“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.”

Federico Fellni (quoted in The Atlantic, December 1965)

“I reflected upon the qualities which the managers demanded in a play: evidently a comedy, for the public wished to laugh; with as much drama as it would carry, for the public liked a thrill; with a little sentiment, for the public liked to feel good; and a happy ending.”

Somerset Maugham, preface to Collected Plays

The Hollywood String Quartet appears in a never-telecast TV pilot from 1953 featuring performances of Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade, Turiña’s La Oración del torero, and two movements from Beethoven’s C Major Quartet, Op. 59/3:

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

“The heart’s impulse is the voice of fate.”

Friedrich Schiller, Piccolomini

From 2013:

I recently looked back over my drama columns of the past decade and drew up a list of the fifteen shows that have meant the most to me personally. Needless to say, it does no more than hint at the wealth of memorable productions and performances that I’ve seen, and I expect that it would look different were I to draw it up from scratch next week….

To pick fifteen shows out of a thousand is necessarily to leave much gold on the counting-room floor. All that said, the following list will give you some sense of what I’ve liked best during my decade at the Journal….

Read the whole thing here.

“Even a great performance can’t spoil a fine composition.”

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, in conversation with Louis Kaufman

The original music video for Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier,” from The Nightfly, produced by Annabel Jankel, directed by Rocky Morton, and released in 1982:

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

“It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.”

Aristotle (paraphased by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda)