“At Andrew Edmunds, Artistic Gossip Is Always on the Menu”
Michael Delgado, Apollo

In Apollo, Michael Delgado lauds the old-school charm of the London restaurant Andrew Edmunds. Its eponymous founder opened a print shop that dealt in satirical works by Gillray, Rowlandson, and Hogarth, and later turned a wine bar next door into the eatery that bears his name today—the fare is “elegant without pretension, comforting and slightly old-fashioned.” Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn and the editor of Literary Review, moved his magazine’s offices above Andrew Edmunds in the 1990s, and the restaurant soon came to host “men of letters, artists and boozy ‘working lunches.’” Delgado reminisces on his time as an editor of Literary Review and celebrates an “establishment that feels like a relic of a lost era.”

“Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta: One Room’s Renaissance World”
J. S. Marcus, The Wall Street Journal

For The Wall Street Journal, J. S. Marcus praises the Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta (painted chamber) in Mantua, Italy, commissioned by the marquis Ludovico III Gonzaga for what became his Palazzo Ducale. Completed between 1465 and 1474, the chamber features portraits of Ludovico and his family underneath “an elaborate, illusionistic ceiling topped with a trompe l’oeil oculus.” The ceiling is decorated with grisaille depictions of Roman emperors and other mythological subjects, along with a group of curious putti surveying the goings-on below.

“A radical Rasputin”
Robert Poole, The Times Literary Supplement

The curious figure of John Nichols Tom (1799–1838) was the epitome of a con artist. Having stolen the identity of Sir William Courtenay, who disappeared after his long-term homosexual affair with his childhood friend was discovered, Tom decided to make a name for himself. In The Times Literary Supplement, Robert Poole reviews Ian Breckon’s Mad Tom’s Rising: The Revolutionary Mystic Sir William Courtenay and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil, which recounts the fake Sir William Courtenay’s rise to power among his gullible demographic of choice: the impoverished laborers of Kent. Espousing themes of “the corruption of power” and the “vanity of worldly wealth,” Courtenay was able to extract large sums from rich fools and to establish a populist newspaper before being convicted on charges of fraud and perjury. After a stint in the loony bin, Courtenay returned to Kent to instigate class warfare. This all culminated in the Battle of Bossenden Wood, in which the con artist and several compatriots were shot dead. Poole commends Breckon’s book and calls it a “readable micro-history.”

Don Giovanni makes his dramatic entrance while fleeing his latest attempted conquest, Donna Anna. Confronted by her outraged father, the proud but nameless Commendatore, the Don slays the older man in a duel, leaving Donna Anna to the milquetoast comforts of her feckless fiancé, Don Ottavio.

Dragging along his increasingly disillusioned valet Leporello, Don Giovanni next encounters Donna Elvira, whom he had seduced and abandoned before the start of the opera. He glibly disengages from the embittered woman, leaving Leporello to console her by enumerating the Don’s international roster of past amours, which totals 2,065. Don Giovanni then stumbles upon the peasant couple Masetto and Zerlina as they are about to marry. The lecherous nobleman persuades Zerlina to go off with him instead, offering dubious promises to transform her fate.

Eventually recognized by a furious Donna Elvira, the now-infamous Don must again flee, only to resume his seductions disguised as Leporello, proving himself shamelessly immune to self-examination or human correction. The supernatural intervenes when a stone statue of the Commendatore comes to life and demands Don Giovanni renounce his libertine ways. After he instead mockingly invites the statue to dinner, the unrepentant title character is dragged by a chorus of demons into the depths of Hell.

Bintner’s weak voice could not rise to his role’s challenges, but most of the rest of the cast delivered their roles with appealing heft. The bass Roberto Tagliavini upstaged Bintner as Leporello. The soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen is no stranger to the role of Donna Anna and communicated her distress with convincing honesty, while still preserving more than a hint of attraction towards her seducer. She was well-matched vocally, if not in her character’s steadfast temperament, by the Ottavio of the refined lyric tenor Bogdan Volkov. The rising mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina played Donna Elvira and was a standout of the evening, resonating in her superbly controlled middle and lower ranges. The young peasants Masetto and Zerlina came to life in the hands of the bass Dingle Yandell and the exceptionally able soprano Giulia Semenzato. The bass Andreas Bauer Kanabas made for a fearsome Commendatore.

