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Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” wrote that “As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see. To look at something that’s “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something — if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.” We might extend Sontag’s assertion…
Opera companies throughout the world are staging Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle this year to fete his 200th birthday on May 22, but Hungarian Jewish conductor Adam Fischer is having no part of it during his “Wagner Days” festival in June. Fischer, who launched his festival in 2006 in the Bela Bartok concert hall at the…
A descendant of Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, promised to hand over the correspondence of her late father to the Bavarian State Archives. Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of the composer and director of the annual Bayreuth Festival of his works, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin that she plans to give Wolfgang Wagner’s letters…
Former German infantryman Hans Himsel lived through scenes in 1944 at the Bayreuth opera house worthy of the finale of Richard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” when Valhalla goes up in flames. In this bicentenary year of Wagner’s birth, Himsel, 90, recalled the last wartime production at Bayreuth. It was August 9, 1944 and the cast performed “Die…
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
A brilliantly researched new biography by Howard Pollack, “Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World,” out soon from Oxford University Press, is shining light on how one 20th-century American Jewish composer expressed his identity as a politically active leftist without abandoning Yiddishkeit. Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and died…
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