"You see," Hector Berlioz said to a friend after enumerating his torments. "It's diabolical isn't it? I mean, it's once tragic and grotesque. I said I deserved to go to hell... but I'm there!" Indeed, Hector Berlioz was the archetype of the tortured Romantic soul: a professed atheist who yet felt the pull of his [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Stephen Klugewicz, as he provides musical suggestions for listening during Holy Week and the Easter season. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Though Handel’s Messiah rightly reigns supreme as the king of music for Easter, there are many other seasonal masterpieces [...]
Fans of the Baltimore Orioles already know that their team will not make the playoffs this year. A realistic goal, in fact, simply will be to avoid losing 100 games. But I daresay that the Orioles will be a much more exciting team than most losing teams usually are. I fell in love with the [...]
Gil Meche His career stats indicate that he was a mediocre baseball pitcher—perhaps the epitome of mediocrity: 84 wins; 83 losses; a 4.49 Earned Run Average; a Walks-plus-Hits-to-Innings-Pitched ratio of 1.42. Yet Gil Meche, who played for the Seattle Mariners and Kansas City Royals, was responsible for one of the most astounding, yet almost unnoticed, [...]
"I feel I am dying," Hector Berlioz wrote in one of his last letters. "I no longer believe in anything." Indeed, by 1869, Berlioz was a frustrated man who had long ago given up his Catholic faith and who had largely given up composing. For many years, the limited and intermittent success of his compositions had [...]
In his two-volume Berlioz and the Romantic Century, historian Jacques Barzun argued that the much-maligned and misunderstood composer was in fact the dominant cultural figure of his day, “who by will and genius stamped his effigy upon the nineteenth century” and brought “kings, ministers, and public institutions, no less than poets and musicians, under his spell.” Publisher's Note: This essay [...]
Hector Berlioz relished the spectacular sounds that could be achieved with massive orchestral forces, but he was much more than a musical showman. His gift for melody, his genius for musical drama, his mastery of orchestration, and his bold originality place him in the front rank of the great composers. Today’s offering in our [...]
The Gates of Vienna: Baroque Organ Music from the Habsburg Empire, performed by Robert James Stove (Ars Organi, 2018) The organ is in truth the grandest, the most daring, the most magnificent of all instruments invented by human genius. It is a whole orchestra in itself. It can express anything in response to a skilled touch. Surely [...]
"I love him too much." —Joseph Haydn, about his friend Wolfgang Mozart "Joseph Haydn with Mozart," by V. Janschiek Wolfgang Mozart and Joseph Haydn were the two masters of the Classical Period of music history; indeed, they helped to define that age, by giving shape to its central compositional forms: the symphony, the [...]
Many believe that objectivity is the historian’s goal. But Forrest McDonald believed that history by its very nature entails artifice; the historian is not simply a mere recorder or reporter of events, but also an artist... “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into it [...]
Christian chivalry harmonized human relations. Without it, society could only be held together by brute force and cold reason. Gone would be the warmth of considerate human relations, corrupted would be the morals of men, and all would be reduced to slaves… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity [...]
"You wouldn't believe how many guys wanted to play here. We had to beat 'em off with a stick. Ty Cobb wanted to play. But none of us could stand the son of a b---- when we were alive, so we told him to stick it!" —Shoeless Joe Jackson, in the film Field of Dreams Ty [...]
“They say you won’t succeed because ‘making a man President cannot change him,'” Julia Sand wrote. “But making a man President can change him! If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine”… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity [...]
In an age of cynicism and selfishness, Mike Rowe's "Returning the Favor" is an unabashedly feel-good show, telling the story of the many unsung, little, local platoons that comprise the heart of our communities and that quietly give the lie to the idea that only the omnipotent State can take care of us... Edmund Burke famously [...]