Finding God and Self in “Becket”
Plays, movies and other dramatic renditions have made the life and martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket familiar to a wide audience. Many will have read T.S. Eliot’s…
Plays, movies and other dramatic renditions have made the life and martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket familiar to a wide audience. Many will have read T.S. Eliot’s…
Beethoven’s Mass in C major, Op. 86, is much less well known than his late sacred masterpiece the Missa Solemnis, and a common attitude sees it as…
To pass from reading a contemporary essayist to one of the middle decades of the 20th century is often to enter another world, one of succinct elegance and…
A wise man has written a book called God or Nothing—the title a profoundly pithy expression of the primary choice we must make in our lives. Yet…
Had I to choose a musical summer idyll, my choice would be Jour d’été à la montagne (Summer’s Day in the Mountains), a tone poem by the…
Music is a constant part of our lives, yet its nature remains elusive. We tend to take music for granted, like any product or commodity, not realizing…
As “discourse about God,” “reasoning about God,” or “the science of God,” theology has always had pride of place in societies of strong religious faith—in the Middle…
“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hale souls out of men’s bodies?” —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing I have been involved for a…
I believe that the victory of certain ideas is well worth the suppression of our tranquility and even our lives. —Albéric Magnard Some people regard music…
We live in an era in which words are routinely diluted of their meaning. One feels the need, especially around Christmas, to go back to the root…
One of our greatest founding statesmen, Thomas Jefferson was just as remarkable for the breadth of his interests outside of politics. This American “Renaissance man” (and he…
Fifty years ago, most music lovers had not heard of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), let alone heard any of his works. Now he has claimed his…
Many are the emotional states, natural phenomena, and physical gestures that music is capable of evoking for listeners. The link between the musical and the visual has…
There will not be another like him; no one in America has approached him for individuality of style, perfection of craftsmanship, beauty of utterance, loftiness and subtlety…
Composers’ reputations come and go, often with little justice. Surely one of the most chronically underrated composers in the canon is Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). This Frenchman was…