celebrated compositions have been performed around the world, including his hometown. In 1984, the San Francisco Symphony premiered his first opera, Plump Jack, and in 2015, the San Francisco Opera presented his one-act opera Usher House. Getty’s anthology includes piano and orchestral pieces, operas and songs. And at 90 years old, he is still hard at work, doing what he loves most — making music. Next month, Getty will be honored by Festival Napa Valley with the Angels of the Arts Award, at the War Memorial & Performing Arts Center.

On a rainy January afternoon, I sat down with Getty in his cozy composing room tucked behind the kitchen in his pale yellow Pacific Heights home. Our conversation took place surrounded by Getty’s Steingraeber & Söhne piano, shelves overflowing with LPs and CDs, and framed mementos from an extraordinary life, including photos of his beloved wife, Ann, who passed away in 2020. With boyish enthusiasm and an eye toward the future, Getty reflected on decades of music, creativity and a life well lived.

Tell me a bit about your childhood. What was a young Gordon Getty like, and what did you want to be as a little boy? I remember wanting to be a baseball player, but I had zero talent. I couldn’t catch a pop fly. But I always knew that I was born to be a composer and a versifier. I hate to call myself a poet, but I write verse. What I didn’t realize is that I would end up with interests also in economics and biology. That came to me as a surprise. So those are my four fields: composing, verse, economics and biology.

What’s the first piece of music you composed? Well, I’ll put it this way: My mother told me, “You take your first piano lesson as soon as your feet can reach the pedals.” So that’s what she arranged for me to do. In those days most schools provided piano lessons. I don’t know if their teacher was on staff or just handy, but here’s something funny that happened. After my first Plump Jack episode was performed by the San Francisco Symphony ... it made the newspapers, of course, because of the fame of my father. And my first piano teacher from military school in Los Angeles ... he taught me how to write the scales — the treble clef and the bass clef and the key signatures. He said, “As soon as you learn those things, you should write a piece.” So I wrote a piece, I think of one or two pages. And by God, he kept it and sent it to me.

For all those years he kept it? He must have seen you had some talent! He must have seen that I had something on the ball. (Laughing.)

What attracted you to the genre of opera? Oh, I dig opera. There’s something about the mixture of art and athleticism. Like I say I’m a lousy athlete, but I respect it. And producing a big tone without effort is a tricky thing to do. … I loved classical music all my life, but I showed not much interest in opera separately before my voice changed. ... Around that time, I and my older brother Paul both became avid, rabid opera fans, and we collected records. This was going back to the mid-’40s. And we collected records of [Enrico] Caruso and [Mary] McCormic and [Beniamino] Gigli and the great singers ... [Kirsten] Flagstad.

What do you love most about composing music? If you’re a composer, you’re driven. ... It’s an addiction. You have to do it.

Does it come naturally? Or do you have to really work at it? Both. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this, or his daughter or somebody wrote, that he would spend as much as a whole afternoon figuring out a single line. And I’ll do that. I’ll figure a whole afternoon on one little cadence, because I don’t necessarily stay within the rules of what a cadence should be, but I consult the rules first because I’m basically very traditional. And I know there’s always a solution. There’s always an answer. ... I can spend all day working this thing out.

That gives rise to a memory back in the early ’80s when I composed The White Election [a cycle of 32 songs for soprano and piano on poems by Emily Dickinson] because I worked on all 1,800 of her poems. ... There were no punctuation signs except an occasional random capital letter and dashes. And I remember spending two weeks parsing one of the sentences. “What is the verb and what is the subject? What is the object? What does this series of words mean? Where does this sentence end and this one begin? What the heck is going on here?” I remember taking two weeks. Two weeks, figuring out what was going on in this poem!

So what are you working on today? Today the utmost priority is Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which is completed, but I want it perfected because we’re starting to record it. [Getty’s fourth opera, billed as “an opera reimagined for film,” premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2021 in partnership with Festival Napa Valley.]

Do you consider yourself a perfectionist? Oh yeah.

Well, that’s why you’re so good! I’m as good as anybody thinks I am. It’s only style points in composing, same with verse. In economics and biology, that’s different. There, there are concrete measurements that your math has got to stand up [to] and your tests have got to test out. (Laughing.)

