Have you ever looked up over the proscenium arches or along the upper walls of still-existing nineteenth-century concert halls and observed the medallion bas-reliefs of the composers considered immortal at the time? There you will recognize the visages of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. You will also most likely encounter the profile and name … Read more
Picture fin de siecle Vienna in the 1890s, a cosmopolitan capital of empire that was about to shake the world with its new ideas. Sigmund Freud was already in practice. Walter Gropius would soon launch his revolutionary architecture. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were splashing their canvases with images of angst. Gustav Mahler was directing … Read more
One of most compelling sights of Holy Week is that of Mary standing beneath the cross on which her son hangs dying. There were, after all, two innocents at Calvary—her son, innocence itself, nailed to the Cross; and Mary herself, innocently suffering from sin, her heart pierced. Yet Mary is our intercessor. She asks for … Read more
Some critics think composers should be seismic devices. Music should not only reflect its time, but foretell things to come. In fact, it should even help usher in the new age. However, both politically and artistically, the cultural revolution is now over, and so too should be this view of music as a revolutionary muse. … Read more
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was the greatest Catholic composer at the turn of the nineteenth century and the greatest English composer since Purcell some two hundred years earlier. Elgar’s mother, Ann, was a convert to Catholicism and, despite her husband’s objections, raised her children in the faith. Among the things she used to read them as … Read more
You probably missed the centenary of French composer Charles Gounod’s death in 1993. Not much attention was paid to this once phenomenally popular composer, who lived from 1818 to 1893. He is supposed to be completely passé, a relic of Victorian times; his saccharine tunes would send us moderns into insulin shock. Yet, even those … Read more
Everyone loves Christmas — even agnostics. The English tolerance for, if not cultivation of, eccentricity easily embraced Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), the agnostic composer of some of this century’s most beautiful religious music, including Hodie Christus Natus Est, finally available here in time for Christmas on a special EMI import CD (CDC 54128). This is … Read more
Fleeing the congestion and mayhem of New York City in the early summer of 1893, Antonin Dvorák, along with his wife and six children, alighted from a train in the little Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa. Perhaps by then his worldwide fame had spread even there, but this quiet town in the middle of nowhere … Read more
Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc is an opera for those who hate the French Revolution. I am among them. As I discovered during my journeys through France over the past thirty years, the destruction still most present to the modern-day traveler resulted from neither world war, nor from any of the calamities of the … Read more
Requiems are for the living. They shape our attitude toward death. What should we expect? Peace and serenity, or terror and judgment? Heaven or hell? It depends on the composer. In their Requiems, Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi frighten us with rafter-shaking, apocalyptic visions of the Dies Irae. Just as composing symphonies became a problem … Read more
English composer Edmund Rubbra [1901-1986] probably did not read The New York Times. At least, he did not respond to, nor was he guided by, the terms of the artistic dilemma propounded by the headline to a music review published in the early 1980s: “Beauty or the Pain of Truth?” The question is obviously loaded. … Read more
The older I grow the more I listen to Haydn. There is something measured in his pace that goes with daily life. The sturm und drang of youth is over and I can no longer bear the emotional excesses of Romanticism. Of course, there is always Mozart. But listening to him involves the pain of … Read more
The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music’s Dr. Kevorkian, Arnold Schoenberg, whose cure, the imposition of a totalitarian atonality, was worse than the disease — the supposed exhaustion of the tonal resources of music. Schoenberg’s vaunted mission to “emancipate dissonance” by denying … Read more
Was Hildegard of Bingen a saint? One might think so from the way this 12th-century abbess wrote music. She compiled her Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum (“The Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations”) over the course of a long life that creatively did not begin until she was in her forties (b. 1098). In 1141, … Read more
Have you ever suspected that all church music sounds the same, at least in certain genres? If you have heard one plainchant, you have heard them all? No matter how much the New Agers rave about the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, who must be somewhat perplexed by the new pop chart audience for … Read more
The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country; These five kings did a king to death. — Dylan Thomas Historical turning points are notoriously difficult to identify. While they are occurring, few notice, and even those who do … Read more
Read Dostoevsky before going to the Soviet Union. Dostoevsky said that there are two ages of man: from the ascent of man to the death of God, and from the death of God to the annihilation of man. A grasp of this chronology is the only fitting preparation for what one sees and experiences in … Read more
What causes war and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. The Epistle of St. James (4:1-2) The great enthusiasm for the flurry of … Read more
Managua, November 2-5. Peeling paint; warped plywood; shantytowns; rationed water; walls smeared with graffiti; unrelieved shabbiness. At night only a few streetlights poke themselves into the darkness; they too are rationed. Police kiosks, mounted on cement tripods, are falling over into street intersections they are meant to control — an engineering miscalculation. In response to … Read more