Jay Nordlinger is a senior editor at National Review, known for his extensive writing on music, culture, and politics. He contributed frequently to The Weekly Standard from 1995 to 2017, with particular emphasis on classical music criticism and cultural commentary. He is also the author of several books and a regular contributor to the Salzburg Festival blog.
As a rule, I favor a strict separation between music and politics. Politics need not worm its way into every nook and cranny. Of course, sometimes composers like to impose politics on their music. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies declared that a string quartet of his was about the Iraq war: a depiction of…
Many who would never dream of attending a violin recital have warmed to Itzhak Perlman. Voluble, funny, and charismatic, he has traded quips with David Letterman and appeared on Sesame Street. He has garnered Grammys and Emmys with boring regularity, and a Newsweek cover story named him " Top…
LINDA TRIPP--remember her?--is back in the news, with a bit of vindication. The Defense Department will pay her $595,000. It will also give her a retroactive promotion and retroactive pay. Why? Because the Clinton Pentagon played a nasty trick on her, and violated the Privacy Act in so doing. Tripp…
New York
New York OH, HE'S A BEAUT, Clinton. Every week, he fascinates and appalls. But he is also a predictable man -- even dully so. I wish I had called his move to Harlem; it seems so obvious now. Clinton does it over and over: runs to black people when he gets into a jam. Many observers have remarked on…
It's just a small matter, in all the Clinton grossness, but it counts. Linda Tripp was the victim of a dirty, and illegal, trick. It was played on her by her own bosses at the Pentagon. And now those men -- Kenneth Bacon and Clifford Bernath -- have escaped with the wispiest slaps on the wrist.…
The gay lobby is seeking a trophy, and the target is Dr. Laura Schlessinger. "Dr. Laura," as she is known, is a radio therapist, dispensing advice to 18 million listeners. For sheer radio popularity, she has only one rival -- Rush Limbaugh. An Orthodox Jew, Dr. Laura takes a traditional view of…
I must've been 12 when I first heard Leontyne Price. I didn't like vocal music much -- young people seldom do. But she was on the concert series, sandwiched between the likes of Horowitz and Milstein, so I went.
LINDA TRIPP MAY NOT BE America's sweetheart, but one fact remains: The Clinton Defense Department -- her own employer -- played a rotten trick on her. And no one has yet been held responsible.
AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE LAST WEEK, Bill Clinton received one question he clearly relished: Would his current troubles harm his cherished race initiative? No, Clinton answered -- especially given "the response you've seen from some sectors of the American community," which has "reinforced and…
AS PRESIDENT CLINTON'S DATE with the grand jury approached, Lawrence Walsh was feeling queasy. "My instinct is to shut my eyes," he told a television audience. The Iran-contra prosecutor was hardly known for delicacy when he was pursuing Presidents Reagan and Bush. What had so perturbed him now? "I…
IF PRESIDENT CLINTON could count on anyone in the press, it was Eleanor Clift, the Newsweek writer known in certain quarters as "Eleanor Rodham Clift." She never wavered.
If music has a mystery man, it must be Sergiu Celibidache, the late Romanian conductor who refused to record, forsook celebrity, and held legions of admirers in his spell. He belongs with the first rank of conductors -- Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, George Szell -- yet he is relatively…
WHO IS THE LEADING CLINTON APOLOGIST on television? None other than Geraldo Rivera, who has spent 1998 mauling Kenneth Starr and swathing the president in sympathy. And who is television's foremost Clinton attacker? Almost certainly Chris Matthews, who rides the president relentlessly, appalled…
WHO IS THE LEADING CLINTON APOLOGIST on television? None other than Geraldo Rivera, who has spent 1998 mauling Kenneth Starr and swathing the president in sympathy. And who is television's foremost Clinton attacker? Almost certainly Chris Matthews, who rides the president relentlessly, appalled…
IN THE ANTI-TOBACCO CRUSADE, the number 3,000 is king. The most cherished statistic of the crusade is that 3,000 kids a day begin to smoke. The next most cherished statistic is that 3,000 non-smokers a year die of "secondhand smoke." These figures fly through the air like missiles, launched by…
ON JULY 7, AS LINDA TRIPP was testifying for a third day before Kenneth Starr's grand jury, Stephen Montanarelli, a Democratic prosecutor in Maryland, had a surprise announcement: He was going to launch a grand-jury investigation of his own, into Tripp's taping of phone calls with Monica Lewinsky.…
NO JOURNALIST IS MORE TROUBLING to the Clinton White House than Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. He has immersed himself in White-water, taken Paula Jones's claims seriously, and listened to Linda Tripp talk about an intern named Monica. Now, Isikoff is himself a target of controversy. On June 11, Julie…
No one likes a braggart, but here's a fact: A golf tournament is a much nicer experience with a press pass. And you feel the difference immediately.
