September 25th, 2008
Great news for opera fans: The Metropolitan Opera will begin a subscription-based online broadcasting service beginning October 22. Read about it here from the New York Times.
In the meantime, there are several other great ways to see/hear the Met, even if you live on the Left Coast, as we do. Check them out at the [...]
July 9th, 2007
One of the great little pleasures of my youth was watching Danny Kaye’s TV variety show every week. (I credit this dear lunatic with introducing me to my first Gilbert & Sullivan patter song—an important moment in any young life!)
I don’t know the origin, but here’s an operatic (ahem) duet Kaye did with the late [...]
May 17th, 2007
Some of you in the larger cities may have noticed this last year that the Metropolitan Opera has begun to set up “simulcast” viewings of some of its performances in select movie theaters. As opera fans, Dan and I very much wanted to attend these viewings, and were disappointed when we learned that we would [...]
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
None
Those were the days [the nineteenth century] of the great schism between the artist and Catholicism when it seemed that art and sanctity must be forever separated. One thinks of the convert J.K. Huysmans standing among the crowd of pious pilgrims at Lourdes, his soul harassed by the observation that, although Mary had chased the devil from the rocks of the shrine and the hearts of the pilgrims, he was still there blaspheming her and her Son by the ‘hideous’ architecture of the place. He distinctly hears the devil say to Mary: ‘I shall dog your footsteps, and wherever you stop, there I shall establish myself; you may have at Lourdes all the priests you please, but art, which is the only worth-while thing on earth after sanctity, not only will you not have, but I shall so effect that it will unceasingly insult you by the prolonged blasphemy of its uglinesss….All that represents you and your Son will be grotesque…’
—
Kelly Hatzenbihler on 