Thoughts on literature and music from Frank Beck
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Asmik Grigorian (Image: Alpha Classics) "Does [Sergei Vasiliyevich] really think we don't know he's writing a piano concerto?" Fifteen-year-old Vera Skalon wrote that question in her diary in the summer of 1890. She and her two sisters were staying at Ivanovka, the Satin family estate, some three hundred miles south of Moscow, with the two Satina sisters, and their cousin, a seventeen-year-old…
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of angels? Even if one should suddenly take me to his heart, I would fade in the power of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but an onset of terror that we can barely stand, and that we admire because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each angel is terrifying. And so I restrain myself and swallow my dark, sobbing call for help. Ah,…
If you hope to hold a listener's attention for 37 hours, you'd better capture it at once, and David Rintoul does that. His reading of Thomas Mann's classic novel, in John E. Wood's marvelously fluent translation, is alluring right from the start, but in such a matter-of-fact way that listeners may be enchanted before they know what's happening (click here to listen): The story of Hans Castorp that…
Anna Depenbusch (Bayerischen Rundfunks) Anna Depenbusch, one of Germany's leading singer/songwriters, has released "Kingfisher Frau"-- the first song from her new album ---- in an intimate performance from Berlin's Meisterhall, an historic concert venue built in 1910. "Kingfisher Frau" is dedicated to pioneering German mathematician Emmy Noether, but it speaks eloquently about anyone who, to use…
Brinkwells: the cottage the Elgars rented in West Sussex Thoughts on the centenary of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, first performed at Queen's Hall in London on October 27, 1919. Imagine if Hamlet began with the Prince alone on stage, delivering the words, "To be or not to be . . . " -- no setting of the scene, just one character thinking out loud, leaving us to make what we can of what he…
For the 200th anniversary of the birth of our national poet (May 31, 2019), here are lines from Walt Whitman's 'Song of the Universal', which composer Ola Gjielo has selected and set for chorus, piano, and orchestra. (You can hear a performance of the work from Spain at the first link below.) Whitman was one of the first writers who made me take poetry seriously, and I'm sure there are more echoes…
The story sounds like one of this morning's headlines. A brilliant young woman has a teacher she admires, who offers to be her mentor. She studies with him privately and even moves in with his family, but then discovers he wants to divorce his wife and marry her. This shattering MeToo moment is from Ruth , an 1895 novel by Lou Andreas-Salomé. The Russian-born novelist challenged many accepted…
Carla Juri as painter Paula Modersohn-Becker Christian Schwochow's Paula is the story of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the first female painter to have a museum devoted entirely to her work. However, I must admit that, before I saw the film, most of what I knew about Modersohn-Becker had to do with her relationship with Rainer Maria Rilke. The poet met her at Germany's Worpswede artist colony in 1900…
The Duino Castle, near Trieste, where Rilke began the Duino Elegies Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of angels? Even if one should suddenly take me to his heart, I would fade in the power of his stronger existence . . . Reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in one of the many English translations, what kind of voice do you hear? I've heard people read his poems in a voice…
We have audio recordings of Tolstoy and Tennyson--even one of Robert Browning. But no recordings of Rainer Maria Rilke are known to exist, although he lived until 1926. In a letter written in April of that year to Dieter Bassermann, Rilke noted that the phonograph could contribute "to a new, orderly sense of responsibility toward the reading aloud of a poem (by which alone its whole existence…
