Richard Halley

Richard Halley is the composer in Atlas Shrugged whose music Dagny Taggart loves above all other, and who vanished on the evening of his greatest public triumph. He is the novel's only artist among the strikers, and Ayn Rand uses him to extend the strike's argument from production into art.

Phaethon

Halley wrote in obscurity for nineteen years. His opera Phaethon was first performed when he was twenty-four and was booed off the stage; nineteen years later it was staged again and received the greatest ovation the opera house had ever given.

The story he set is the Greek myth in which Phaethon takes his father's sun-chariot and is destroyed for the presumption. Halley changed the ending: in his version Phaethon drives the sun across the sky and succeeds. That alteration is the novel's compressed statement of Romantic art as Rand understood it — the deliberate presentation of man as able to achieve what he attempts, against a tradition that treats the attempt itself as the sin. See Esthetics and The Romantic Manifesto.

Why he quit

The day after the ovation, Halley retired, sold the rights to his music and disappeared.

What Rand is dramatising is not bitterness at long neglect. It is Halley's judgment about what the applause meant. His audience had not changed its estimate of the work; the work was the same work it had booed. What had changed was that he had suffered for nineteen years, and the applause was payment for the suffering — approval extended because he had been made to pay enough for it. An artist who accepted that would be accepting that his work's worth is set by what it cost him rather than by what it is.

Later, in the valley, Halley is explicit that he composed for the sake of the music and not for an audience, and that what he wanted from a listener was not admiration but the recognition of a specific thing. Rand's point is that a work of art is not a service rendered to the public and that an artist who treats it as one has already conceded the standard. See Independence, Pride and Sense of life.

The fifth concerto

Halley wrote four concertos. Early in the novel Dagny hears a brakeman on the Taggart Comet whistling a theme she does not recognise, and when she asks, he says it is Halley's Fifth. Challenged, he claims he was mistaken and cannot say where he heard it.

The exchange is the first clue in the book that the vanished men are somewhere, alive, and still working. The music Halley has written since his disappearance exists and is being played, and the world outside has never heard it — which is precisely what the strike means, expressed in the one currency that cannot be seized.

Common misunderstandings

That Halley withdraws out of resentment. The novel gives him a reasoned objection to the terms on which recognition was offered, not a grievance about its timing.
That Rand held art must be optimistic. Her requirement was that art present values, and that a Romantic work show man as a being of volitional consciousness. The Phaethon revision illustrates the view; it is not a rule that every ending be happy. See Volition.
That his story is a minor ornament. Halley supplies the argument that the strike is not merely economic — a society that has made the productive man's terms unacceptable has made the artist's unacceptable by the same act.
That the fifth concerto is a loose end. It is the novel's earliest plant, resolved when Dagny reaches the valley and hears it played.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Psycho-Epistemology of Art", "Art and Sense of Life" and "The Goal of My Writing", The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, 1969.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 12.