You went to St. Ignatius High School and USF, both Catholic institutions. How do you think those schools shaped your life? Well, they gave me a lifelong fondness for the Jesuits. I’m not religious [but they taught] respect. Respect. But it was basically the three R’s [reading, writing and arithmetic]. That’s what I really want from education, because social values and stuff, I think we each just make up our own minds on that. And history, of course. The liberal arts is what interests me most. I was good at math in high school. I didn’t take any in college. Then I was self-taught in higher math. About 40 years ago I realized there were certain problems I was working on that I couldn’t solve without learning calculus, so I bought the textbooks and learned calculus.

Maybe the Jesuits taught you to be a lifelong learner as well. Well, my father told me that. When I was still in high school, I asked his advice, not so much because I depended on his advice [but] because I thought it was a nice thing for a son to do, to ask his father for advice on what university [to] go to. He said, “Well, if you want petroleum meteorology, petroleum engineering, you can’t beat University of Oklahoma, but all you really need is liberal arts. You can learn all the rest.” And that’s from J. Paul Getty. Isn’t that interesting?

It is. You wouldn’t have thought that, would you? That took me by surprise. All you need is liberal arts. And he further said, “What you really learn in college is how to learn.”

And did you find that to be true? Yes. Well, again, teaching yourself calculus — not many people have done that.

Tell me about your father and your relationship with him. We were a huge mutual admiration society. He was on my case sometimes, but he was an amazing guy, and I was one of the few people he listened to seriously. Everybody listened to him seriously. But now, the faults you hear about him were all true. He was a tightwad to the point of eccentricity. But look what he gave to the Getty Museum. … He was a caring man. He had principles, and he was a man of his word.

What’s the greatest lesson he taught you? That your enemy today may be your friend tomorrow, and don’t bear grudges. That’s not so much from what he told me, but from what I saw him do. I remember him saying, “When you’re in the business room, check your personality outside.”

You grew up in one of the most famous and one of the wealthiest families in America. What were the biggest advantages and liabilities of that life? First of all, you want to bear in mind that although we realized we were well-to-do, that we lived in the better sections of Los Angeles, and people were vaguely aware of my father’s name, we never got the news that my father was the richest American until that Fortune article in ’57, I think it was. By that time, I was out of college. So I knew my father was rich, but we all thought, “Oh, no, that guy’s father, he’s the rich guy. He’s the son of the rich guy in the room.” Which is nice, because it’s better not to be known as the son of a famous person. A son of a respected person, that’s the best.

But as far as the advantages and liabilities, well, as a composer, the advantage is that everything I compose will be looked at, for curiosity if nothing else. And as far as prejudices, there are prejudices. Of course there are people, and probably the majority, that think I haven’t paid my dues, and how could I possibly be one of the very best composers in the world as distinct from a passable composer? There are a lot of people who think I couldn’t possibly be one of the best. But I invite you to ask the opinion of any other composer, whether I know them or not, because they all know my music.

You and your late wife, Ann, are known as wonderful philanthropists. What causes are you most passionate about? Well, the record shows that I’ve gone all in on the Conservatory [of Music] in San Francisco. I like to support things that I understand maybe a little better than the next guy, and that includes music.

Not long ago you gave $15 million, a portion of the proceeds from the auction of your art collection, to USF. Yes. God knows, you’ve got to kind of be loyal to the institutions that educated you.

You have such diverse interests: arts, science, economics, winemaking, to name a few. Do you think that’s what keeps you sharp and engaged? Well, I’m sharper than many people I know, aged 90. I realize one of these days I’m not going to be, and I’ll have to give up some of these responsibilities, maybe all of them.

What is the key to longevity? Good genes. My mother and father both died at 83.

What do you think about this next generation of philanthropists in the City? No clue. If you asked me about the next generation of opera singers and composers, I could pipe up.

What brings you the most joy these days? Well, being with my family, of course. But you ask any composer, and composing is a kind of a demon, but I get the monkey off my back by composing. And that’s a kind of joy.

What would you like to be remembered for? For my dear children and grandchildren.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.