When I was a teenager, my mentor in all things operatic was Conrad L. Osborne. I read him religiously in High Fidelity Magazine. I thrilled to his encyclopedic erudition, to his impassioned advocacy, and (not least) to the ruthless thoroughness with which he documented and assessed a devastating decline-and-fall in standards of performance. I never met him, never glimpsed him. … [Read more...] about Aida at the Met
Music and WW II: Eisler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Stravinsky
PostClassical Ensemble inaugurated its new residency at Washington National Cathedral with a World War II program – “Music in Wartime” – juxtaposing works by Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The results were startling. Eisler’s strange odyssey is ripe for exploration. In Weimar Germany his workers’ songs linked to a Workers-Singers Union with 400,000 … [Read more...] about Music and WW II: Eisler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Stravinsky
Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Response to FDR
What kind of American was Arnold Schoenberg? In Los Angeles, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, he adopted English as his primary language. He watched The Lone Ranger on TV. For his children, he prepared peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches cut into animal shapes. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, in reaction to Franklin Delano … [Read more...] about Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Response to FDR
The Most Under-Rated 20th Century American Composer — Take Two
Back in the thirties and forties, there were no American music historians to tell the story of American classical music. So the task fell to a couple of composers: Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. According to the official Copland/Thomson narrative, noting much of consequence was composed by Americans before World War I. Their focus was on themselves and kindred composers, … [Read more...] about The Most Under-Rated 20th Century American Composer — Take Two
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Four
Processing my exchange with Vladimir Feltsman, I find myself distracted by something I have long more or less ignored: the art of the piano as manifest by the young artists who today dominate the scene -- what Feltsman calls "a new artform." I am … [Read more...] about “The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Four