Verismo, a largely Italian operatic style employing a gritty naturalism current around the turn of the last century, was its day’s reality television. Shocking and sometimes grisly narratives involving murder, suicide, adultery, prostitutes and la vie bohème were stock-in-trade for colorful scores by such figures as Umberto Giordano, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Riccardo Zandonai. Giacomo Puccini, […]
George Frideric Handel’s operas, instrumental music, and oratorios together form one of the pinnacles of Western culture. They are among—along with that of J.S. Bach, Franz Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the highest musical expressions of the 18th century. But Handel’s music lives on especially because it marries elegance and virtuosic composition to deep humanity […]
None other than a saint, Philip Neri himself—founder of the Oratorian order and so-called “Apostle of Rome”— used to sit “rapt in the sweetest ecstasy” in front of Federico Barocci’s altarpiece The Visitation in his order’s mother church, the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. Centuries later, a young art history student wept in front of the […]
We all know the saying about “truth in advertising,” and in truth Picasso Black and White, the exhibition recently at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (where I viewed it) and currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is not quite what it says it is… It is an important retrospective of that giant of […]
