When I was in graduate school, I took an advanced musicianship class, which mainly demonstrated that I was not an advanced musician. One of the components was ear training and dictation. Our task was usually to notate a series of dense chords and tricky modulations the teacher played from the piano. One class, she played […]
Tag: 19th Century
Posted inPlaylist
A “Faust” Playlist
“The more the Faust myth changes, the more it endures,” writes Peter Werres in his introduction to Lives of Faust. “It is our myth, and we must go on confronting it.” Since first appearing in a chapbook in the late 1500s, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Edita Gruberová Playlist
The death of a classical musician is a moment of loss, but it’s also a moment of rediscovery. Especially when the musician in question is someone like Slovak soprano Edita Gruberová, whose death in Zürich this past Monday, October 18, was an opportunity for fans and houses alike to pay tribute to some of her […]
Posted inEssay
The Intelligence of Bodies
When VAN asked me to do a review of an artificial-intelligence-created realization of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony called “Beethoven X: The AI Project,” which is based on the skimpy sketches he left when he died, I more or less groaned in my reply. “Not for me,” I said. “I know pretty much what I’ll think about […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: “Eine Alpensinfonie”
When talking about films and filmmakers he admired, French New Wave legend François Truffaut said, “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” […]
Posted inEssay
An Old, New Song
During this pandemic year, distanced from the world, I’ve taken solace in Schubert’s 1827 song cycle “Winterreise,” which plumbs a man’s anguish as he travels through a wintry night away from the woman who has rejected him. The desolation of solitude, darkness and ice, and the lilting or storming interplay of piano and voice, have […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: The “1812 Overture”
When Tolstoy began working on what would become War and Peace, his 1869 opus that moves fluidly between historical novel and philosophical treatise, he initially had a completely different story in mind. Rather than craft a constellation of parallel and intersecting histories between 1805 and 1820 (with a particular focus on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Every Schubert Song, Ranked
In her 2019 review-cum-retrospective of John Updike, writer Patricia Lockwood noted that her assignment felt “like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons.” I would like to situate this ranking of every Schubert song in the same hallowed pantheon as the […]
Posted inInterview
The Eternal Factor
New Year’s and third lockdown resolution: trying to listen to and rank every Schubert song. (I’m not done yet, but I attempted something similar for the Scarlatti sonatas.) Because my impressions are very subjective—not to say flat-out wrong—I also decided to get a more holistic view of this oeuvre, which numbers somewhere around 700 lieder, […]