Music and Being is an exploration of the influence of music on being. It is derived in part from my own experience and involvement. My essential theme is that art is crucial to the well-being of the human mind. The book consists of nine interrelated essays, both personal and analytical, on the music of Mozart, […]
Music and Being
Babi Yar Massacre – Shostakovich & Yevtushenko & Proust
On September 29th and 30th, 1941, over 33,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis at the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. Twenty-one years later, Shostakovich and Yevtushenko collaborated, within a Stalinist regime of repression, to bring to the public Shostakovich’s 13th symphony. In addition to the 1941 killing ground of Babi Yar, the first movement […]
Gounod and Mistral – Mireille
The video below is Vincent’s aria in the second scene of the fifth and final act of Charles Gounod’s 1864 opera Mireille, written the year before his remarkable Faust, based on the first part of Goethe’s play. Mireille contains fascinating music. The libretto is based on Frédéric Mistral’s long lyric poem Mirèio. Mistral was the 1904 […]
Edward Elgar – Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 – The Eloquent Emptiness of Fulfillment
I have a small, special place in my heart for the music of Edward Elgar, and his sentiments of the place and the people surrounding and inspiring him. The Quintet, especially in its middle slow movement, contains that beauty of understanding made remarkable and moving because it resides beneath the surface of things, through which […]
Kurosawa, van Gogh, and Chopin, and the Permanence of Dreams
This is the first scene of the fifth part, “Crows,” of Kurosawa’s 1990 film “Dreams,” based on the director’s actual dreams. Its production was assisted by Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg. Kurosawa was 80 at the time, and this was his third to last of his films. The music by Chopin is the 15th prelude of […]
Mozart and Haydn – The Last Piano Sonatas
The last piano sonatas of Mozart and Haydn are studies of musical and aesthetic differences. The last of Mozart’s piano sonatas, K. 570 and 576, were written in 1789, two years before his death at the age of 35. Haydn’s piano sonatas 61 and 62 were composed in 1794, in London, at the height of […]
On Hearing András Schiff Play The Goldberg Variations
I was feeling not at all well yesterday, so unwell that I considered not going to the evening’s Bach concert by András Schiff. But I also felt unwell the day before, and I still made the four hours’ round trip to White Rock to keep my appointment there. I tried a nap, but as naps […]
Kon Ichikawa – The Makioka Sisters (1983)
The beginning of Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters may be the most beautiful twenty minutes of film to be seen: the beauty of the faces, of the kimonos, and, surmounting all, the passage into the humanless sequence of cherry blossoms, into which is introduced a modern scoring of Ombra mai fù that begins Handel’s Serse, […]
The Displaced Anxiety of Discontent – Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet 1
The Moscow Show Trial of the Twenty-One occurred in March, 1938. It was one of the culminating events of Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936 through 1938. All of the defendants were prominent, and were accused as Trotskyites guilty of murder, assassination, and treason. Particularly prominent amongst them was Nikolai Bukharin, former ally of Lenin and Stalin […]
Reflections on the Final Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert
It is said the last three piano sonatas of Schubert are suffused with premonitions of his death. It may be so, but the contemplation is often sweet, as if Schubert cannot help being so in his music and, thus, so as well in his preparations for death. They are piano sonata 19 in C minor, […]