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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: La serenissima

August 31, 2011 by Terry Teachout

5666411906_78fff0a1eb.jpgA month before I met Mrs. T, I spent a night in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage, which is located on a bluff overlooking a lake two miles from the Wisconsin Dells and is available for short-term rentals. Not long afterward I wrote a piece about the experience for The Wall Street Journal. No sooner did I discover that my spouse-to-be was equally passionate about Wright’s architecture than I resolved to bring her to the cottage at the earliest opportunity. It wasn’t easy—you have to book your stay a year in advance—but yesterday we finally made it.

I have no words to describe the feeling of tranquility that washed over us as we walked through the door of the Peterson Cottage, knowing that it was to be all ours for the next two days. Entering the cottage is like putting on a piece of exquisitely well-tailored clothing: you feel at one with the house and its surroundings, so much so that you can scarcely tell the difference between indoors and outdoors. To be sure, you wouldn’t want to stay there for more than an hour or two with anyone other than the closest of companions. The two-room cottage is small—880 square feet—and the only interior door is the one that leads to the bathroom. Yet you never feel cramped, precisely because Wright took such great pains to meld the house with its site.

CottageInterior01.jpg.w300h260.jpgNot being a student or critic of architecture, I can’t say anything more informative about the design of the cottage than what Paul Goldberger wrote about it in 1994:

The house is Frank Lloyd Wright boiled down to his essence: Powerful geometric form; low, contained spaces played off against exuberantly high ones; a sense of natural materials put together into a composition that at once seems to hug the earth and blast off from it. From the outside, it is at once serene and energetic. A solid section of stone, barely bigger than a chimney, anchors the center. The low horizontal of the bedroom ceiling comes off from one side, and the high, raked roof of the living-dining room bursts out from the other. The solids and the voids, the lows and the highs, the horizontals and the verticals, are in harmony.

2857971206_5fc36fb57c.jpgThe last word of that passage put me in mind of the exquisite lines from The Merchant of Venice that Ralph Vaughan Williams set in his Serenade to Music: Here will we sit and let the sounds of music/Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night/Become the touches of sweet harmony. As my beloved spouse and I sat in the soft stillness of the Wisconsin night, we felt the sweet harmony of the Peterson Cottage, in which the built and natural worlds resonate in perfect concord.

Careworn and road-weary though we both are, I doubt that Mrs. T and I have ever been much happier than we are today.

*  *  *

A 1938 British Pathé newsreel of Sir Henry Wood recording Ralph Vaughan Williams’Serenade to Music with the musicians who gave its premiere a few days earlier. Vaughan Williams was present at the session:

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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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