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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 8, 2012

TT: Reveille

February 8, 2012 by Terry Teachout

orangegrove.JPGOn Monday Mrs. T and I decided to take the long way from Sarasota to Winter Park. Shunning the interstate highways, we drove down two-lane roads that passed by countless orange groves and through tiny towns with names like Ona, Zolfo Springs, Avon Park, and–my favorite–Frostproof. Even the landmarks along the way bore picturesque names (first Troublesome Creek, then Peace River). Alas, we were only passing through, for I would have liked to spend a night at the Hotel Jacaranda, whose website recalls the long-ago days when Clark Gable and Babe Ruth graced its spacious rooms. But we had to return to Winter Park in time to meet a dinner guest, so we kept on driving.

As Mrs. T napped, I turned on the car radio and listened to Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto, whose brisk, jazz-flavored outer movements flank a seraphically tranquil evocation of the Larghetto of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. It flows with such seemingly uncomplicated grace that one marvels at Ravel’s confession that he found it all but impossible to write. “Flows so easily! Flows so easily!” he sputtered to a colleague who praised its apparent effortlessness. “I put it together bar by bar and I nearly died over it.” Midway through the movement, Mrs. T awoke, looked out the window at the orange trees, and said, “They look like treasure.” Then she fell asleep again.

I can never hear the slow movement of the Ravel Concerto in G without feeling that I’m being offered a momentary glimpse of a world beyond that which we see around us, one that is simple and serene and devoid of pain or sorrow or doubt. The glimpse comes toward the end of the movement, when the music modulates without warning into a new key. It sounds like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a slate-gray sky. My eyes always fill with tears when I hear that passage, and they did so yet again on Monday, right on cue.

What gives music such inexplicable power? I’ve spent the whole of my life immersed in that mysterious art, yet I haven’t a clue as to what it is that makes me weep when I hear such things. All I know is that no other art makes me more intensely aware of life’s cruel brevity, or of the brief moments of piercing beauty that make such knowledge supportable.

41694_652497192_736498721_n.jpgSamuel Beckett said it: “We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” To drive past an orange grove while listening to the Adagio assai of the Concerto in G is to be awakened, if only for a moment or two, to the beauty at the heart of things, to be fully alive for as long as we have it in us. Sooner or later habit will always lull us back into the terrible sleep of everyday life–but then a great work of art sounds reveille, and we sit bolt upright, see treasure, and weep.

* * *

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Sergiu Celibidache, and the London Symphony perform the slow movement of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall on April 8, 1982:

TT: Snapshot

February 8, 2012 by Terry Teachout

The novelist William Maxwell talks about his life and work and reads his favorite poem, “Diffugere Nives,” A.E. Housman’s translation of an ode by Horace. Maxwell was ninety years old when this film was made in 1999:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

February 8, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“Stephen was in the habit of putting inverted commas round a cliché; it was his way of discrediting those aspects of the commonplace, and they were many, which offended against whatever might be his pose of the moment.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

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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