About R.J. Stove

R. J. Stove is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times and ISI’s A Student’s Guide to Music History.

The Youngest Master: Felix Mendelssohn

By |2024-02-02T18:03:34-06:00February 2nd, 2024|Categories: Culture, Felix Mendelssohn, Music, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Felix Mendelssohn, for all his amazing versatility, is now remembered by a tiny handful of his works, themselves not always representative. But there is now no excuse for neglecting so many of the masterworks of a composer who was central to the art of his epoch. Mendelssohn: The Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the [...]

Neville Marriner: The Last of the Beloved Gentleman-Conductors

By |2016-12-11T13:23:40-06:00October 22nd, 2016|Categories: Featured, Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

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 Skelton—regarding the crowds at a universally abhorred Hollywood tycoon’s funeral: “Well, it proves what they always say. [...]

Sir Francis Walsingham: Bring Me the Head of Maria Stuarda

By |2014-02-19T17:29:33-06:00February 19th, 2014|Categories: Catholicism, History|Tags: , |

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 to spend time in modern England – rather than simply viewing it through a Downton-Abbey-generated haze – knows perfectly well that [...]

Richard Strauss for Everyman

By |2018-10-15T17:38:49-05:00September 13th, 2013|Categories: Literature, Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|Tags: , |

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, I am a first-rate second-rate composer. —Richard Strauss I was never a revolutionary. The real revolutionary was Richard Strauss. —Schoenberg Richard Strauss [...]

Conservatism’s Mozart: Joseph Sobran

By |2022-05-15T14:41:24-05:00April 14th, 2013|Categories: Books, Conservatism|Tags: , , |

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 reviewers. Fact A: I knew Joe Sobran, from 2003 to 2008, well enough to sabotage such hopes of critical detachment as I might otherwise have retained concerning his [...]

Why Hilaire Belloc Still Matters

By |2021-07-16T07:21:50-05:00March 16th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Communism, Hilaire Belloc, Religion|Tags: , |

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 same rhyme scheme and meter as Hilaire Belloc’s own “The chief defect of Henry King”: The chief defect of dear Hilaire Was [...]

Wolfgang Mozart: Born January 27, 1756

By |2022-01-27T14:08:49-06:00January 27th, 2013|Categories: Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|Tags: |

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 Hollywood told you about him is wrong, except his child prodigy status, which even Hollywood could hardly [...]

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