A Life of Arts and Letters

Learning Never Ends for Matthew Ruggiero

Matthew Ruggiero, ALB '84, ALM '87

No one more clearly personifies the Harvard Extension School's motto, "Learning never ends," than Matthew Ruggiero, ALB '84, ALM '87. Nor is anyone's life a more elegant testimonial to the adage, "It's never too late." Ruggiero's admission to the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement a year ago is only the most recent destination in an educational voyage that has been extraordinary by any standard and shows no sign of coming to a conclusion. A classical musician who spent nearly 30 years with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ruggiero had no formal education after high school, except for his musical training. "All musicians must begin to prepare themselves at a very early age," he said, yet the cost of this intense preparation is the foregoing of many other forms of knowledge.

Born in Philadelphia in 1932, Ruggiero acquired his professional training in his native city at the Curtis Institute of Music. He spent five summers at the Marlboro Music Festival studying and performing chamber music in collaboration with Rudolf Serkin and Marcel Moyse. After performing three years as second bassoonist of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, Ruggiero moved to Boston in 1961 to assume joint duties as assistant principal bassoonist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and second bassoonist of the Boston Pops. Several years later, Seiji Ozawa and Arthur Fiedler appointed him principal bassoonist of the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops Orchestras.

He toured the Soviet Union as a member of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, with whom he later recorded an album of Stravinsky's chamber music. His recordings, in addition to those released by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during his tenure, include Mozart's Grand Partita, under the direction of Marcel Moyse. By 1963, he was also teaching music at Boston University's College of Fine Arts and at the New England Conservatory of Music.

"Living in the shadow of Harvard, I constantly felt the lack of a wider education and resolved one day to do something about it," he stated. In 1978, he took the first step toward remedying this gap when he came to the Harvard Extension School and began taking courses toward the Associate in Arts degree. By 1984, he had completed the Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree, cum laude. At that point, he was completely hooked and knew he would go on. He applied for candidacy in the Master of Liberal Arts Program, concentrating in English and American literature and language, and graduated in 1987. His master's thesis was on the subject of language in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Taking a sabbatical from his orchestral duties in 1988, he then studied at Harvard's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and earned an AM in Italian literature. To many people, earning two undergraduate and two graduate degrees in ten years might have seemed an adequate conclusion to this quest for knowledge. Not so for Ruggiero, though. From his perspective, this quest was only advancing to the next stage.

Once he retired from the Boston Symphony in 1989, he was accepted to an interdisciplinary doctoral program in literature and the arts through the University Professors Program at Boston University, where he was designated university scholar and fellow. It was here that his many interests and academic pursuits began to converge into an exciting new field of inquiry: the cross-fertilization between literary and musical art, in particular, the literary texts from which composers draw inspiration and the aesthetic process involved in transporting ideas from one medium to another. "While playing with the BSO," he said, "I wasn't that interested in the connections between the musical and the literary texts; but after my literary education began, I found myself thinking more and more of the connections." At the conclusion of his doctoral studies at the age of 60, he received the University Professors Program Alumni Prize for his dissertation, which was judged best of the year in May 1993. The dissertation focused on Verdi's operatic adaptations of Shakespearean plays. What he finds most fascinating about this general subject is "the way in which the composer effects a 'translation' from one form of the aural to another. The libretto is the intervening step between play and opera, yet, ultimately, it is the music that comes to the fore."

In recent years, Ruggiero has continued in his multiple roles as musician, teacher, and student. In May of 1994, he was honored by an invitation to sit on the jury of the 19th International Competition for Wind Instruments in Toulon, France. He has taught Italian language courses and interdisciplinary courses at Clark University, including one on Shakespeare and Verdi. And he has even served as teaching assistant to Dean Sue Weaver Schopf at the Harvard Extension School in her courses Understanding Poetry and Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory. Ruggiero still enjoys teaching young musicians and travels to Asia every summer with his wife, Nancy (a violinist and instructor at Wellesley College), to help train members of the Asian Youth Orchestra. (It should be noted that he studied the Japanese language for several semesters to prepare himself for this work.) Additionally, he continues to serve on the faculties of Boston University's College of Fine Arts and the New England Conservatory.

Now a member of both the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement (HILR) and the Brandeis Adult Learning Institute, he observed, "I came to these programs looking for a place to read books and talk about them with others. Nothing can compare with the range of life experiences that the members bring to our discussions." So far, he has taken courses on Shakespeare's sonnets and Tom Stoppard's plays and is already looking ahead to the coming year when he hopes to study either Renaissance Venice or Homer's Iliad. And he is teaching courses at both institutes as well. At Brandeis, he recently taught a course titled Three Voices of Poetry, which focused on the works of Keats, Dickinson, and Frost. At HILR, he taught one of its most popular courses last year on literature and opera, juxtaposing Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro with Rossini's and Mozart's operas of the same name, Shakespeare's Othello with Verdi's Otello, Buchner's Woyzek and Berg's Wozzeck, Carlo Gozzi's The Love of Three Oranges and Prokofiev's opera.

So how could Ruggiero's life get any fuller or richer? Add translator and possible production consultant to his resume. Among his many accomplishments, he completed a translation of Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which his brother-in-law--an actor and biographer--urged him to submit for consideration to the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble in Pennsylvania, since the company was in the process of comparing translations for a future production of the play. At the company's invitation, he spent a few days there in June taking part in a reading of the work. "I sat there thinking, Pirandello didn't write one word of what they're saying!" he laughed. If they choose his translation over the others, he will consult with them on the production in the 2003-04 season. Whatever the fate of his translation, one thing is certain: it will be just another stage in the ongoing intellectual journey of Matthew Ruggiero, which seems only to gain momentum with each new challenge. What Chaucer said of the Oxford scholar in The Canterbury Tales aptly describes Ruggiero as well: ". . . gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."