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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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American music’s forgotten master

June 20, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I pay tribute to Charles Griffes. Here’s an excerpt.

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This year marks the centennial of Charles T. Griffes’ sudden—and no less suddenly brief—ascent to musical stardom. A small-town music teacher at a boys’ prep school in suburban New York, he was catapulted into celebrity when Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony gave the world premiere of “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan,” his first large-scale orchestral piece, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem about an opium dream.

Born in 1884, Griffes had labored for years in semi-obscurity, turning out art songs and piano pieces that were modestly popular but didn’t sell well enough for him to quit the day job that he despised. The premiere of “Kubla Khan,” which was greeted with wild enthusiasm in Boston and New York, promised to change that in a single stroke….

Four months later, he was dead, a victim of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. He was 35….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Myra Hess performs Charles Griffes’ “The White Peacock” in 1928:

Barbara Bonney and Malcolm Martineau perform Griffes’ “The Lament of Ian the Proud”:

Almanac: Cyril Connolly on the problem of free will

June 20, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.”

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

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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