Elegance, stability, and order—as well as a sense of pure, elemental joy—are the qualities I hear in Tomaso Albinoni’s music. It is music of Venice through and through, where in the meltingly beautiful slow movements you can all but see the morning light playing on the water of the lagoon, or feel the quiet awe [...]
“To speak precisely, God lost His dwelling place; thereby man lost his proper place in existence.” Man believed he had dominion over nature, and so proceeded to act as a ruler thereof, but it is a poor ruler indeed who destroys that over which he is supposed to govern. “Where is the place of man? [...]
By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]
Make no bones about: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” is conservative because of its deep appreciation for the sublime and the beautiful. Better yet, its conservatism can be found in its holistic and ordered approach to human emotions, as well as its unbridled love for mystery and transcendent revelation. Considering that it was influenced by the [...]
Incarnating the truth in art is the supreme test for a writer with convictions, and this problem is the real heart of the tension between entertainment and literature. I had a friend in England I’ll call Rosemary. She had always wanted to be a writer, so she honed her craft and eventually got a contract [...]
So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]
Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]
If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]
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 [...]
Dieterich Buxtehude might seem at first glance an interesting minor figure, the “man who influenced Bach.” But consider: If he was a decisive inspiration to Bach, that means that Buxtehude can lay claim to being the immediate progenitor of the mainstream classical music tradition we all enjoy. Prelude Our experience of classical music has become [...]
Felix Mendelssohn, for all his amazing versatility, is now remembered by a tiny handful of his works, themselves not always representative. But there is now no excuse for neglecting so many of the masterworks of a composer who was central to the art of his epoch. Mendelssohn: The Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the [...]
The protagonist of the film “Groundhog Day” discovers that what makes life worth living is not immediate gratification, or moral autonomy, or flippant cynicism, or self-deification, but rather encountering those things that give meaning and purpose to our lives. Today, we are experiencing nothing less than a renaissance of classical education throughout the United States, [...]
Franz Schubert’s music is the music of Paradise lost. It is the songful lament of the wanderer who has been banished, yet who must find the difficult way back through suffering and death. It is music of the journey in exile. In terms of his achievement there is only one other composer to whom Franz [...]
Ridley Scott’s film is a vast oversimplification of a complex historical reality. Therein lies the danger. Like a mind-altering drug, the film provides a convenient shortcut that saves the audience the time and trouble of thinking for themselves. Filmgoers, of course, need not become experts in Napoleonic history. But Scott might have done more to [...]