Algis Valiunas

Algis Valiunas remembers the composer of ‘Ave Maria’ and the opera ‘Faust’ on his bicentennial.

Algis Valiunas on the longing that defined Napoleon, man of action.

Pleasure, war, and the mad torment of Lord Byron.

The intuition and integrity of the influential physicist.

Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

I decided against Jane Austen, without having read her, at 21. I had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read English, and the first don I met was my tutor (tutors oversaw one’s moral hygiene and general deportment, while supervisors handled the academic end). He was a voluble little dumpling…

IT’S BEEN THIRTY-FOUR YEARS, and you haven’t changed at all—flattering if exclaimed immediately by a friend one hasn’t seen in all that time, less so if blurted out after fifteen minutes of conversation. It’s true in both senses of Stanley Fish, whose latest book, How Milton Works, contains pages…

Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936) presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies. From 1899…

Novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually…

Novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually…

Kings, queens, and emperors come and go, or used to anyway, in the good old bad old days, and the modern potentates who have left a lasting mark on the popular imagination are few. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Peter the Great of Russia, Napoleon and Louis…

The art song for voice and piano—Lied, mélodie, canzone—is the poor relation of opera and oratorio, at least as far as popularity is concerned. There are legions of classical music fans who can hum every bar of La Traviata from overture to last gasp and who make attendance at Messiah sing-along…

Saint Petersburg from its ground-breaking in 1704; Petrograd from 1914; Leningrad from the arch-demonic founding father’s death in 1924; and St. Petersburg redux, with the hope of civilization restored, in 1991. But the most beautiful and illustrious Russian city is still best known as Leningrad,…

There are four 20th-century writers who are widely considered to be the gold standard in American journalistic criticism of the arts and intellectual life: H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, and Virgil Thomson. Now Thomson (1896-1989) joins the other three in the Library of America, with a…

Certain amusements appropriate to childhood or adolescence have established a beachhead in adulthood, or its 21st-century American simulacrum. Grown men and women indulge, with or without shame, in video games, fantasy football leagues, sitcoms, online porn, comic books, and movies based on comic…

Facile cosa è farsi universale. (It is an easy thing to make oneself universal.) The statement in English has a blowhard’s windy obscurity. It sounds as though it came from the facile mouth of an exceedingly minor Transcendentalist. Some things are best said in Italian, and by men who can back up…

Mr. Vladimir Putin intends that the current Olympic games be forever stamped with his glory.  Sochi is being protected by a “Ring of Steel.”  Thus has spoken Russia’s current Man of Steel, who sees himself as the rightful descendant of the original, although Mr. Putin’s bared breasts on such…

The earth is a place of woe and wailing: This is an understanding as old as human consciousness. However, most men and women have always seen that such an understanding is hardly adequate. Small contentments and towering ecstasies, consolation and redemption, must have their significance as one…

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

John Huston (1906-1987) had the talent and the courage to live as he pleased. Who would not wish to be able to say the same for himself? Who does not feel diminished beside someone who has done as much? Yet one can live as he pleases and still fall well short of the life he might have lived if he…

Despite the insistence of formalists that music is about nothing but itself, the supreme composers take in and give out as much life as the supreme novelists do. That is as true of the modernists as it is of their generally more revered predecessors—though when it is modern life that the composer…

This year marked the 250th anniversary of the death of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), and musical hallelujahs rang out around the world, as choral societies, professional and amateur, trotted out the warhorse oratorios, and opera houses not only presented the now-standard works (Alcina,…

The Wagner Clan

The Rest Is Noise

Those who love opera can scarcely imagine a world without it. Yet on the very face of it--what a queer notion it is to translate drama into song, and to saturate this nonpareil artistic outpouring with emotion so extravagant that it bears the scantest resemblance even to the most heightened…

History of My Life

Shakespeare's Philosophy

Nothing else pumps up the municipal pride of once- glorious cities, now moribund, like the pertinent anniversaries of their artistic native sons long dead.

The Complete Plays

THIS YEAR WAS THE 200TH anniversary of the death of Friedrich Schiller, after his dearest friend Goethe, the most superb peak in Germany's literary mountain range: dramatist, historian, philosopher, poet celebrated for An die Freude, the "Ode to Joy" that Beethoven set in his Ninth Symphony.

Going Sane

Don Quixote

Prokofiev

THE CLOSE OF 2002 brings with it the close of the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But you would hardly have known it from America's premier journals and magazines, which showed little interest in giving "Uncle Tom's Cabin" its due in the course of the year. No other…

Algis Valiunas on the works of the Nobel laureate.

THIS YEAR MARKS THE CENTENARY of Giuseppe Verdi's death, and you can hardly move without meeting some sign of it. Companies with short schedules, such as the Atlanta Opera and the Palm Beach Opera, have devoted the entire season to Verdi; the rather grander San Francisco Opera conducted a Verdi…

EVEN IN THE DAYS THAT HOMER SINGS OF, sightings of the gods were a rarity. By the time the Trojan War got underway, Zeus had pretty much given up making earthly appearances, and it was hard for even the wisest mortals to identify the lesser gods he sent in his stead, as Odysseus complained to…

Music and drink have long been companions; some awfully good tunes have celebrated the pleasures of getting gloriously hammered. The title character of Mozart's Don Giovanni announces himself ready to go all night in his champagne aria, "Finch'an dal vino," which tears along like a raging erotic…

If the good of the body -- hygiene, comfort, longevity, protection from illness, relief from pain, and availability of pleasure -- is the standard by which we judge, then the past doesn't stand a chance against modern times. Whatever nobility, magnificence, or wisdom previous ages might have had,…

Comedians, beautiful women, and the writers of popular fiction all suffer from the same affliction: a yearning to be taken seriously. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was born in 1859, wanted above all to be considered a serious writer, and it was no consolation that he had created the most enduring…

Sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is probably the most famous artist ever to live, and his most famous works all depict man as a beautiful creature made for great things and deserving to rejoice in his own majesty. The heroic male nude was Michelangelo's…

When it comes to dazzling political spectacle, no regime in history can touch the Fascist powers. Inducing mass rapture by convincing one's countrymen to abandon themselves to the leader's will -- goose-stepping legs and saluting arms by the tens of thousands jerking upward like those of…

If simply to be an American is "a complex fate," as Henry James once declared, then the fate of an American who chooses to live most of his life in England must be something more than complex -- maybe compound complex, like an especially nasty fracture. In Improvised Europeans: American Literary…