"It’s important to begin a season well, and the Ronen Chamber Ensemble did just that with the first concert of its series Tuesday night in the Hilbert Circle Theatre Wood Room."

That announcement of a beginning turned out to be a most regrettable ending: It began the last piece of journalistic prose Charles Staff was ever to type into his computer at the Indianapolis Star for publication the next morning as a music review. The date was last October 5, and the irony was that six days earlier the Indianapolis News, the paper for whom Staff worked for 44 years, had ceased publication. Charles and I had been friends for over 25 of those years--not intimate, inner circle type friends, but friends-in-music, for want of a better term. And I’m indebted to him for encouraging me into music reviewing myself. Which is why I have to call him Charles in this memoir. "Staff" just doesn’t work for me.

By far the most influential, charismatic member of the fourth estate in Indy’s performing arts community for most of those 44 years, Charles’ death on November 27 at age 70 is now only possible for me to accept because I had already "lost" him before the end of August. He determined, perhaps more emotionally than rationally, that he wanted to face his pending mortality with a minimum of people: those he was closest to, who lived nearby, who could convey him to the hospital, who could tend to him, look in on him. Mostly he wanted to face it alone. I was encouraged not to phone him, so I didn’t. But we did exchange a few letters before I last saw and talked with him at that October 5 Ronen concert. After having undergone radiation therapy, he appeared to the many who came up to wish him well to have been transformed into a slow moving, slow talking "old" man—a mere shell of the always vibrant persona he presented as recently as last July. (It was poignant to see him rather haltingly—and for the last time—following the score for the Debussy Flute, Viola, and Harp Sonata as it was being played, a practice he often engaged in at concerts with music he owned and especially revered.)

His last letter to me had surprised the hell out of me. I had assumed that one who savored life with such overt emotions-on-his-sleeve would be facing death in abject despair. However, this is what he wrote:

"What I’ve been going through is not what you think but sort of an adventure. Ever since I found out about the cancer, I’ve realized what a wonderful life I’ve had and that’s all I can think about. I’ve sat thinking until 3 in the morning, once until 4, and try as I may, I can only think positively. . .Dying is what we all do and I may now or later but I think the living of my life has been so great a life that it doesn’t matter that it must end." I don’t know if Charles maintained that serenity to the end, but it was uplifting to read it, and in it recognize the same direct syntax that has been a hallmark of his writing style ever since I read my first Charles Staff review after moving to Indianapolis in the early `60s.

When he came to the News in 1955 as a "cub" reporter, Charles started with no formal journalistic background or training. He had been a music major and a grad student at the IU School of Music; he studied composition under Bernhard Heiden, who in turn had studied under Hindemith. Starting at the paper, he became a protégé of long-time News music and theater critic Walter Whitworth. The two--both bachelors--were as diverse in their emotional makeup as was the disparity in their ages. According to Charles, Whitworth was a quiet man with a few close friends. Whitworth’s prose was flowery, but his reviews began with mundane, give-them-the-facts lead-ins, befitting early 20^th-century journalistic practice. Charles was outgoing, temperamental, and a formidable foe when he felt abused or crossed. He could incur the wrath of sponsors, presenters, musicians, and actors in the music and theater communities. Yet he had plenty of admirers. At concert intermissions he was often the center of attention, as friends, casual and close—some would include sycophants—clustered around him. He filled his life with activities on evenings he wasn’t working ("I’m sorry I can’t; I have a dinner party tonight" he often responded when I called to ask for some of his time). His reviews were simple, direct, filled with epigrams or catchy turns-of-phrases—and often were quite humorous. His use of metaphor reflected his considerable liberal arts background. He eschewed words like "eschew" and had a knack of using simple terms to express profound thoughts. And his leads were almost always attention getting: During his apprenticeship he quickly eased into this more modern journalistic style and made from it his own, without having been taught.

Whitworth lived ten years after Charles hired on, and during this period, as well as a number of years afterward, he took on as many tasks as the paper would allow a promising journeyman journalist: interviews, event previews and reviews in the areas of dance, theater, movies, music (starting as a Whitworth stand-in), and even television. During those years he interviewed many show business personalities, and even started an abortive interview with the aging Stravinsky as he was stepping out of a taxi ("He was drunk and his breath stunk," was mostly what Charles remembered from that encounter). Just earlier this year he was reminiscing that as a young "firebrand" he had wanted it all, but had "grown up" since then. And until the Star - News’ staff merger (always up for wordplay, Charles referred to it as "my" merger) in 1995, he had remained both music and theater critic for the News. After the merger he was given music only, for both papers—and he couldn’t have been happier. Music was always his first love—a visceral, tenacious love that was the one consoling constant in his career. For Charles, music was the "lithium" that stabilized a slightly manic depressive temperament, which he knew full well he possessed. (When we talked on the phone and he was at home, I always heard music in the background—usually opera, his first love within his first love.)

