The Farewell Symphony was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997. The title references Haydn’s symphony in which musicians leave the stage one by one until only two violins remain — an obvious metaphor for the AIDS epidemic that dominates the novel’s second half. The book covers the 1970s and 1980s: the decade of gay sexual liberation (bathhouses, Fire Island, the Clone culture) followed by the decade of plague.
The first half of the novel is a portrait of a sexual culture in full flower — not apologetically but celebratorily. White describes the 1970s gay male world of New York with encyclopedic specificity: the bars, the baths, the cruising grounds, the codes of dress and behavior, the elaborate sexual choreography, the democratizing eros that cut across class lines. This is not nostalgia but documentation — a record of something that was destroyed so completely that without such testimony it might be forgotten.
The second half is devastating. One by one, the narrator’s friends, lovers, and acquaintances sicken and die. White tracks each death with the same precision he brought to the sexual encounters of the first half — the wasting bodies, the hospital rooms, the memorials, the survivors’ guilt, the political rage at government indifference. The structural parallel between the symphony’s musicians departing and the narrator’s community disappearing gives the novel its formal power.
White’s own HIV diagnosis (he is seropositive) gives the writing an urgency that transcends literary craft. This is testimony as much as art — a witness bearing witness.
Collecting The Farewell Symphony
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20