In England, the summer country house opera season is winding up. Dinner jackets fly south to the dry cleaner; wicker picnic hampers bed down to hibernate until the spring. Although there are summer opera festivals all over the world, the country house phenomenon is almost unique to the British: few other countries give such primacy […]
Category: Essay
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Me and Ruth in Berlin
In 1930, Ruth Crawford went to Berlin. Nearly a century ago, she was a few years younger than I am now. I imagine a young American woman deeply intrigued (intimidated?) by her European contemporaries and eager to feel “the scene” under her feet. I can relate. In a 2017 New York Times portrait, William Robin […]
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Sounds Gay, I’m In
Thirty years ago, Queering the Pitch loosed one of the most powerful institutional revisions in musicology’s long and anxious history. Published in January of 1994, the book posed a forceful injunction to the field at large: Queerness—with all its social and political ramifications—could and would no longer be ignored by the ivied academies of Western […]
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Opera At the End of the Earth
Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both? The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]
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It Could Be Me
The curtain opens on Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito.” On stage is a raging Vitellia: wannabe empress, scorned daughter, forgotten royalty. “He could have at least chosen a rival worthy of me,” she spits, of reigning emperor Tito. “Instead, he prefers a barbarian and an exile to me, a queen!” Vitellia’s father was the emperor […]
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Kafka’s Coloratura
To read Franz Kafka’s last short story “Josephine, the Songstress or The Mouse Folk” is to recognize the reflection better the dirtier the glass. The subject of the story is an artist and the creatures in whose midst she makes her art. Her name is Josephine. She is a singer. Or is she? Josephine’s folk […]
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Sweet Fingers
If Morteza Mahjoubi’s pianism is alive today, it is not out of devotion or praise for his person, but rather on account of something internal to his virtuosity: a sublime rubato that penetrates beneath the level of surface and releases melodies that cultivate and nourish the soul. Mahjoubi’s tone is so striking, its kinship to […]
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Composers, Canonized
I get itchy in temples and I make jokes at funerals. You could reasonably describe me as “irreverent.” But I have felt the divine. I was in college, and it was a Wednesday, and I was stuck in choir rehearsal. And we had a moment, together, in the middle of John Rutter’s “Requiem.” My voice […]
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Jester’s Privilege
ACT I He’d never been to the opera, and I’d never been to the opera alone. Actually, I had never been to the opera without my father, and I was pretending to still be in love with my boyfriend even though I knew that I wasn’t, so I took him as my date. We’d almost […]
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Music, Putin’s “Powerful Weapon”
In January, late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny reported that the Siberian penal colony in which he was held blasted the song “Я РУССКИЙ” (“I Am Russian”) by Putin’s favorite singer, Shaman, every day at 5 a.m., right after the national anthem. But the dictator has also instrumentalized classical music for his own purposes. A […]