More than a century after her death, Isabella Stewart Gardner still fascinates

Boston Globe

20-02-2025

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Commissioning a piece about Gardner herself instead of the collection wasn't a problem for Steel, who said in a phone interview that he 'likes to do as little 'putting composers in a box' as possible.' This Sunday at the museum's Calderwood Hall, percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire and soprano Nicoletta Berry will present the world premiere of 'ghost story,' a song cycle inspired by the life and legacy that Gardner cultivated.
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'There's a way in which she was very much of her time, but there are aspects of her story that feel very current now,' said Waltham-based historian Natalie Dykstra, author of the 2024 Gardner biography 'Chasing Beauty.' 'The gorgeousness of her story, I think, is her capacity to stay open to life, and interested, and curious, even when there was much that discouraged her.'
'I was just drawn into her world,' said Kline, who said he read 'Chasing Beauty' and other Gardner biographies as background for the piece. The composer's most famous creation is 'Unsilent Night,' a starkly beautiful and entirely wordless processional for an ensemble of boomboxes;
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'Isabella is very famous, but also mysterious, and she did a lot to sort of cover her tracks in a lot of ways,' said Kline. However, he noticed that in her surviving correspondence with art historian Bernard Berenson dating from later in her life, Gardner began to express her personal feelings more. 'Even in her 60s and 70s, she's very playful,' he said. 'The one that floored me was when she said, 'I would mortgage my eyes to see you.' And I was like, wow, the lady can write lyrics.'
Composer-lyricist Phil Kline.
Lovis Ostenrik
Born into a wealthy New York City merchant family in 1840, Gardner was expected to settle into the life of an upper-class Boston matron after her marriage to John Lowell ('Jack') Gardner Jr. at the age of 20 — childrearing, making social calls, attending sewing circles with women in a similar income bracket. According to 'Chasing Beauty,' Gardner had trouble fitting in with Boston society, for reasons that have never been entirely defined. In 1863, the couple's only child, 2-year-old Jackie, died from pneumonia, and a doctor had ordered that she bear no more children. This only isolated her further, and she was in fragile condition when that same doctor 'endorsed a cure commonly prescribed to upper-crust Americans: a trip to Europe,' Dykstra wrote in 'Chasing Beauty.'
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That voyage would be the first of many she'd make throughout her life to far-flung locales, in which she'd absorb as much fine art, music, and architecture as possible, and nourish a social circle of mostly male intellectuals and artists including Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Henry James. Her husband died in 1898, but she carried on their plan to buy the plot of land upon which was built the mansion that became the museum.
'As she got older, she continued to make new friends; continued to assemble a kind of family of choice,' Dykstra said. 'It feels like there's much we can learn from her.'
Gardner herself isn't the only ghost present in 'ghost story,' however. Into the song cycle, Kline also incorporated his own adaptation of the museum's blurb about Govaert Flinck's 'Landscape with Obelisk,' which was stolen from the Dutch Room in the infamous
'Cut up the poem, you know, remove some things, and it becomes about the children that aren't there,' said Kline. 'That was probably the definitive moment of her life, in a way; recovering from the loss.'
Because not much of Gardner's personal correspondence survives, Steel said, 'we have to assemble what we think about her from the museum and other things she left behind.'
In including Owen's 'The Kind Ghosts,' Kline wanted to touch on the double-edged nature of Gardner's collecting without necessarily passing judgment. 'She and Bernard Berenson spent a lot of time, one could cynically say, looting Europe for its masterpieces, and bringing them back and putting them in her house,' he said. 'She did something that you could be cynical about, but at the same time it's also sort of magical.'
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Gardner's loneliness seemingly went hand in hand with a knack for attention-getting stunts, which included taking zoo lion cubs for a ride in her carriage and showing up to a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert after the Red Sox's 1912 World Series win while sporting a headband emblazoned with 'OH, YOU RED SOX'. This last one is also represented in 'ghost story,' through an excerpt from gossip magazine '
Dykstra sees Gardner's public legacy as a representation of 'enormous self-discipline,' she said. 'She could have so easily said, 'This is what I intended in the Titian room,' but she didn't want to get in the way of her visitors' experiences,' she said. 'I think people re-engage with the museum in fresh and new ways, because she never locked down what it meant.'
YARN/WIRE
Calderwood Hall, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Feb. 23, 1 p.m. 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at