Archives for September 2018

Bruno Walter leads the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of the finale of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony, filmed in 1950. This sequence is an excerpt from Botschafter der Musik, a 1954 documentary about the orchestra:

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

“Strange! When I hear music—even when I am conducting—I hear quite specific answers to all my questions—and am completely clear and certain. Or, rather, I feel quite distinctly that they are not questions at all.”

Gustav Mahler, letter to Bruno Walter, 1909

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about where I was and what I did that day:

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age….

Read the whole thing here.

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Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 9/11 memorial concert on September 20, 2001. I was there:

“He had realized that many people were emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he had not realized quite the fanaticism that seemed capable of flaring from it at an instant’s notice. He still, after seven years in office, retained some slight, idealistic belief that if you treated people in Washington and the great world of politics and the press fairly, they would accord you the same fairness; he was still shocked occasionally at the extremes of bitterness which often cropped out on what sometimes seemed the slightest of provocations. ‘You know,’ Stanley Danta had once remarked wryly, when his unexpected criticism of some proposal put forward by one of the more popular favorites had suddenly brought an avalanche of personal attack upon his own head, ‘I think I’ll introduce a resolution to change the motto of the Republic from “E pluribus unum” to “It all depends on whose ox is gored.” That would be more fitting, I think.’”

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (published in 1959)

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, staged by the author, performed by Rick Cluchey, and directed for French TV in 1988 by Walter D. Asmus:

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

“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”

Bernard Shaw, quoted in “Shaw’s Reply to Judge Neil,” Weekly Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 6 1919 (courtesy of Quote Investigator)

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review an extremely rare revival of Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come. Here’s an excerpt.

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Lillian Hellman wrote 10 plays that opened on Broadway in her lifetime. Five were box-office smashes that were subsequently turned into big-budget Hollywood movies, while two others had shorter but nonetheless respectable runs. That’s a very solid batting average for an American playwright, and even more so for a woman who was writing at a time when few other female playwrights were able to get any traction. Yet only one of her plays, “The Little Foxes,” continues to be revived with any regularity, be it on Broadway or elsewhere in America. Hence it is stop-press news that the Mint Theater, the off-Broadway troupe that specializes in “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten,” has now chosen to produce a Hellman flop, and done so with its customary flair. What’s more, “Days to Come,” which opened on Broadway in 1934, closed after a bruisingly brief run of seven performances, and only seems to have been staged once since then, turns out to be a gripping piece of storytelling…

Not only is Hellman’s second play a superior effort, but it’s all of a piece with her later work, “The Little Foxes” in particular, telling as it does the story of the Rodmans, an upper-middle-class family that is swept up against its will in the political crosscurrents of the moment. The time is the Thirties, the place a small Ohio town dominated by a factory owned by the Rodmans whose employees have gone on strike for higher wages. Henry Ellicott (Ted Deasy), the ruthless in-law who runs the factory, hires an outside firm of detectives and orders them to break the strike by any means necessary, up to and including murder. Andrew Rodman (Larry Bull), who has always seen his employees as an extension of his own family, doesn’t want to go along with Henry’s plans but lacks the strength of will to stop him. Meanwhile, Julie (Janie Brookshire), his wife, has started to suspect that Henry is making a potentially fatal mistake…

Part of what makes “Days to Come” so effective now—and led, I suspect, to its commercial failure in 1934—is that Hellman’s portrayal of Andrew and Julie is not a black-and-white political cartoon à la Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty.” They are not monsters of privilege but well-meaning liberals whose only sin is that they don’t know how to make a Depression-era factory pay its way without cutting wages to the bone….

“Days to Come” is not without flaw, of course: Hellman wasn’t yet able to smoothly entwine the disparate strands of her plot, and on occasion she indulges in the preachiness that forever after was to be her besetting sin. Nevertheless, it is as dramatically potent as any of her hits, and the Mint’s production, directed with self-effacing sureness by J.R. Sullivan, is so strong as to paper over the author’s occasional missteps…

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Read the whole thing here.

Vladimir Horowitz plays Ferruccio Busoni’s transcription for piano of Bach’s Chorale Prelude on “Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland,” BWV 659. This performance, filmed in the pianist’s New York apartment, is drawn from The Last Romantic, a documentary about Horowitz directed by David and Albert Maysles and released in 1985:

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