Don Giovanni’s frequent scene changes and rapid dramatic flow make it notoriously difficult to stage. Holten’s production gestures toward coherence by confining the action to a house party. Es Devlin’s sets and Anja Vang Kragh’s costumes suggest a licentious 1930s milieu. Luke Halls’s video projections look rather dated, but they nevertheless help many scenes along. In certain moments, the projections include handwritten lists of names of the Don’s lovers on the house’s walls. As Donna Elvira contemplates his infidelity, she affectingly gestures toward her own name on the wall. The projections show the fires of Hell in the final scene, when the Don meets his infernal end. At other times, they are more abstract. During the famous “Champagne Aria,” a rollicking cavatina set to the rhythm of a follia, a multicolor projection isolates Don Giovanni in a doorway and spins around him, complementing his frenzied instructions to Leporello to prepare a grand party at which he hopes to add at least ten new names to his list of conquests.

Stefano Montanari, the principal conductor of the Orchestra del Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy, led a studied overture but took the rest of the performance con brio, delivering the score faster than any other performance of Don Giovanni I have heard. This suggested he was rushing, but his tempo was lively, entertaining, and consistent. Holten also notably cut the opera’s final scene, a moralizing coda in which the surviving characters pronounce the justice of Don Giovanni’s damnation and move on with their more pedestrian lives. It is widely believed that Mozart cut the scene from the opera’s revised Vienna premiere, and, though it is rarely done in modern times, the occasion felt more satisfying without it.

Tintoretto’s near contemporary, at once a friend and great rival in Venice, was Titian, thirty years his senior and perhaps briefly his master. Their art can seem similar to a casual viewer, both having painted rich colors and luscious, seductive landscapes inspired by the beguiling Venetian mainland. Nevertheless, they differed—not least in their approach to painting. Titian was the kind of artist who worked slowly with great care, producing urbane pictures emanating serenity. Tintoretto was his opposite: he painted at high speed, created worlds and figures in a few hasty brushstrokes, and often employed the artificial, somewhat unnerving colors and sharp diagonals associated with Mannerism, dispensing with the perspective that was essential in Renaissance art. We can see that distinction in the exhibition’s second room, which features Tintoretto’s femmes fatales. In his Danaë (ca. 1570–83), the sprightly young woman and her maidservant eagerly scoop up Jupiter’s gold coins. His version is contrasted with a photograph of Titian’s Danaë (1560–65), in which the same mythological figure lies passively, a sixteenth-century pinup, her crone of a servant holding up a sack to catch the falling bounty.

The art historian Bernard Berenson, who placed Titian and Tintoretto on an equally exalted plane, wrote in his 1894 study Venetian Painters of the Renaissance of the poetry and religiosity in Tintoretto’s art. Looking here at The Miracle of Saint Augustine (ca. 1549–50), one is reminded of El Greco, who may have learned as much in Venice as he did in his native Greece before he left for Spain. Tintoretto’s endemic dramatic sense and spiritual depth also enraptured John Ruskin, who saw Tintoretto’s decorative programs in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 1845 and decided that he should be a model for modern artists. Ruskin, though often a crank, was widely followed in his time, and his writing on Tintoretto touched his contemporaries, but he is ignored by the exhibition. It instead quotes in a wall text Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1957 essay “The Venetian Pariah.” Tintoretto is often considered the first modern artist (a pin that could apply to Michelangelo too), but to imply that he was an existentialist, as Sartre does, is an exaggeration. Venice’s patrician hierarchy kept Tintoretto busy once he became the republic’s official portraitist in 1551. The exhibition includes a section of portraits of black-suited patricians and one simian-looking worthy, Marco Grimani (ca. 1576–83), a Venetian senator who wears a dusky rose cloak.

The excitement of Tintoretto’s art, always dramatic in its atmosphere, sharp lighting, and shifted perspectives, can be seen in the exhibition’s first room. Emerging from the High Renaissance, he was in tune with the Mannerism of his period, and he foreshadowed aspects of the next century’s Baroque. Two pictures (both ca. 1541–42) come from Tintoretto’s first major commission, awarded when he was in his early twenties, to decorate the palazzo of Vettor Pisani with scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Orpheus Imploring Pluto shows swirling clouds, the lover begging the god to restore life to Eurydice. The Fall of Phaeton shows Apollo’s son’s fiery fate, reminiscent of Icarus’s, as he tries to take his father’s chariot across the sun. That painting features a loose wheel, and another appears in the hands of flying angels in Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an Angel (ca. 1557–70),attributed to Tintoretto’s studio. The picture is off-center, with Mannerist colors of pink, blue, and gold. The painting was bought by a more recent Mannerist, David Bowie, in 1987, and it remained his until he died in 2016. Bowie was enough of a fan to name his official rightsholder company Jones/Tintoretto Entertainment.

Tintoretto’s art is at its most magical in The Creation of the Animals (1550–53), in which God, floating above the earth, guides birds low in the sky and fish at the sea’s surface. It works far better than an attempt at realism. The moving Noli Me Tangere (ca. 1585–90) captures Christ’s benevolent expression. Venetian painting is sometimes accused, notably by Tintoretto’s contemporary Giorgio Vasari, of prizing color over line, but a section in the exhibition shows some sketches that illustrate the importance of drawing to the artist. He greatly admired Michelangelo and reportedly put a sign on his studio advising his assistants to follow Michelangelo in line and Titian in color.

