Listen to musicologist/pianist Robert Levin play Mozart's own piano and explain why it is important to know how Mozart's music sounded to the composer on the very instrument for which he composed... Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The [...]
Antonio Vivaldi's Beatus Vir, RV 597, is a setting of Psalm 111 of the Latin Vulgate. The title of the piece comes from the first words of the Psalm ("Blessed be the man"), and the ninth movement of the work sets the words, "In memoria aeterna erit iustus, ab auditione mala non timebit" ("The just [...]
Written in 1777, the Missa Sancti Hieronymi (Saint Jerome Mass) in C major is scored for soloists, wind orchestra, and mixed choir. It is also known as the "Oboe Mass" for the prominent use of that instrument in the opening Kyrie and the Credo. It is one of many Masses that Michael Haydn wrote in honor [...]
Do we really want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth as it was heard at its premiere? Do we want to listen to fifty unevenly trained musicians, playing on weak instruments that are hard to play, in an unheated concert hall, conducted by a deaf man on one rehearsal? Or do you want to experience what the [...]
While the common-sense approach to early childhood education was standard practice for centuries, it has been abandoned in recent years. Shunning rote learning, we have instead told young children to draw on their own (limited) experience or feelings when completing school assignments... We all want the best for our kids. Because of this desire, it’s [...]
There I was, two hours into the eleven-hour flight. Then I heard the piece, the same one I’d been listening to for months, and suddenly I knew right then that my life had been irrevocably altered. I fell in love somewhere near the North Pole one afternoon while kicking back at 35,000 feet. It was sudden, [...]
The twenty-two-year-old Richard Wagner composed this dramatic overture as part of the incidental music for a play about the explorer, written by the composer's friend, Guido Theodore Apel. Wagner also wrote a chorus and orchestral epilogue for the play, but these have been lost. At its premier the music “astonished everyone and was tumultuously applauded," [...]
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s “Miserere” and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn’t stop the teenaged Mozart. The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, mind [...]
Ottorino Respighi wrote his suite, Church Windows: Four Impressions for Orchestra, in 1925-1926. They were based on three earlier piano pieces, which the composer had written after developing an enthusiasm for Gregorian Chant; he incorporated elements of chant into the works. In recasting them for orchestra, Respighi affixed religious titles to the movements: "The Flight [...]
Arturo Toscanini was the early-twentieth century version of a rock star, receiving offers left and right, commanding huge sums of money, selling out theaters, and grabbing the constant attention of the press wherever he went… Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, by Harvey Sachs (Liveright, 944 pages, 2017) In the Academy-award winning film adaptation of Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, [...]
Though his fans will undoubtedly enjoy this engrossing autobiography, it deserves a broader audience because of the beauty of Mr. Springsteen's writing, his penetrating observations about human nature, and his well-crafted history of an interesting and important life. "We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty, roots and deep earth, in the [...]
Mass is not supposed to make me comfortable—it’s supposed to make me more holy… After thirty-five years as a liturgical musician, it’s amazing how little I really know about the liturgical music of the Roman Rite. Then again, what should I expect when my earliest memories of music at Mass tend to involve now-forgotten attempts to make [...]
What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players, busy in their everyday lives, to spend a week in a far-off place and inundate themselves in practice and education concerning a single piece of music and its composer—the sort of exercise usually reserved for professionals. […]
At some point during the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Nikita Khrushchev was asked whether it would be okay to give the prize to the American virtuoso, Van Cliburn. One of the most famous—and unexpected—lulls in the Cold War came when Texan Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. stepped off a plane in Moscow in April 1958. [...]