It is well known that over the years the evaluation of Haydn underwent a number of changes. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, no one would have hesitated to call him the greatest of all composers. According to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1802, “The inexhaustible spirit of his masterpieces is admired from Lisbon…
Would you rather see the world in black and white or live without music? This is one of my favorite questions. Most people tell me that they would give up color before giving up Bach and the Beatles and so on — except kids, who usually make the opposite choice. I’m with the kids, and…
after Manet Smudge of ivory cameo (another lady’s face, but anonymous) lists from black ribbon. To her, she offers a petite bundle of lilac. The African grey contemplates a beyond beyond its empty dish, no droplet or seed to hold its attention. This is discipline. The blue velvet hair bow and red (parted, kempt) complement…
Born from pastel clouds and blushed as health, each a painted infant, gessoed and reaching. Kin to Monet’s faraway “Jar of Peaches,” seeded into the clay spectacular to commune and dream and flower, achieving at the center the divided brain of human nature: split between the orchard’s timetabled logic and the sumptuous urge toward art,…
How long had it languished, erotic in the stalls of oil paintings and furs cryptic as the decrepit hutch where rabbits are generations gone? How well hid in the warrens of the flea market, then deeper as if back into the camera’s aperture, suddenly abloom as a daisy in the cemetery dirt that nurtured it….
Sculptural swan, left behind earring sworn to the garden, as after an encounter on a carpet, risen then into a different person. When a thing alights, its missingness elevates prettiness into art. All of life in the sunset-fired contours. Your life poured into looking.
1 Sometimes the great moments of history are the small moments of history. Such is the case with the short-lived Munich Revolution. Compared to the world wars or the Russian Revolution, it seems like a footnote about a failed adventure. But its significance is far greater: it was a social earthquake whose aftershocks marked the…
As part of the research for a book that I am writing on civic education, I recently interviewed Dr. Matthew Spalding, the dean of the Van Andel School of Government of Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian institution that has supplied much of the intellectual heft for the war against “woke” education. I wanted to talk…
A few years before his death, Zbigniew Herbert, the prominent Polish poet, published a slim volume of nineteen poems titled Elegy for the Departure. Many of the poems had a clearly valedictory theme. The title poem, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp,” is particularly significant: it seems to announce the end of…
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the moment he realized that he did not really believe what he had always professed. It happened during a conversation with another zek, or prisoner, named Boris Gammerov, a “yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face.” After exchanging biographies they passed to politics. Gammerov “began to question…
Recent reports in The New York Times and the Guardian have noted that at least one-quarter of Gen-Zers believe in the idea that you can attract the things you want — luck, money, love, anything you want — by repeating certain mantras. The practice is called “manifesting.” Most of these believers are devoted adepts of…
On December 8, 2015, French President François Hollande announced plans to posthumously award the Legion of Honour to the one hundred and thirty victims of the terrorist attacks of November 13 at the Bataclan concert hall and the surrounding area. The institution’s Grand Chancellor disagreed. Since its creation on May 19, 1802, by Napoléon Bonaparte,…