Tintoretto was especially strong in erotic scenes, his only rivals being other Venetians of the same period, and he painted the biblical Susanna more than once. Susanna and the Elders (ca. 1555–56) portrays the heroine more as a Venetian courtesan than an innocent Hebrew maiden, her jewelry hinting at venality and an ability to make fools of pathetic old graybeards. The greenery is as magical as anything to be found in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s works. This painting and Leda and the Swan (ca. 1578) show that women can be capable of lust as well.

Though Tintoretto continued to be admired after his death, including by Rubens, Velázquez, and Fragonard, his influence became more marked in the nineteenth century. The exhibition’s last three rooms chart this influence in France. Nineteenth-century art may command the public’s attention, but the latter-day disciples pale in comparison to the Old Master that was Tintoretto. Even so, there are worthy attempts to be seen here. Dominique-Vivant Denon’s etching after Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Shepherds (1578–81) is good, though it lacks the color so important to Tintoretto’s art. Eugène Delacroix’s Christ on the Cross (1835) is the clear hit, but the painting, rich in red, owes as much to Rubens as to Tintoretto. Léon Cogniet’s Tintoretto at His Daughter’s Deathbed (1843) is highly moving, showing Tintoretto painting his beloved daughter Marietta as she is dying, his face looking like a rhinoceros’s. Marietta, who died four years before her father, was his favorite child, and she followed him in becoming a painter. Less successful is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto (1848), while Paul Cézanne’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (ca. 1870), inspired by Tintoretto’s color palette, is grotesque. Édouard Manet’s 1854 copy of Tintoretto’s Self Portrait (ca. 1588) shows the master in winter, wrinkled with sunken eyes. Manet whitens Tintoretto’s gray hair and darkens his coat.

The Jacquemart-André’s exhibition space is limited, and many of Tintoretto’s large-scale masterpieces can only be seen on Venetian walls. Nevertheless, there is enough of a selection to give more than a taste of this towering master.

The banners were heralding the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. Everywhere, there was an image of him, sort of Che Guevara–style. The only thing missing was the beret.

Frankly, I find the hoopla surrounding Dudamel a little culty. But if it’s good for classical music—which needs the help—who am I to complain?

Playing on the plaza was a hot Latin American band. Then came a concert inside David Geffen Hall: a concert billed as “Gustavo Dudamel’s Inaugural Gala” (“in partnership with Rolex”). The new music director conducted the Philharmonic in a program that accented Latin America music.

Dudamel is a Venezuelan, I should note.

I thought back to the arrival of Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, in 2018. I don’t remember much hoopla. Van Zweden is a Dutchman, of course, and this is a Dutch city—or was. Think of Vanderbilts, Stuyvesants, and Roosevelts.

Think also of the current NBA champions: the New York Knicks (as in “Knickerbockers”).

I don’t recall that van Zweden conducted much Dutch music. (There was Louis Andriessen.) To be fair, there is not much music to conduct, as it has been a rather dry four centuries since Sweelinck died in 1621.

Why has that country excelled in painting while doing relatively little in music and literature? That is a subject for another day . . .

Introducing last night’s concert was Alec Baldwin, the actor, who has long been a member of the Philharmonic’s board. He was charming, funny, and deft, as usual on these occasions. Soon, Dudamel took the stage, and launched into “The Star-Spangled Banner”—which he conducted crisply and authoritatively.

The program itself started with Ginastera, a suite from his ballet Estancia. Dudamel was energetic, propulsive (adjectives commonly applied to him). The last movement is a malambo, i.e., an Argentinian folk dance. The orchestra played it with brilliant precision, and Dudamel did a little dancing on the podium—nothing showy, just a little natural moving around.

Then came a piece by a Venezuelan composer who lived from 1898 to 1965: J. B. Plaza, which is to say, Juan Bautista Plaza. This was his Fuga Criolla, a little piece good to know.

Following Plaza was a living composer, Gabriela Lena Frank, an American. The orchestra played her Mestizo Waltz, whose title is a play on Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. (He wrote four of these, though No. 1 is the most famous by far.) We heard this piece in Carnegie Hall earlier this year, when a youth orchestra, NYO2, played it.

Lately, the Philharmonic has been playing a new piece by Tania León, who was in the audience last night: Imágenes Mestizas.

Do you know that Anthony Hopkins writes music? And plays the piano? He does. And the Philharmonic gave us a movement of his 1947: Suite for Piano and Orchestra. That movement is “Circus.” I heard it as a danse macabre, and enjoyed it.