THE EFFORT TO TARNISH LINDA TRIPP is sometimes appalling, sometimes comical. Ever since the former White House secretary emerged as a threat to Bill Clinton's presidency, she has been the target of furious examination. Her story has always had its share of intrigue: sex, divided loyalties, an FBI…
THE WEEK OF MAY 18 was not an especially good one for Bill Clinton. New China allegations had surfaced, and Republicans were quick to make hay. The House leadership scheduled a series of votes, each intended to rebuke Clinton for his China policy. Democrats had little choice but to go along. Many…
IT WAS A VERY STRANGE STRETCH of an already strange deposition. Ten times in a row, Ken Bacon, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, was asked whether he took responsibility for the release of confidential information from Linda Tripp's security file. And all ten times, he answered,…
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 13, at least one Pentagon hand knew something strange was going on. Les Blake, head of an office dealing with confidential files, decided he needed to write a "Memorandum for the Record." Earlier in the day, he had received a call from Cliff Bernath, a deputy in the public-affairs…
Curt Sampson
For the first five years of Bill Clinton's presidency, his opponents grumbled that the press was too soft on him, refusing to probe one scandal after another. When the Monica Lewinsky story broke on January 21, however, the press came alive, and it has been hot on the case ever since. Steve Roberts…
BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON have found themselves an awfully sympathetic minister -- the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, who presides at a Methodist church a few blocks from the White House. Wogaman has recently sounded less like a clergyman than a purveyor of the Clinton line. Shortly after the Monica…
Judith Tick
NOW IS THE HOUR OF BILL CLINTON'S greatest political need, and one senator has rushed to his side: Bob Torricelli of New Jersey. Torricelli has made the defense of Clinton his special cause. Other Democrats warily hang back, but Torricelli charges ahead, vouching for the president on television,…
Public television has never been kind to Ronald Reagan. All through the 1980s, shows like Frontline and Nova assailed him, depicting him as a buccaneer, a menace, and worse. Conservatives, understandably, developed a thirst for eliminating PBS altogether.
If you don't know Dr. Ray Greco, you don't live in the northern tip of West Virginia, and a shame, too. Norman Rockwell couldn't have drawn a more appealing physician -- kindly, wise, all-capable. Dr. Greco is also a bit of a radio star, hosting a Saturday-morning call-in show called "Let's Talk…
That brilliant, appalling, and unignorable pianist, Martha Argerich, will always be thought of as a young tigress: her hair tumbling down her back, her shoulders hunched, her eyes blazing -- as though she would rather devour the keyboard than play it. Many critics consider her the greatest living…
Brendan G. Carroll
The opera world is helpless against a love story, and it is now under the spell of a real one. On a spring day in 1996, Angela Gheorghiu, the dreamy Romanian soprano, and Roberto Alagna, the equally dreamy French-Italian tenor, skipped out of a rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They…
If American orchestras had a golden age, it was the 1950s, when titanic conductors commanded the podiums: Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Fritz Reiner in Chicago, Charles Munch in Boston, Dimitri Mitropoulos in New York. But the most impressive of them all was the one in the least likely place:…
Jan Swafford
The plane, overbooked, was crawling with irritable travelers. After some seat reshuffling, I squeezed by a burly, hostile-looking man and settled in. I figured on an unpleasant flight. The man and I wrestled over our shared armrest for about five minutes, until I gave up.
Georg Solti
In music, as in chess, tennis, and other pursuits, child prodigies come and go. Some flame out quickly, never to be heard from again. They have their time upon the stage, displaying their precocious technique, beaming at astonished applause, then exit. There comes a point -- 15, 16, 17 -- at which…
Laurence Bergreen
Just as there are cat people and dog people, there are wedding people and reception people. Most people, I imagine, belong to the latter category -- impatient for the ceremony to be done with, eager for the party to begin. Because that's all a "reception" is, really: a big fat party, only one where…
When Ben Hogan died on July 25, the golf world seemed slightly stunned. He was 84 and had been sick for several years, but he was always a hovering presence around the game, a necessary part of its self-image. Not that he ever talked to anyone. He kept to himself at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort…
For the past few years, the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne has been offering her audiences an unusual encore: "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the 1970 Simon & Garfunkel hit. The effect is both unsettling and transfixing. The voice is familiar; so is the song. But the voice and the song together are an…
The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas vividly remembers the New York premiere of Steve Reich's Four Organs. The year was 1973, the site Carnegie Hall. After a few minutes, "a restlessness began to sweep the crowd." There were " rustlings of programs, overly loud coughs, compulsive seat-shifting," and…
It happened so fast: The record stores no longer had LPs, they had CDs. You couldn't put a needle on them. You had to go out and buy expensive equipment to play them with, and they were expensive, too -- sometimes twice the price of LPs (but with more minutes of music, usually).
