For decades, writer Edmund White has been a definitive voice in gay literature, especially in the United States. He’s written over 30 books, mostly on themes of same-sex desire; they are also are riddled with references to his own passions for art and music. Of particular interest are the frank discussions about psycho-sexual tensions with […]
Tag: Books & Film
Posted inPlaylist
A “Faust” Playlist
“The more the Faust myth changes, the more it endures,” writes Peter Werres in his introduction to Lives of Faust. “It is our myth, and we must go on confronting it.” Since first appearing in a chapbook in the late 1500s, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange […]
Posted inInterview
Sacred Time
If you’re going to the Metropolitan Opera, Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the iconic exploration of opera queendom, The Queen’s Throat, is the best guide one could hope for. After dinner at Rosa Mexicano across from Lincoln Center, we sauntered across Columbus Avenue to a performance of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” For both of us, it was […]
Posted inPlaylist
A “Divine Comedy” Playlist
One of the more morbid traditions of classical music is its focus on death anniversaries: 1991 was a big year for Mozart (particularly in the business of Requiems). The cancellation of so many #Beethoven250 concerts in 2020 was half–but only half–jokingly bright-sided by the fact that all of the programs could be resurrected for 2027. […]
Posted inReview
Communist Dissonance
At the beginning of the Chinese Communist Party propaganda movie-musical “The Wings of Songs,” a tune is playing, and there are attractive people frolicking. But, unlike “The Sound of Music,” the frolicking and the music never match. We have just been introduced to three boyish members of a band, the film’s protagonists, who are performing […]
Posted inOpinion
The Offensively Inoffensive
At a tandoori restaurant in Tel Aviv, an Israeli politician chastises a quixotic Norwegian diplomat: “When people talk to you, Terje, you should pay attention to what they actually say, and not just listen for what you want to hear.” The scene is from “Oslo,” which began as a 2016 play and last weekend resurfaced […]
Posted inReview
The Society of the Spectacle
Modernist literature has a special fascination with Wagner. The voices of “Das Rheingold” and “Tristan und Isolde” drift across T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Virginia Woolf’s The Waves bears the imprint of the composer’s motivic method, along with the symbolism of the “Ring” Cycle and “Parsifal.” A lusty Wagnerian atavism is stamped all over […]
Posted inReview
Far Away, So Close
In this pandemic, with its necessity of physical distancing, opera—known for large-scale, human-intensive productions and larger-than-life immediacy—faces particular challenges. Many companies’ creative approaches to COVID-friendly performance have drawn on the past few decades of live broadcasts to bring their productions to house-bound, worldwide audiences. At the end of this first year, filmed opera produced during […]
Posted inInterview
Healthy Confusion
Alex Ross’s Wagernism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music was released in September to wide acclaim. In VAN, Alison Kinney described the book’s complex, nuanced approach to art and morality: “Ross recognizes, and reshapes, the world of Wagnerism as it is, for good and for bad, and makes room for the inadequacy of […]
Posted inReview
The Ecstasy of Knowledge
Early in Wagnerism: Art and Politics In the Shadow of Music, a history of the cult of fandom devoted to the operas of 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner, Alex Ross drops a charming anecdote from the 1850s. Poet and critic Auguste de Gasperini told of being “subjugated” by Wagner’s music, suffering what Ross calls “an […]