Question: Would this music be programmed if it were not by a great and famous actor? Maybe not, but a lot that is not as good is programmed, I assure you.

Serving as the pianist was Sergio Tiempo, who was born in Caracas in 1972. We had heard him with the Philharmonic once before: in the 2019–20 season, when he played a new concerto by Esteban Benzecry, under the baton of Dudamel.

The composer’s nationality? A little hard to say. He was born in Lisbon, grew up in Argentina, and is now a French citizen.

There was a second Gabriela on the program last night, besides Gabriela Lena Frank: Gabriela Ortiz, the Mexican composer. The orchestra played a new work by her, or rather a third of it: “Mujer Arena,” the middle movement of Mujer Ángel. In other words, “Sand Woman” from Angel Woman.

It is dreamy, mystical, alluring. Then it is madly jubilant. I look forward to hearing all three movements.

There was a touch of Broadway last night, as Brian Stokes Mitchell took the stage to sing some Sondheim—a couple of excerpts from Company. He’s a star for a reason, Mitchell is. He is personable. Moreover, he can sing in tune, even when the intervals are tricky, which I applaud—in a Broadway singer or any other.

Jaap van Zweden was the music director of the Philharmonic for six seasons. I never heard him speak. I don’t know what the sound of his voice is—fine by me. He lets his baton, and the music, do the talking. I don’t know whether Dudamel makes a habit of it, but he spoke from the stage last night.

And he was charming. He spoke of his first visit to New York, when he was a kid. He visited F. A. O. Schwarz and saw dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. He also got a look at Lincoln Center.

He introduced a guest last night—a guest in the audience. Steven Spielberg. To be honest, I was a little starstruck (though I merely saw him, without meeting him). (Thinking back, I have been starstruck by two people: William F. Buckley Jr. and Christa Ludwig. Who would have loved each other.)

Dudamel then conducted the orchestra in an unannounced work: an excerpt from the soundtrack by John Williams to a new Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day. The Philharmonic’s new principal horn, David Cooper, did good work.

The program ended as it had been planned to end—with Duke Ellington’s Harlem. Some Philharmonic players got to show off their jazz chops: Christopher Martin on trumpet, Joseph Alessi on trombone, Anthony McGill on clarinet, et al.

Doesn’t “on trumpet,” etc., sound appropriate when writing about jazz? Even “symphonic jazz”?

The inaugural gala was scheduled to last from 7 to 8. I told a friend earlier in the day that it would not end a minute before 8:45. I left the hall at 8:47.

On balance, it had been fun.

There was a lot of action onstage, provoking laughter in the audience. This is good—but so is Mozart’s overture. Can music ever have pride of place? Can it ever be let alone? Can stage directors ever trust music to carry the day? (Especially Mozart’s music?) Must there always be visual accompaniment, visual distraction, visual razzle-dazzle?

Mozart’s overture is only four and a half minutes long. It can set the scene of the opera, believe me—all seven of the scenes.

Anyway, I am singing the song of a dinosaur. And I am talking about Così fan tutte, which was revived at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. The production is that of Phelim McDermott from 2018. I reviewed its premiere, and I don’t like to take a second bite at the apple. But maybe I could say a few words today.

The production sets the opera in an American amusement park, à la Coney Island, in the 1950s. There is a parade of carnival performers, including snake-handlers and sword-swallowers.

(Let me pause to note that Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist, who was a master of double entendres, would have had a field day with snake-handling and sword-swallowing.)

McDermott’s production is a treat: clever, colorful, and entertaining. It is very well directed in its revival by Sara Erde. Ferrando and Guglielmo, in disguise, look like Beavis and Butt-Head.

Here’s my complaint—my dinosaur song: it’s not Così fan tutte. Music and stage don’t match. Ear and eye don’t match.

But on with the show . . .

In the pit was Nimrod David Pfeffer, an Israeli American. Does he need the “David”? To distinguish himself from the other Nimrod Pfeffers? I should not kid—it is a handsome name, with those three parts.

Maestro Pfeffer had a rocky start, and there was some other fumbling—as in the concluding chords of “Come scoglio,” far from together. But Pfeffer clearly knows what he is doing and conducted a crisp, graceful Così.

There are six singers, six characters, in this opera. If you get admirable performances from three of them, you’re doing well. If you get admirable performances from four, you’re doing very well. But on Saturday night, it was six for six. This was an evening of good and clean Mozart singing.

In the parts of Don Alfonso and Despina, who conspire together, were two veterans: Gerald Finley, the Canadian bass-baritone, and Ana María Martínez, the Puerto Rican soprano. Finley is a suave, canny singer-actor. The calendar says he’s sixty-six, but that’s hard to believe.

He’s going on and on, as Sir Thomas Allen did.

