More on how great artists become great: Liszt
Some fascinating glimpses of Franz Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer. Biographer Alan Walker writes:
More on how great artists become great: Liszt Read More »
Art
Plato and art that is more noble
Plato was an advocate of censorship of all the arts. But he did allow for some exceptions, so the cartoon above need not be only about ego-boosting hypocrisy. Here’s my summary of Plato’s arguments for censorship, as presented in The Republic. (Image source: An early edition of Douglas Palmer’s fun Does the Center Hold? An
Plato and art that is more noble Read More »
Beethoven’s romantic fatalism
Reprising this post on a fascinating and oft-debated issue: Beethoven’s sense of life. To start — three sensitive commentators on the meaning of Beethoven’s music. * Hermann Hesse, the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, in Steppenwolf, contrasting Mozart to Beethoven (and to Kleist, who committed suicide at age 34): “You have lent a deaf ear to those that
Beethoven’s romantic fatalism Read More »
How great artists become great
Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters
How great artists become great Read More »
Could Tchaikovsky play Tchaikovsky?
Reprising this amusing anecdote from Tchaikovsky, by Anthony Holden. Tchaikovsky was traveling from St. Petersburg to Tiflis “via the scenic route, aboard a steamship down the Volga. Concealing his identity from the other passengers, he agreed one evening to accompany an amateur soprano in a romance by Tchaikovsky, only to be told by the singer
Could Tchaikovsky play Tchaikovsky? Read More »
Rossini and the end of the castrati
One more thing to thank the Enlightenment for. I’m reading a biography of Rossini. Gioachino was born into a musical family in February 1792 (two months after the death of Mozart), but his family always struggled financially. In the music world of the 1700s, the castrati had reached the height of their popularity due to
Rossini and the end of the castrati Read More »
Cacti and metaphysics [From *The Power of One*]
From a favorite novel. A mentor to the main character, a young boy named Peekay, speaking to the boy’s mother in the context of trying to convince her to let the boy take music lessons: “God and I have no quarrels, madame. The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to
Cacti and metaphysics [From *The Power of One*] Read More »
Ellsworth Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost]
[I use Ayn Rand’s classic The Fountainhead in my Introduction to Philosophy course, analyzing the five major characters as moral-philosophical types. Here is a digest of the novel’s brilliant-manipulator villain, Ellsworth Toohey.] The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of
Ellsworth Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost] Read More »