Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Hello, Dolly!” at Fort Hood in 1967. They are introduced by Dick Cavett:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Solitude is the mother of anxieties.”
Publilius Syrus, Moral Sayings
A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2002 Commentary essay about Beethoven.
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Late in his own life, Igor Stravinsky paid this extraordinary tribute to Beethoven’s late quartets:
These quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is a longer word for love, whatever else), as indispensable to the ways and meanings of art, as a musician of my era thinks of art and has tried to learn it, as temperature is to life.
It is startling that the giant of modernism who declared that music “is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all” should have written so passionately about the greatest works of a composer whose music is so palpably expressive of the deepest human concerns. But, then, Stravinsky’s best music, whatever he may have thought or wrote about it, is in fact as expressive of those same concerns as is Beethoven’s. The composer of Symphony of Psalms and the composer of the Ninth Symphony were in some fundamental sense speaking the same language.
This spiritual continuity—this unswerving faith in the universal power of beauty to relieve and transcend the earthly woes of mankind—is Beethoven’s message. Small wonder that its unabashed idealism should make postmodernists so uncomfortable. Disbelieving as they do in the possibility of truth and beauty, they therefore have no choice but to seek to explain away the Ninth Symphony, a universal masterpiece whose very existence is a definitive refutation of the nihilism that informs their view of the world.
The abolition of the Ninth Symphony is, to say the least, an ambitious critical project, and one may take leave to doubt that it will be completed any time soon. As Scott Burnham writes, “Perhaps when that happens, the Western world will truly have passed into another age.” But until that nightmare should come to pass, it seems far more likely that Beethoven will remain, as the New Grove still proclaims him to be, the most admired composer in the history of Western music—past, present and future.
From 2005:
Read the whole thing here.If you can write like Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, and if you have a personality as interesting as theirs, you don’t have to be “right” in order to be taken seriously as a critic. You are, in fact, an artist–a personal essayist whose subject matter is art.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II
Constant Lambert leads the London Philharmonic in an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. This is a clip from Battle for Music, a 1943 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)
Constant Lambert, occasional verse quoted by friends
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How effective can a stage comedy be when performed without an audience? Having now seen two such webcasts, both of them taped in empty theaters, I still don’t know for sure.
San Francisco Playhouse, a company new to me, is currently testing the efficaciousness of online comedy with Yasmina Reza’s “Art.” Like Ms. Reza’s “God of Carnage,” it’s a serious small-cast comedy (three characters) of bad middle-class manners that hit big on Broadway, where it opened in 1998 and ran for 600 performances. Directed by Bill English, the company’s artistic director, on a simple but elegant set of his own design, it tells the tale of Serge (Johnny Moreno), an art snob who spends $200,000 on a minimalist painting that his old friend Marc (Jomar Tagatac) curtly dismisses as “a piece of white shit.”…
While this production is a trifle rough around the edges, the cast is well chosen and Mr. English’s staging serves the play equally well. Not so the absence of an audience, which is a problem, if never a serious one….
Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year” was an even bigger hit than “Art”: It opened on Broadway in 1975, ran for 1,453 performances, then was turned into a popular movie. It is now a regional-theater staple, and North Coast Repertory Theatre, a very fine troupe whose headquarters is a suburban shopping center not far from San Diego, is presenting it as a fully-staged webcast taped on its main stage.
Directed by David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, “Same Time, Next Year” is a lightweight romcom about George and Doris (Bruce Turk and Katie MacNichol), who are married—but not to one another—and who meet once a year for an adulterous tryst without informing their spouses….
“Same Time, Next Year” has long since become a period piece. Even its best laugh lines smack of Neil Simon’s old-fashioned one-two-get-ready-for-the-joke style: “I have a friend who says that life is saying ‘yes.’ The most I’ve ever been able to manage is ‘maybe.’” Such jokes land much harder when there are people present to laugh at them….
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for Art: