“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: […]
Tag: Weird & Wonderful
Posted inPlaylist
A C Major Playlist
Some days, I sit at the piano and doodle, playing nothing in particular for some unspecified period until I eventually stop. What happens next depends entirely on the amount of music I’ve chewed through the previous week: adventurous or gentle, thickly slathered or flimsily constructed. Little is uniform in these twiddling sessions, save for the […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
The Most Deserved Deaths in Opera, Ranked
There are countless rankings of the best deaths in opera that grade by the most memorable (“La Bohème,” “La Traviata”), the most epic (“Dialogues of the Carmelites,” “Götterdämmerung”), and the most difficult to stage (“La Wally,” “La Juive”). All of those criteria are well and good, but what I want—what I really, really want—in an […]
Posted inPlaylist
A March Madness Playlist
“What if we did a playlist of 32 musical marches to tie in with March Madness?” asked one VAN editor who definitely understands sportsball and did not have to google how many teams are in a bracket (or when March Madness takes place). As classical-music-cartoonish as the idea sounded, it did get us thinking about […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Ten of the Best Composer Love Letters
People often look to classical music for Valentine’s Day inspiration. Which is great, unless your inspiration is Carlo Gesualdo. While there are plenty of bad mixes (and one actually good classical music for sex playlist), looking directly into the private lives and letters of composers also offers a trove of possibilities for everyone from your […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Actually Erotic Classical Music for Sex Playlist
Early this fall, I asked friends to tell me which pieces of classical music they believed to be “the all-time sexiest.” I promised there were no wrong answers. I wasn’t being disingenuous—though I was thinking about how erotic classical music playlists on Spotify and elsewhere, if not “wrong” or “bad,” are full of famous pieces […]
Posted inBreaking
Requiem for a Tweet
Twitter was never a very musical social medium. Unlike YouTube, you couldn’t listen to ten hours of “Für Elise” on repeat; unlike TikTok, teenagers didn’t go viral for singing sea shanties. You can’t really share your own music like on SoundCloud or Bandcamp, and probably no one will care about your rare vinyl of Gérard […]
Posted inReview
The Young Adult Self-Insert Fanfic “Magic Flute”
For those with no knowledge of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s final singspiel, the poster and cast list of Florian Sigl’s new film version of “The Magic Flute” (produced by Roland Emmerich—of “Independence Day” fame and “Moonfall” infamy) might raise some questions. For those familiar with the (incomprehensible) plot of “The Magic Flute,” featuring bird men (and […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
The Sex Lives of Women Composers, Ranked
We are regularly bombarded with information about Schumann’s syphilis, Mozart’s interest in rimming, and Tchaikovsky’s unfortunate love for his nephew. But what about the kinky exploits of women composers in history? In the name of gender equality in music, I have ranked the sex lives of 30 women composers in absolutely objective order of worst […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Cooking the 1988 Metropolitan Opera Cookbook
In the summer of 2022, a second-hand bookshop in Oslo was having its closing sale. In the very back, past the classical music biographies and encyclopedias, Aksel found The Metropolitan Opera Cookbook (1988). He dropped everything and took to Twitter, and a few weeks later, amid Kevin’s transatlantic move to New York City, they once […]