Few conductors are loved. It could be as well, for music’s sake, that most conductors are loathed. Any impressive level of attendance at their obsequies readily calls to mind the witticism—attributed both to George Jessel and to Red...
Mendelssohn: The Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the Composer
and His Family by Mary Allerton-North
Mendelssohn: His Life and Music by Neil Wenborn
Amid the neo-Stalinist personality...
Sir Francis Walsingham
The thought of a new book, from a proverbially establishmentarian imprint, on Elizabeth I’s spymaster is not one that immediately gladdens the heart. Anyone who has actually been expected...
Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss: A Musical Life, by Raymond Holden. Yale University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, by Charles Youmans, Cambridge University Press. I am not a first-rate composer,...
Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years, Articles From 1974 to 1991, edited by Fran Griffin
These are the times that try men’s scruples, especially the scruples of...
Hillaire Belloc
An author too robust and significant to be wholly un-personned can still be marginalized. Consider this elegant pasquinade, which years ago won a parody-contest award in Britain’s New Statesman and which employs the...
Mozart, Wolfgang (Austrian, 1756–91). No, not “Amadeus”; his baptismal certificate reads “Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart,” “Amadé” (the form of his middle name that Mozart himself preferred to use) being Theophilus’s Gallicized version. In fact, almost everything else...
