Michael De Sapio is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. A writer and classical musician from Alexandria, Virginia, he attended The Catholic University of America and The Peabody Conservatory of Music. Mr. De Sapio's essays on music, religion, and cultural history have been featured in Fanfare, Touchstone, and Crisis, among other publications. He has also published a screenplay, The Incredible Life of Joey Coletta.
“Music seems to exist in and of itself, like a temple built around your soul.”
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
The story of music in the twentieth century would have been very different without...
Though William Sidney Mount’s name is rarely mentioned except among art experts, the images he created are timeless Americana—skillfully rendered scenes full of homely comforts and the joy of life... “How glorious it is to paint in the...
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Michael De Sapio as he considers the reasons for the decline of the West. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher
That Western culture is...
French Impressionism may well be the most popular artistic style in the world. Even people who know little of art delight in the way painters like Monet and Renoir depicted everyday life and the play of light in...
Igor Stravinsky is endlessly touted as an arch-modernist, but The Soldier's Tale and The Rake's Progress show him to be something more important: a great twentieth-century moralist...
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was certainly the greatest composer...
The Miracle of the Bells doesn’t claim to be great literature, but it is a richly-drawn story about faith and Hollywood, a time capsule of a bygone era that retains its inspirational charm... The Miracle of the Bells by Russell Janney (510 pages, Forgotten...
Those of my Dutch neighbor's generation knew exactly what they were doing in the Passion Play that was Europe during World War II. It was her Christian faith that sustained her through the hardships of those years...
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The Bible does not speak of “happiness” as such, though it often speaks of “joy,” one of the signal characteristics which Jesus bequeathed to his disciples... In The Mind of the Maker, her brilliant book...
Leave It to Beaver was very much a medieval morality play, in which the character of the Beaver repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue... Russell Kirk defined...
Igor Stravinsky was not only one of the greatest composers but also one of the great minds and wits of the twentieth century... “Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church in all its decoration; it...
Camille Saint-Saëns indeed had a wonderful sense of humor, but it is his serious, abstract works—especially his chamber music—that show him at his Gallic best and assure his place among the great composers... When it comes to...
12 Angry Men is a film connected to the Western moral imagination, speaking to us on a primal, even a classical level, with themes that are as old as the Bible and Greek tragedy. The characters of the twelve jurors are archetypes representing the virtues and vices of...
Bach's Mass in B Minor is the summation of his life's work and one of the supreme masterpieces of Western classical music. Yet mystery surrounds the work. What was its purpose, how did it come to be written, and how was it intended to be performed?...
That a priest allowed a Catholic burial and high requiem Mass for Beethoven would seem to indicate that he thought Beethoven died a believer. But did he indeed?... Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus...
