Stand Watie (Cherokee: ᏕᎦᏔᎦ, romanized: Degataga, lit. 'Stand firm') (December 12, 1806 – September 9, 1871), also known as Standhope Uwatie, Tawkertawker, and Isaac S. Watie, was a leader of the Cherokee Nation. They allied with the Confederacy, and he was the only Native American to attain a general's rank in the Civil War, Confederacy [...]
At eminent universities, Europhobic cultural Marxism is taught to succeeding generations of music majors, prejudicing each generation against the canon of great music that Europe has produced, not because it is bad or lacking in beauty but simply because it is deemed politically incorrect for no other reason but that anything European must be bad. [...]
When Berlioz's "Trojans" reaches its last half-an-hour, with Dido’s rage, misery, and then calm acceptance of utter loss amid the final doomed realization of Rome’s triumph—one finds oneself on a level that shuns most other opera’s attempts at classical transcendence. Based on Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid, Hector Berlioz composed his four-hour Les Troyens in the style [...]
More mighty than the hosts of mortal kings, I hear the legions gathering to their goal; The tramping millions drifting from one pole, The march, the counter-march, the flank that swings. […]
In “Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption,” Sir Roger Scruton guides us—like Virgil—through the twisty cosmos of Richard Wagner and leaves us at the gates of paradise. Those who desire a treatment of Wagner’s final opera without the pollution of ideological criticism will find a wonderful breath of fresh air in Scruton’s treatment of the [...]
When famed cellist Steven Isserlis came to end of his project to perform all five Beethoven sonatas in sequence, he found that the final movement of the final sonata expresses a conquest over struggles that would have destroyed a lesser being. Years ago cellist Steven Isserlis set out on a quest, a quest to discover [...]
Beethoven’s unusual cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment), Op. 136, was commissioned by the Vienna City Administration. The work has an undistinguished text suited to the occasion of its first performance, a tribute to the kings and princes of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, words that are at least better than those that Beethoven had [...]
Il mondo della luna (The World on the Moon), Hob. 28/7, is an opera buffa by Joseph Haydn with a libretto written by Carlo Goldoni in 1750, first performed at Eszterháza, Hungary, on 3 August 1777. Goldoni's libretto had previously been set by six other composers, first by the composer Baldassare Galuppi and performed in Venice [...]
"Give Us Back Our Game" appears on Terry Cashman's 1995 album, Passin It On: America's Baseball Heritage in Song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwQPfGLOZy8 Give us back our game It belongs to us The people of America Give us back our game It's a song about us Before the fields and all of the dreams turn into dust [...]
Beauty reconciles opposites: It adheres to objects themselves, and yet it calls to each of us in the depths of our psyche. Only beauty blocks out the outside world and focuses our attention on the work of art. This is, perhaps, its danger. But it is also its power. I will confess that, of the [...]
When we think of the great classical composers, our mind does not tend to wander too far north. But in addition to the works of Sibelius, Grieg, and Pärt, much great music was composed in the frozen North during the past century that has been unjustly neglected. When we think of classical music, we are [...]
"When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out [...]
Our readers are well aware of the wide-angle conservative lens that is the purview of The Imaginative Conservative’s co-founder Bradley J. Birzer. But what would it be like to set the fruits of Dr. Birzer’s expansive vision to music? In case you were unaware, the question is not a rhetorical one; the answer is readily [...]
For conductor and musicologist Nikolaus Harnoncourt, expressive meaning was central to music. Music can cry out in pain or anger, it can soothe, it can exult in joy. Harnoncourt sought to restore these many meanings to music and, for this reason, insisted on drama and urgency in his performances. In particular his Beethoven recordings possess [...]