In many ways, Korngold’s opera “The Dead City” is one of the last gasps of Old Vienna and Old Austria. In its wake came competing national identities, communism, socialism, and, most potently, fascism. When Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) debuted in December 1920, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was only 23. Mahler called him a genius [...]
This is the story of one unique night on which rivals Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri truly went head-to-head, performing newly-composed, short operas back-to-back, at the request of Emperor Joseph himself. The rivalry between Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart is well known, being the subject of Alexander Pushkin’s play, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, and most famously [...]
As winter descends, allow me to recommend to you, dear reader, six pieces of classical music that will warm your soul, as you curl up by the fire with a good book and a hot toddy. […]
Many American readers will know of BBC Radio 3, Britain’s leading radio network for classical music and the arts. Certainly, in recent years, many U.S. artists have created an immense reputation in Britain: Leonard Slatkin, for example, with his chief conductorship of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra becoming [...]
It’s somewhat criminal that Kevin McCormick is not better known. An avid reader and fan of The Imaginative Conservative, a father of four, and a dedicated husband and member of his small Texas parish, McCormick has been fighting for the good, the true, and the beautiful all of his adult life. I can vouch for [...]
If original sin lies at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s work, redemption lurks out there somewhere too. In 1989, the year before his death, the great Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a letter to rock-and-roll legend Bruce Springsteen, which read, in part: This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, [...]
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 [...]
Since the 1960s, the lover of classical music has increasingly found himself a loner in most social circles, appreciated by an ever-shrinking number of people. “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” —Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I Since the triumph of rock n’ roll in the 1960s, the [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien composed a whole “Elvish Book of Genesis,” describing the creation of the world by the One God (Illuvatar). In that mythological account—which he believed to be compatible with the creation story in Genesis—God first proposes the world as a musical theme. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” [...]
The human voice is God’s most beautiful instrument, and the blending of voices and musical instruments within the context of a dramatic visual presentation is the zenith of human artistic achievement. This is the glory of opera. Below is a list of the ten greatest operas ever composed, in order of greatness, from ten down [...]
The parallels between the Mumford & Sons song “The Cave” and the Platonic story are impossible to miss. I am not someone who should ever review music, my tastes being without pattern when they exist at all. But, my students and an old friend have recently introduced me to a very intriguing band who released their second [...]
One of the privileges of writing this column is that I occasionally get to meet the composers of the music I review. I had a meeting this past year with a musician with whom I have been in correspondence for some time. Morten Lauridsen, the most frequently performed American choral composer, came to Washington, D.C. [...]
How should a conservative interact with popular culture? We live in a time when popular music mocks religion, prime time television depicts homosexual relations and multi-generational groupings as “the new normal,” films depict literal orgies of gory sadism, and all promote narcissistic nihilism with a snarky self-confidence expressed in gutter language. How should we respond [...]
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 [...]