On New Year’s Eve, 1991, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its annual New Year’s concert in the city’s Schauspielhaus. The Wall was still fresh in the minds of Berliners from both the former West and East; the two cities had only resorbed as one a little over a year earlier. Under the baton of Claudio Abbado, […]
Tag: 19th Century
Posted inEssay
Universal Partisanship
“I am a child of Europe, I am a liberal cosmopolitan. My family is the genetic equivalent of a UN peace-keeping force. I can read novels in French, and I can sing the ‘Ode to Joy’ in German…[encouraging shouts from audience] ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’…” This from a bitter “Remoaner,” lamenting the UK’s dismal exit from […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Beethoven’s 10 Worst Pieces, Ranked
I like Beethoven. After all, he is VAN’s namesake. I’ll admit to wildly conducting along with the Fifth, in my bedroom, at age 13—the first classical music I ever loved. But one of the things that makes Beethoven so likable is the uneven quality of his work. No perfectionist, you can absolutely tell when he […]
Posted inEssay
What You Have Seen
The sepia photograph, taken over a century ago, shows Ottilie Metzer-Lattermann in a brimmed hat and pale summer dress, standing on a garden path in northern Bavaria. Today, that same garden is blooming with marigolds, geraniums, and bird of paradise flowers. The path moves uphill past shade trees and a waterlily pond, before turning right […]
Posted inHistory
The Smoldering Progressive
Pity Paul Dukas. For most listeners—even serious music lovers—his work is the mere soundtrack to the anthropomorphic avatars of the Disney corporation. Despite floating in the same fragrant creative broth of early 20th-century Paris as Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy he has been rather overshadowed by both, to say nothing of his twelve-tone contemporaries in […]
Posted inOpinion
The Mystic Void
The term Wagnerian never applied to me, though Bayreuth holds a special place in the family lore. In the 1950s, a rare honor was bestowed upon my grandfather: along with the other chosen ones, he was permitted to play his violin in the theater’s “mystic void.” (Also known as the pit.) When I went to […]
Posted inEssay
A Cold War
When he was 16, Wolf Biermann emigrated from his hometown of Hamburg to the German Democratic Republic. The year was 1952 and the young man, whose father was a staunch Communist and killed in Auschwitz, was welcomed in the East. Less than 25 years later, Biermann, now a rock star—his apartment, dubbed “the waiting room […]
Posted inReview
Beckmesser’s Dream
A pogrom unfolds on the streets of Nuremberg. It’s the end of Act II of Barrie Kosky’s new production of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Bayreuth Festival. Elsewhere in the piece, Hans Sachs sings that “all poems and verse are just the interpretation of dreams.” In some sense this production represents Beckmesser’s dream, or […]
Posted inInterview
The Berliozians
Behind the fabulous website hberlioz.com, turning 20 this year, is not a team of French musicologists, but rather a pair of retired academics in Edinburgh, Scotland. Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin live in a quite street which traces its origins back to the 18th century. In the living room, above two large computers, hangs a […]
Posted inReview
They That Mourn
We took our shoes off in a foyer with wooden floors. In the center of the room was a communal jug of water, in which leaves were floating. Plain white paper lay nearby, so that we could fold it into cups and drink. I was at a performance of the “Human Requiem,” an immersive interpretation […]