Leopold Stokowski had been the conductor of the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly three decades by 1940, but much of the world met him only that year, with the release of the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. In the opening frames, the "Fabulous Philadelphians" filed in, took their seats, and…
Brian Newbould
Of all the world's opera companies, only New York's Met has the stature to summon to its stage the finest, most appropriate singers for any work in the repertory and present them in a kind of all-star performance. When these well- laid plans succeed, the results are not only glorious but historic.…
Last year, David Helfgott was a rmer music student who had fallen victim to a crippling mental illness. This year, he is the most famous pianist in the world. All because of a movie.
Something strange happened to me the other day: I got a flat tire. And even stranger, I changed it. I am still dizzy with amazement.
Kim Chernin (with Renate Stendhal)
MUSIC
Once, a reader wrote a wild letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., condemning him for all manner of failure, not excluding "lousy syntax." Buckley answered tersely: "If you had my syntax, you'd be rich."
The story is told of the diva who, shipwrecked, fell into the clutches of cannibals. Before they put her in the pot, she cried, "You can't do this to me, I'm an opera singer!"
John Corigliano has almost become world-famous, and for a composer of classical music who is living and breathing among us, that is rare indeed. Every day, his name grows more familiar; every day, his election by the musical gods (or at least the publicity men) is made clearer. Other composers vie…
When Russia was swallowed in communism, musical life was shackled to the state. Some got out, like Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some stayed and suffered, like Dmitri Shostakovich. Some chose to become functionaries of the regime, like Dmitri Kabalevsky (also a composer). But most were neither dissidents…
One summer, on the cusp of middle age, Ann Kimmage traveled to Europe with her husband and two sons. On arrival in Prague, she switched immediately and naturally to Czech. Her sons gazed at her in astonishment. Clearly she had been there before. Could she explain? Thus did this American professor…
Unlike its sister disciplines, classical music has been spared a fixation on politics. Paintings and sculptures may be more political than artistic, and novels and poems more political than literary. But music, dwelling in its otherworld of notes and modulation and rhythm, has been able to sail on.…
It's not every day that golfers are treated to a movie about their sport, so they rejoice at every crumb from Hollywood's table -- or recoil from it. The latest such crumb is Tin Cup, a Kevin Costner vehicle about a no- account practice-range operator who gets it together and shines at the U.S.…
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has announced its 1996-1997 season, and in most respects it is an unremarkable one, offering the usual subscription series dedicated to "Pops," "Celebrity," "Favorites," and so on. But there is also a revolutionary series called "Classically Black." This is a group…
IS IT WORTH remarking, at this late date, on the near-total acceptance of adultery in contemporary society? Or is it like noting that it is dark at night, or that the car has replaced the horse-drawn carriage? It seemed to happen so fast, really. One day, adultery was an acknowledged evil, a grave…
is it worth remarking, at this late date, on the near-total acceptance of adultery in contemporary society? Or is it like noting that it is dark at night, or that the car has replaced the horse-drawn carriage? It seemed to happen so fast, really. One day, adultery was an acknowledged evil, a grave…
When I was a teenager and vulnerable to fashion, I was much taken with Bertolt Brecht's acid observation that those who desire heroes are saps. Now that I have put off childish things, I see Brecht for what he was, and that heroes, like ideals, have their place. In my boyhood, there were many…
The thaw has set in here in Washington, D.C., and it looks like we can resume lollygagging through life. We had another snowstorm a couple of weeks back. Well, not a storm exactly -- more like seven inches of pretty, powdery snow, barely enough to keep a third-grader in Duluth from skateboarding to…
It's not an evening you've been looking forward to. Guests are coming in from out of town, and they want to go to the Pavarotti blow-out at the sports arena. You are fraught with dread. The last thing you want is to hear the Pay Man like this. It will pain you to see him debase himself, tossing out…
It is mid-November, and every aficionado of presidential speechcraft knows what that means: the issuance of the Thanksgiving proclamation. This is a rare and wondrous species of rhetoric. It is homiletic and hortatory; historical and political; admonitory and prayerful. In it, the president has a…
It is mid-November, and every aficionado of presidential speechcraft knows what that means: the issuance of the Thanksgiving proclamation. This is a rare and wondrous species of rhetoric. It is homiletic and hortatory; historical and political; admonitory and prayerful. In it, the president has a…
As the Ryder Cup unfolded on television a few weeks ago, my thoughts turned naturally to the differences between patriotism and nationalism. Whose didn't?