I got to know him somewhat by accident. It was sometime in the early `70s, and my then recent bride, herself a music major with a Master’s from Butler, was involved with the annual Butler Romantic Festival— then famous nationwide as the vehicle for reintroducing forgotten Romantic music by equally forgotten composers. Giving the event full coverage each year, Charles refused to be caught up in the hype— commenting that much of the presented music was forgotten simply because it was second or third rate material and deserved to be. I was impressed with his having the courage to state that opinion when critics from New York and a number of other large metropolitan centers were attending the event and waxing eloquent about it for their home readership. And I suppose I was also impressed because I basically agreed with him. At any rate festival founder Frank Cooper, then on the Butler music faculty and now musical director of the Festival Music Society’s summer early music series, asked my wife and me one evening if we would mind driving Charles—who didn’t drive, didn’t own a car— to the paper after the concert. His promised "ride" had disappeared.

That was the beginning of a countless number of drives downtown, the beginning of a year-in year-out discourse on music between Charles and myself that didn’t stop until last August. For one thing he was always wound up—almost in a hyper state—after a concert, whether his feelings were positive, negative, or in between. His verbal reflections to me as we were driving south on Capitol from any of several northern venues seemed to find their way into print the next afternoon, usually close to verbatim. By the time he sat down at his keyboard he essentially had his entire piece in his head. It explained why he was usually able to complete it well within an hour, driven by his desire to retire at a "decent hour" (the News’ deadline wasn’t until 7 the next morning). As he often stated, he was "a morning person doing a night person’s job."

What sorts of topics did we get into? Once a number of years ago, Charles, who was very conscious of dates in music history, observed that Bach died in 1750, and that six years later Mozart was born. Mozart, in turn, died in 1791, and six years later Schubert was born. I ventured that perhaps Mozart was Bach reincarnated and that the same "entity" continued with Schubert, explaining the later two composers’ prodigal talents. I had read in some New Age tract that six years was a typical "rest" period for a "great" spirit between incarnations. Charles, a devout agnostic and skeptic, merely asserted that that was interesting. I thought he had forgotten the matter until several days later when he phoned me and said very excitedly that he had been researching birth dates for an "appropriate" composer to follow Schubert’s death in 1828 by six years. He then said: "And get this: The best I could come up with was [Amilcare] Ponchielli (1834-1886) [known today only for his 1876 opera La Gioconda, which contains the famous `Dance of the Hours’]." We both agreed my theory was blown to hell.

More recently I posed the question to Charles the opera buff as to how many operas he could name in which sexual intercourse definitely occurred during the course of the plot, granting that it would most likely have taken place offstage. I knew of only one: Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte. Charles proceeded to name several others right off the bat, the most famous being Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. Had this ever been a Metropolitan Opera Quiz question? Charles, who listened faithfully to every Saturday afternoon Met radio production, didn’t think so, but agreed the question would be a good one.

Though knowledgeable in all musical genres, it was indeed opera that engaged Charles to the greatest degree. I doubt that more than one or two others in our metropolitan area has his depth and breadth of knowledge—from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) to John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) and beyond; Charles was able to cull within himself a complete Gestalt from this hybrid art form. Until recent years he was given as much as 26 column inches for his Indianapolis Opera reviews in the Saturday afternoon News (a typical music review nowadays might run from 13 to 18 inches). In that amount of space Charles had room not only to evaluate the performance in all its aspects but to digress into often fascinating historic sidelights regarding the opera’s composition, a notorious past performance involving a famous prima donna, etc. Of course the number of opera recordings and scores he owned were legion.

In that connection I had a number of occasions--mostly to borrow records--to visit Charles at his Riley Towers apartment, fortunately for him within easy walking distance to the paper and to most downtown performing venues. His living room was cluttered with books, records, a stereo, a TV set, a small grand piano, and the usual furniture. He had a panoramic view of downtown from his 26^th floor west facing window and pointed out that he had one of the best July 4 fireworks views of anybody—and more importantly a daily view of the sunset. The size of his record collection, obviously formidable, was, however, difficult to discern. Single rows of his records (and now CDs) were separated from one another, being scattered into every nook and cranny, not only in his living room but elsewhere. For example all his French composer recordings were in his bedroom closet. (It tickled him to point out that what better place was there for French music than in the "boudoir.")

Charles’ funeral was last Saturday at the Crown Hill Mausoleum’s Peace Chapel, and was a beautiful, wholly secular service, as Charles would have preferred. Sue Staton, recently retired orchestra manager for the Indianapolis Symphony and one of his closest life-long friends, was there. They had met in their student days at IU. ". . .we were dance partners in the sword dance in the ‘53 production of Brigadoon," she said. Later when she went to work for the ISO and Charles became the News’ music critic: "We went from being acquaintances to professionals who relied on and highly respected each other to [being] close friends. . .I don’t suppose I’ll ever walk into a concert again without thinking of him, and I know I’ll never enjoy another review as much as I did his."

That goes for me as well.