“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 [...]

Music for Contemplation

By |2023-12-01T21:55:15-06:00December 1st, 2023|Categories: Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors|

The music of the Western classical tradition is known for its dynamism, drama, and rhythmic and intellectual energy. While I value these qualities as much as anybody, more and more these days I find myself gravitating toward music that is contemplative and serene rather than active and developmental—music that makes us content being where we [...]

Creating Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony

By |2023-11-26T13:41:55-06:00November 26th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, History, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Timeless Essays|

Tchaikovsky's First Symphony is a delight: fresh, assured and just plain fun to listen to. The violins introduce the first movement with a shimmering, sweet tremolo, giving it a dreamy, gossamer texture, that perfectly illustrates the movement’s subtitle, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey." While a longtime fan of Tchaikovsky, I must confess that, up to a [...]

Beauty and the Beast of War: Remembering George Butterworth

By |2023-11-15T18:06:06-06:00November 15th, 2023|Categories: England, Joseph Pearce, Music, Senior Contributors|

Apart from the breathtaking beauty of his musical compositions, it is the ethos of Butterworth that attracts me. He was rooted in the soil and soul of England and enamoured of its shires. He was a true localist before the word was invented, the very antithesis of the modern and modish cosmopolitan. If I should [...]

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 [...]

A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days at the Podium

By |2023-11-03T05:41:08-05:00October 31st, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Music|

Last week, I went to see the great American conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, who is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, conduct Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I adore MTT not just because he’s a rock star in the classical music and a delightful and compelling orator, but because he has essentially been the host of [...]

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 [...]

The Musical Universe and Mozart’s “Magic Flute”

By |2023-09-29T17:54:29-05:00September 29th, 2023|Categories: Music, Peter Kalkavage, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

“The Magic Flute” has been called Mozart’s “Masonic opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. But the Masonic influence is of secondary importance to the power and precision of Mozart’s music, which, like all great music, is inexhaustible. Every act of listening to this work brings new discoveries. “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for [...]

Recovering the Sacred in Music

By |2023-09-30T12:27:58-05:00September 25th, 2023|Categories: Arvo Pärt, Christianity, Henryk Górecki, John Tavener, Music, Poland, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

The music of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener is the music of a new civilization. These composers have gone against the prevailing grain of the twentieth century for the sake of a greater love. The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music’s [...]

Spiritual Renewal and Modern Choral Music

By |2023-09-13T18:52:01-05:00September 13th, 2023|Categories: Arvo Pärt, Audio/Video, Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors|

Since the deaths of the modern musical giants, a great many composers have exerted themselves writing ephemera that is forgotten as soon as it’s heard and means nothing to the vast majority of people. But there are modern choral composers that have produced music that means a good deal to a great many people. One [...]

The Dazzling Dvorak You’ve Yet to Hear

By |2023-09-08T18:16:26-05:00September 7th, 2023|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Music, Timeless Essays|

So you’re acquainted with Antonin Dvořák’s buoyant, instantly accessible “New World Symphony,” are you? And you loved it? Yay, you are part of an enormous fan club that has a spectacularly broad base of listeners. So, what other compositions by Dvořák do you like? {{Silence}} Ah. I get it. I was there too, once. But [...]

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