Ms. Martínez proved a delightful Despina. She is an excellent comedic actress, with a touch of Lily Tomlin about her. Also, she can dance.

Federica Lombardi, the Italian soprano, was our Fiordiligi. She projected nobility—Fiordiligi tries to hold out, which is to say, tries to stay true to her ideals. Ms. Lombardi poured out beautiful Mozartean sounds.

In her Act II aria, “Per pietà,” she did not have her best intonation. But she was dealing with the additional challenge of flying around in a balloon.

I thought of a song by Lee Hoiby, setting a poem by E. E. Cummings, about going up in a balloon and “sailing away and away.”

Dorabella was Samantha Hankey, an American mezzo, and a very good one. In 2023, she gave a first-rate recital in Weill Hall. I think about three dozen people attended. In a just world, with a differently educated public, she would be giving recitals regularly. And so would many another singer.

But I’m about to bemoan again . . .

Ms. Hankey was a fitting and enjoyable Dorabella, not to be picked at. But I will mention this: some of her single R’s, rather than being “flipped,” were rolled in the manner of double R’s, bordering on triple ones. Rrreally.

The tenor portraying Ferrando has a name that combines John Wayne and Korea: Duke Kim. He has a fresh, pleasing voice, with a hint of caprino in it—a little bleat. It seems to me we have a number of good lyric tenors around. We have a shortage of dramatic tenors, for Verdi, Wagner, and other composers.

A small complaint, concerning Duke Kim: at the end of “Un’aura amorosa,” I would have liked a proper trill.

How many musicians from Moldova can you name? Before Saturday night, I could not have gotten past Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the violinist. I am glad to add Andrey Zhilikhovsky, the baritone who sang Guglielmo in this Così. He exuded charisma. Guglielmo can sometimes seem the least of these six parts, but he was a full participant—almost a starry one—on this night.

So, a satisfying Così, in the midst of bearded ladies, fire-eaters, and all the rest.

Downhill: A Memoir of an Accident, Two Comas, Many Books, and Starting Over, by Juana Libedinsky, translated by Maureen Shaughnessy (Urano Publishing): In 2019, Conrado Tenaglia, an Argentine attorney and New Criterion contributor, tumbled down an icy ravine while skiing at the family’s cottage in Patagonia. Downhill, the new English translation of Juana Libedinsky’s gripping memoir Cuesta abajo, chronicles the author’s uphill climb as she contends with her husband’s traumatic brain injury. As an Argentine journalist and columnist for La Nación and Uruguay’s El País, Libedinsky turns to Didion, Borges, and Verghese—not to mention family, friends, and club tennis—while caring for her comatose husband and their two young children. Tender, bookish, and wry, Downhill considers how we handle life’s devastating stumbles even when the prognosis is dire (against the odds, the ending is a happy one). On October 27, at 6 p.m., Libedinsky will present her memoir at Washington’s Flor bookstore over wine and empanadas. —JP

Nonfiction:

The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unraveling the Norman Conquest, by David Musgrove and Michael Lewis (Thames & Hudson): The new paperback edition of David Musgrove and Michael Lewis’s Story of the Bayeux Tapestry is rather shorter than the artifact itself, but don’t let its packaging fool you: like the tapestry, the book contains a great deal worth considering. Lewis is the curator of the current British Museum display of the tapestry, and this little book is a worthy primer on what Sean McGlynn, reviewing the exhibition in our September issue, called “one of the most recognizable historical artifacts of all time,” one whose historic importance is only matched by Magna Carta. —BR

Music:

“Lang Lang & Gustavo Dudamel,” at the New York Philharmonic (October 1): Composed in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven’s regal Piano Concerto No. 5 was nicknamed “Emperor” after an awestruck concertgoer exclaimed, “C’est l’Empereur!” at its premiere—so the story goes. Despite the composer’s known disappointment with Napoleon’s rule, the nickname has stuck. For one night only, the pianist Lang Lang will take up the concerto, joined by the New York Philharmonic and its new music director, Gustavo Dudamel. The philharmonic will also perform the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Invisible House by Zosha Di Castri, a work inspired by the composer’s Ukrainian heritage. —EE

Theater:

The Invention of Love, directed by Zachary Elkind and performed at Theaterlab (through October 3): Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love is the antithesis of dumbing things down: unflinchingly erudite, stuffed with information and allusions, it introduces us to the poet and classicist A. E. Housman on his journey into Hades, exploring the tension between Victorian England’s fascination with the classical world and the measures it took to stamp out “the Greek vice.” The first new production of a Stoppard play in New York since Leopoldstadt in 2023, this staging runs in the Garment District for another week. Stiff-backed and reedy-voiced, David Greenspan embodies the Cambridge don in the lead role; the director Zachary Elkind makes much of a minimal set and intimate loft space. —IS

Dispatch:

“Evelyn Waugh’s last masterpiece,” by John P. Rossi. On the Sword of Honour trilogy.

