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 [...]
Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates what he has found in an understandable and [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]
"Those days have come and gone," says Indiana Jones at one point in the newly-released film, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." And they sure have, for our hero has been emasculated on the altar of political correctness in this film, with an immoral, money-grubbing, narcissistic, feminist character usurping his place. "Those days have [...]
On April 25, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial celebrations, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved an American flag from being burned by two protestors who had trespassed onto the field during a game at Dodger Stadium. As the bottom of the fourth inning got underway, the protesters placed the flag in left-center field [...]
Such was Gordon Lloyd's contagious energy that his presence at an academic program guaranteed its success. Even now I can see him, with his irrepressible enthusiasm, almost hopping across the stage in excitement, brushing back the bangs of his wavy white hair as they fly about, and boyishly declaiming in the Caribbean accent of his [...]
Jean-Féry Rebel’s revolutionary symphony “Les Élémens” still stands, nearly three centuries after its composition, as man’s supreme artistic attempt to imagine chaos and creation, and the beginning of time itself. The Ancient Greeks held three notions about the nature of the universe that held sway for centuries over Western scientific and religious thought. The first [...]
“He alone has the secret of making me smile and touching me to the bottom of my soul,” Mozart said of Joseph Haydn. It is a dizzying prospect to explore the vastness of Haydn’s delightful musical creations. But here are some starting points. Quite unjustly, he stands in the shadow of his young friend, Wolfgang [...]
“Ryan is the only guy who puts fear in me. Not because he can get you out but because he can kill you.” —Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson It was the last day of our spring training odyssey: Sunday, March 28, 1993. For the past week, I, along with my friends Mark and John, had [...]
The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen [...]
"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 [...]