About Stephen M. Klugewicz

Stephen Klugewicz is Direct of Development at Aristoi Classical Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in American History, with expertise in the eras of the Founding and Early Republic. Dr. Klugewicz is the co-editor of History, on Proper Principles: Essays in Honor of Forrest McDonald and Founders and the Constitution: In Their Own Words. He is the former executive director of the Collegiate Network at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and has long experience in education, having served as Director of Education at the National Constitution Center, and as Headmaster of Regina Luminis Academy.

Glory to Dido! The Operas of Hector Berlioz

By |2024-03-08T06:30:43-06:00March 7th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Hector Berlioz, Hector Berlioz Sesquicentennial Series, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

"They are finally going to play my music." —Hector Berlioz, on his deathbed Though Hector Berlioz's operas are still little known today—even to the opera-going public, who are much more likely to find the dramas of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, and Mozart on the program—the increasing recognition of their many glories is slowly making them less [...]

George Washington and the “Gift of Silence”

By |2024-02-22T05:51:49-06:00February 21st, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, George Washington, Leadership, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

George Washington, the great actor, was playing his part in a great drama, not just for Americans of his day, but for you and me. Washington, the Stoic, used his “gift of silence” shrewdly, and surely it is his actions more than his words that echo down to us today. In December 2009, a letter [...]

Forgotten Virtue: The Baseball Hero Nobody Knows

By |2024-02-14T18:57:33-06:00February 14th, 2024|Categories: Baseball, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Gil Meche His career stats indicate that he was a mediocre baseball pitcher—perhaps the epitome of mediocrity: 84 wins; 83 losses; a 4.49 Earned Run Average; a Walks-plus-Hits-to-Innings-Pitched ratio of 1.42. Yet Gil Meche, who played for the Seattle Mariners and Kansas City Royals, was responsible for one of the most astounding, yet almost unnoticed, [...]

Doctor Winchester, Mozart, & the Devil

By |2024-02-07T20:42:08-06:00February 7th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Culture, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Television, Timeless Essays|

M*A*S*H's Dr. Winchester and the Chinese prisoners in the American camp find a common language in a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before: Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. The final episode of the hit TV series, M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, garnering an astounding 125 million viewers, the most in television history at the [...]

Beethoven & the Greatest Concert of All Time

By |2023-12-21T17:30:54-06:00December 21st, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beethoven 250, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Timeless Essays|

On December 22, 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven—by then an established composer and a renowned piano virtuoso—conducted a concert of his own works, featuring himself also as pianist, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. The program included the premiers of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth symphonies, his Fourth Piano Concerto, and a concluding piece for [...]

“I Must Ever Weep”: Haydn’s Musical Elegy to Mozart

By |2023-12-04T17:30:05-06:00December 4th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Friendship, Joseph Haydn, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

When Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5, 1791, fellow composer Joseph Haydn was "quite beside [himself] over his death," and the older composer soon paid a veiled tribute to his young friend in the form of a sombre slow movement of a new symphony he was writing for his London tour. "I love him too [...]

Discontent, Death, & Desolation: Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”

By |2023-11-09T20:24:06-06:00November 5th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” —Father Zossima, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” Is there an opera that better conveys the mood of late autumn—with the inevitability of winter’s desolation on the doorstep—than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin? Based on the “novel in verse” by [...]

The Ten Most Beautiful Symphonies

By |2023-10-27T17:53:44-05:00October 27th, 2023|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Culture, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

In addition to melody, great and beautiful classical symphonies must display a mastery of structure and orchestration, a command of tone color and harmony, and an expertise in developing musical ideas. Here are the ten most beautiful symphonies ever composed. “Imagination creates reality.” —Richard Wagner Though beauty is an absolute reality, we human beings see [...]

A Requiem for Manners

By |2023-08-30T17:46:50-05:00August 30th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Edmund Burke, History, Robert E. Lee, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]

Killing Indiana Jones

By |2023-07-13T09:02:19-05:00July 9th, 2023|Categories: Film, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

"Those days have come and gone," says Indiana Jones at one point in the newly-released film, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." And they sure have, for our hero has been emasculated on the altar of political correctness in this film, with an immoral, money-grubbing, narcissistic, feminist character usurping his place. "Those days have [...]

The Day Rick Monday Saved the American Flag

By |2023-06-13T18:07:21-05:00June 13th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Baseball, Independence Day, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

On April 25, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial celebrations, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved an American flag from being burned by two protestors who had trespassed onto the field during a game at Dodger Stadium. As the bottom of the fourth inning got underway, the protesters placed the flag in left-center field [...]

Gordon Lloyd: A Remembrance

By |2023-05-05T16:53:29-05:00May 2nd, 2023|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Constitutional Convention, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

Such was Gordon Lloyd's contagious energy that his presence at an academic program guaranteed its success. Even now I can see him, with his irrepressible enthusiasm, almost hopping across the stage in excitement, brushing back the bangs of his wavy white hair as they fly about, and boyishly declaiming in the Caribbean accent of his [...]

The Music of Chaos & Creation: Jean-Féry Rebel’s “Elements”

By |2023-04-17T20:10:11-05:00April 17th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Featured, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Jean-Féry Rebel’s revolutionary symphony “Les Élémens” still stands, nearly three centuries after its composition, as man’s supreme artistic attempt to imagine chaos and creation, and the beginning of time itself. Jean-Féry Rebel The Ancient Greeks held three notions about the nature of the universe that held sway for centuries over Western scientific and [...]

Classical Music for Holy Week & Easter

By |2023-04-02T19:21:24-05:00April 2nd, 2023|Categories: Antonio Vivaldi, Audio/Video, Easter, Hector Berlioz, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Though Handel's "Messiah" rightly reigns supreme as the king of music for Easter, there are many other seasonal masterpieces that deserve to be heard more often. Here are ten lesser-known classical works that brilliantly depict the dramatic events of Holy Week and Easter Sunday. 1. "Resurrexit" from the Messe Solennelle, by Hector Berlioz (1824) The [...]

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