By the Editors:

“‘Sightlines: British Landscape Photography, 1840 to Now’ Review: For Camera and Country”
Isaac Sligh, The Wall Street Journal

From the Archives:

“Crimes against culture,” by Gary Saul Morson (May 2017). On Doctor Zhivago & the dissident faith of Boris Pasternak.

In his new critical work, Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics, the Catholic scholar Joshua Hren takes on this theme. (Hren is also the founding editor of Wiseblood Books and the cofounder of the creative-writing MFA at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.) In the first book-length monograph to investigate directly the Catholic core of Gioia’s work, Hren describes Gioia’s method of the “via negativa”: understanding God through first painting in stark detail everything that is not God. The wretched characters of Gioia’s poetry often despair of eternal things, clinging instead to this world for satisfaction. Their misplaced, restless desires are at the heart of Gioia’s vision of evil, but those desires also point to an unspoken need for God. As his argument progresses, Hren escorts the reader through poems that depict deeper and deeper perversion and blindness, until he finally travels down into Gioia’s underworld. Throughout the book, Hren unveils how Gioia’s method of making “God’s absence palpably present” points us back to the divine. Facing down such darkness is undoubtedly trying for the reader—there are no false reassurances here. But the trial is the point, and Hren has done us all a service by taking up the cross.

The first chapter addresses Gioia’s poem “The Burning Ladder,” a retelling of Jacob’s Old Testament dream. In this version, Jacob “close[s]/ his eyes to the Seraphim/ ascending” the mystical ladder and “disappearing into the scattered light/ between the stars.” He is too exhausted, too “sick/ of traveling” to continue climbing the ladder. Hren calls this exhaustion a rejection of the pilgrim life essential to any true citizens of a heavenly home.

Some might scoff at Jacob’s malaise, but as Hren notes, “We readers see the angels even if Jacob does not, but no one sees God.” As the reader attempts to reverse Jacob’s denial and turn towards heaven, he is faced with the real experience of faith—a dark night by which the soul, as Saint John of the Cross says in his work The Living Flame of Love (1618), “empties itself of everything comprehensible to it, because none of that is God.” This via negativa is no easy alternative to Jacob’s blindness.

Again and again, the reader is asked to choose between these extremes of faith and despair, or, as T. S. Eliot put it in his poem “Little Gidding,” “to be redeemed from fire by fire.” Often, Gioia’s narrative poems that dramatize this choice are set in more familiar environments. Hren discusses “Shopping,” “The Angel with the Broken Wing,” and “Style,” poems that depict the contemporary tendency to mystify commodities and capitalism while nonetheless holding to a secularity that rejects any real sacramental mediation. When our need for transcendence is directed at earthly goods, we consume more, clinging to the things that we think reveal God rather than to God Himself. Gioia continues the theme of consumption in his opera libretto Nosferatu (2001), written for the composer Alva Henderson. Almost as if preparing a kind of inverted Catholic Mass, the vampire plans to devour his guests rather than feeding them from himself. The opera’s heroine tricks the vampire, distracting him with her blood until the daylight arrives and defeats him. With this undeniably Christlike image, Gioia once again presents the cost of redemption and the sacrifice implicit in love.

Hren returns to the theme of suffering through the lens of the sudden death of Gioia’s four-month-old son. The poet’s pen went silent for nearly a year, and, when he returned to the page, he wrote “Pentecost.” In the poem, the transformative fire of the Holy Spirit is identified with the pain of loss. Pointing to Gioia’s devastating lines “Comfort me with stones. Quench my thirst with/ sand,” Hren draws out the poem’s combined force of complete lament and Abraham-like confidence, quite like the assertion in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” Turning then to the suffering of the children themselves, Hren addresses the poems “Special Treatments Ward” and “Prayer.” Both ask if we can detach from our self-image as the savior of our children and trust God to guard them for good, even in their sorrows— the same way that in “Prayer,” “a mountain guards its covert ore/ and the harsh falcon its flightless young.”

The final chapters of Faith in the Furnace of Doubt face down evil itself, covering “Homecoming,” the grotesque narrative of a Nietzschean spiral ending in violence, and “The Underworld,” Gioia’s serial poem charting a descent into an eerily familiar hell where “demons like to regulate.” Both poems present evil as a corrosive privation of selfhood and community. All life’s goods are replaced with grossly reduced substitutions until what remains is unrecognizable. Frustrated by their own reductions, people are driven to resentful acts of violence, destroying whatever fragments of being are left in themselves and in each other. By showing this dissolution of being, Gioia awakens us to the reality of evil and stirs up our desire for a restoration of the good.

