Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

A Toscanini moment

The Korngold Symphony

 

Ross Alexander, left, in Captain Blood.

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Much thanks to Paul Sommerfeld, of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, for his kind assistance. Here Paul gives a lecture on the compositional process of Captain Blood, one of the sources for the Symphony.

A note on Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger's music books at the Villa Aurora.

I wrote about Lion Feuchtwanger's The Oppermanns for this year's New Yorker roundup of the Year in Rereading. I had previously read the novel in translation; this year I read it in German, as part of a small-scale Feuchtwanger marathon. The other novels in Feuchtwanger's Waiting-Room Trilogy — Success and Exile — also deserve to be back in print in English.

A Bekah Simms moment

Featured on Simms's new album Bestiaries (Centrediscs).

For Ned Rorem

The gentleman composer died yesterday at the age of ninety-nine. What I wrote about him in 2003: "To read Rorem’s writing is to feel the agony and the bravery of composing in America. Anyone who writes music for a living is a hero, and Rorem is more heroic than most, because he has compromised so little of what he holds dear. His prose will outlast the sneering of his critics, and his music is too mysteriously sweet to die away. To him should go the final word: 'The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.'"

A very long Missy Mazzoli moment

The invaluable OperaVision channel has made available a stream of Mazzoli's The Listeners, whose world première recently took place at the Norwegian Opera, in Oslo. My quick first impression is of a potent, chilling, and excruciatingly relevant work, perhaps comparable in impact to Kaija Saariaho's Innocence. The libretto is by Royce Vavrek, who also supplied the text for Mazzoli's first full-length opera, Breaking the Waves. Opera Philadelphia and the Lyric Opera of Chicago are the co-commissioners, and I look forward to seeing the opera live at one company or the other.

Bezuidenhout's fortepianos

The Shock of the Old. The New Yorker, Nov. 21, 2022.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns (McNally Editions)

Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Holly Rogers, Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction (Cambridge UP)

Jennifer Bain, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (Cambridge UP)

Stephen Walsh, The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Pegasus)

Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century (Random House)

Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books)

Greil Marcus, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography (Yale UP)

Kevin C. Karnes, Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (University of Chicago Press)

Eric Saylor, Vaughan Williams (Oxford UP)

A Jane Sheldon moment

A Jessie Cox moment

Cox will present a collaborative work with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the DiMenna Center in NYC on Nov. 5. brin solomon recently interviewed him for VAN. I wrote about his music last year.