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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: When an artist retires

January 5, 2008 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I reflect on Alfred Brendel’s recent announcement of his plans to retire from public performance next year. At what point should an aging artist call it quits–and what responsibility do critics have to call time?
Some excerpts:

I treasure my memory of the last gig of the jazz saxophonist Benny Carter, who was born in 1907, cut his first records in 1928 and kept on playing until 1995, when I had the good fortune to hear him in New York, eight years before his death. He was still playing well–and he knew it. “I play the same way now that I did when I was 23, so I don’t think age has anything to do with it,” he told Peter Keepnews of the New York Times.
But the performer, unlike the creator, is as much athlete as artist, and thus is slave to the flesh. Sooner or later he must face, like the oven bird of Robert Frost’s poem, the problem of “what to make of a diminished thing.” Some performers, like Horowitz and John Gielgud, solve that problem bravely and resourcefully, balancing the intensified insight of maturity against the physical decline that gradually erodes their mechanical skills, and manage to go out on a high note. Others, like Rudolf Nureyev and Arturo Toscanini, hang on too long, leaving their fans with memories they’d rather not have….

Read the whole thing here.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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