Hren laments somewhat that Gioia has not given us a Paradiso to complement his “Underworld”: “Gioia’s sins do not straightjacket him from seeing and saying the celestial realities.” But in his epilogue, Hren discusses silence: the mystical, inarticulate contemplation that is the end of any true work of art. It may be that the “celestial realities” Hren requests are, in fact, ineffable, and that these mystical visions must be consigned to a silence that does them greater honor than any words.

An “ABC company” is one that serves up favorites, to the exclusion of almost everything else. In particular, it serves up Aida (Verdi), La bohème (Puccini), and Carmen (Bizet).

Last Tuesday night, the Met opened its season with an M—Verdi’s Macbeth. In my upcoming chronicle for our print magazine, I will discuss this night. Here and now, let’s talk Bohème.

Beginning with the soprano in the role of Musetta, Rosa Feola, who comes from southern Italy, within shouting distance of Naples. This character, Musetta, is a hoot in Act II. She is flirty and troublemaking. She also has a wonderful aria, “Quando me’n vo.” It is one of the best waltz songs ever composed.

In recent years, sopranos at the Met have camped this aria up. They sing it as though they were Jo Anne Worley on Laugh-In, or Carol Burnett in parody.

But not Feola. Having worked early on with the conductor Riccardo Muti, she knows better than to turn music into camp or slop. She sang “Quando me’n vo” like an angel—a saucy angel. It was beautiful, accurate, and delicious.

Conducting the opera was Ramón Tebar, a Spaniard making his Met debut. He launched into the opera before the applause died down, which I liked. But this start was loose in the orchestra. The players were not together. Tebar soon gained control, however, and he would prove himself a fine manager of Puccinian affairs.

The main soprano in this opera is the one portraying Mimì. This was Juliana Grigoryan, the Armenian (not to be confused with Asmik Grigorian, the Lithuanian, who has an Armenian father). Mimì needs tenderness, vulnerability, nobility, and strength. Grigoryan supplied all of those qualities.

Let me note that, on her high C at the end of “O soave fanciulla,” she was a mile flat. But let me note this, too: So what? “Life is not a studio recording,” I like to say. There is nothing like live. I would not trade what we experienced on Friday night for a sanitized recording.

Our tenor, our Rodolfo, was Freddie De Tommaso, a Brit. He has been busy at the Met: De Tommaso is Macduff in Macbeth. He was filling in as Rodolfo for an indisposed Stephen Costello.

De Tommaso may be British, but his name suggests that he is of Italian paternity, and indeed he is: his father came from Apulia. De Tommaso was a credible Rodolfo, in all respects. His long, unruly hair gave him a bohemian air.

He had a somewhat rough Act I. He did some straining. He also did some sharping, which I found a relief: one hears so much flatting. But his climactic “la speranza,” at the end of his aria, was superb. And as the evening continued, he got nothing but better.

Trigger warning: I’m about to get ethnic or racial, but you have nothing to worry about. Everything will be all right.

The parts of Marcello, Schaunard, and Colline were taken by men from East Asia: two Koreans and one Chinese. I mention this because it illustrates the phenomenal globalization of opera. A happy development.

Marcello was the baritone Hansung Yoo, whose singing was gleaming and easy. His voice boasts an Italianate glow. Schaunard was another Korean baritone, Gihoon Kim, who evinced the right spirit. The bass-baritone Le Bu was Colline. He accorded the Coat Aria its compassionate solemnity.

The production by Franco Zeffirelli premiered in 1981. When the curtain went up on Act II last week, a man near me said, “Wow!” When the curtain went up on the next act, much of the auditorium burst into applause. During the second intermission, two patrons were talking about the production. “Amazing,” said one. “Amazing,” returned the other.

Newcomers are wowed by the Zeffirelli production; some of us oldcomers are still wowed by it too.

And by La bohème. Familiar it may be, but it never stales, particularly when in good hands (and voices). Some years ago, a fellow critic and I spoke at the first intermission. “I have to admit,” I said, “that when the orchestra shifted into A major, to begin ‘O soave fanciulla,’ I felt a shiver down my spine.” Answered my colleague—a very cerebral sort, mind you—“We always will.”

“Euripides had the last laugh”
David Butterfield, The Critic

Some people are simply born in the wrong generation. In a darkly comic essay for The Critic, David Butterfield details the life and work of the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The tragedian was not popular in his lifetime—his entries in the annual dramatic festival in Athens in 431 B.C. came in last place, and his brand of intense psychological realism was deemed by Aristophanes in his play The Frogs to corrupt civic morale. Nevertheless, Euripidean tragedy could save lives: Butterfield informs us that after their defeat at Syracuse in 413 B.C., the surviving Athenian soldiers escaped execution by reciting lines from Euripides’ tragedies for their captors. Whatever ancient Greek audiences thought of his works, Butterfield argues that Euripides was “a man creating art far ahead of its time for an audience that could not yet stomach it.”

