Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale, $38). The first full-length history of what happened to the Jewish classical composers who, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill, ran afoul of the Nazi regime and had their music banned. A powerfully unsettling tale of ideology run amok–and of how Hitler destroyed Austro-German musical culture by trying to ensure its supremacy for all time (TT).
Archives for July 2013
MUSEUM
Fairfield Porter: Modern American Master (Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, N.Y., ongoing). For much of his adult life, Fairfield Porter lived and painted in Southampton, and many of his paintings belong to the permanent collection of the Parrish, which is now hanging them regularly rather than sporadically in its new building. Anyone interested in the work of one of America’s most insufficiently recognized modern masters, a lifelong realist who was nonetheless deeply influenced by abstract expressionism, should hasten to Water Mill and partake of this important show (TT).
TT: Snapshot
A complete performance by New York City Ballet of George Balanchine’s Western Symphony, filmed for French TV in 1956 and featuring Diana Adams and Herbert Bliss, Melissa Hayden and Nicholas Magallanes, Allegra Kent and Robert Barnett, and Tanaquil LeClercq and Jacques d’Amboise. The score, conducted by Leon Barzin, is by Hershy Kay:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
TT: Almanac
“Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.”
Clifford Odets, Golden Boy
TT: Lookback
From 2003:
Do you tend to agree with what I write? Even if you don’t, do you find it illuminating? If so, then it doesn’t really matter whether I happen to know the people who made the works of art I recommend, does it? A lot of readers, after all, seem to think I’m a trustworthy critic, and the reason why they do is because their experience has taught them to trust my taste. I’ve worked hard at building that trust. It’s my capital. I wouldn’t dream of squandering it by writing a favorable review of a bad work of art by a good friend. I never have, and I never will.
One more thing: I teach a course in criticism at Rutgers/Newark University, in which I spend a few minutes early in the semester talking about conflicts of interest. Rule No. 1 of arts journalism, I tell my students, goes like this: “Never sleep with anybody you write about.” That gets their attention–especially since I put it more bluntly than that….
Read the whole thing here.
TT: Almanac
“Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it.”
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
TT: Just because
Lillian Gish, Helen Hayes, and Bob Crane in the opening scene of the 1969 TV version of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, taped in front of a live audience:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
TT: Almanac
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
Conor Cruise O’Brien (quoted in the Irish Times, July 15, 1969)