“Richard Dadd, great Victorian painter”
Susan Owens, Apollo

For Apollo, Susan Owens reviews the exhibition “Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Though he showed a promising start, painting lush, richly colored “fairy worlds,” Dadd had a psychotic break in 1843 and killed his father. Confined to mental hospitals for the rest of his life, he continued his artistic career, though Owens notes a severe shift in Dadd’s works: in his portrait of Bethlem Hospital’s superintendent, “there is a sense of Dadd’s artistic vision having been washed clean of pictorial conventions.”

“Cultural catastrophe”
Durs Grünbein, Times Literary Supplement

Between 1936 and 1937, the playwright Samuel Beckett traveled through Nazi Germany, recording in small notebooks his attempts to learn German and his observations of the culture. The diaries were lost until 1989, when Beckett’s nephew Edward found them in the basement of Beckett’s Paris apartment. In the Times Literary Supplement, Durs Grünbein reviews Gaby Hartel’s translation of the diaries, writing that “Beckett functions almost like an ethnographer studying the rituals of the natives in the field.” Though he wants to form his own opinions of Nazi Germany, Beckett meets the Jewish painter Gretchen Wolhwill and comes to understand the extent of the country’s antisemitism. Grünbein argues that Beckett proves himself an “extraordinarily sensitive seismographer of the Nazification of everyday life.”

One novel that arose from the disastrous impact of the Second World War that will endure, I believe, is Evelyn Waugh’s last masterpiece, the trilogy Sword of Honour, which appeared between 1952 and 1961. He initially planned a single volume but found the story so compelling he produced three distinct novels built around the character Guy Crouchback, a figure not unlike himself in some ways.

The novels originated from what Waugh saw as a crisis of faith in Western values. He saw the enemy clearly—the war was nothing less than “the Modern Age in arms,” totalitarianism and secularism at their worst. The crisis of the times, the war and its aftermath, was also a personal one for Waugh. He believed he was witnessing the decline of the Catholic Church he had joined as a convert, a theme that dominated his writing after the war, and especially after Vatican II, which he distrusted.

The great success of Brideshead Revisited (1945), which was written towards the end of the war, had solidified Waugh’s reputation as not just the author of biting satires, but also the most significant writer of serious English prose. Yet he had written little of importance after Brideshead save for his savagely funny indictment of Hollywood and American values, The Loved One (1948), which was on par with his comic masterpieces of the 1930s as well as being a financial success. Interestingly, he offered the profits from The Loved One to the Catholic Church in England, only to have the offer declined on the grounds that the novel’s content was too scandalous to be associated with the Church.

Waugh was restless after the success of Brideshead and believed, as he put it, that he had a “vestige of imagination” left in him. He wanted to write about the defining event of his life—the war in which he spent five important years. In a significant sense, the travails, both sad and humorous, of Sword of Honour’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback, are a reflection of Waugh’s own. Both men saw the war as a brutal betrayal of Christian values, with the face of evil clearly revealed in Nazism and Communism.

Like Waugh during the war, Guy Crouchback is a middle-aged Catholic who believes the conflict offers a chance to redeem an otherwise boring and meaningless life. He joins the army as both a physical and moral test. Guy’s experiences in the first volume, Men at Arms (1952), are strange and bizarre. Two of the dominant characters as he undergoes his introduction to the war are right out of Waugh’s satirical masterpieces: the one-eyed, one-armed General Ben Ritchie-Hook, who talks constantly about “biffing” the enemy, and Apthorpe, a perpetually frightened officer who is most concerned with his “thunderbox” (portable toilet). Offsetting such characters, Waugh shows his grasp of the futility of war in his description of the disastrous British and Free French attempt to storm the beaches in Dakar. Apthorpe dies unheroically of dysentery, made worse by the gift of a bottle of Scotch given him by Guy, and Guy returns to England having “blotted his copybook.”

Waugh had not planned on developing Crouchback’s adventures but published a second volume encouraged by Men at Arms’s success—it had sold fifty thousand copies in England and the United States. Officers and Gentlemen (1955) picks up Guy’s story. Through his connections, Guy has joined a British military force that is sent to organize the evacuation of British troops on Crete. The withdrawal is a disaster, and Guy’s life is saved by another Wavian character, Corporal Ludovic, who may have left a fellow officer to die in the retreat and yet finds himself hailed as a hero. Guy’s commander whom he idolizes, Ivor Claire, abandons his own men and leaves Guy disillusioned with the war. The description of the withdrawal from Crete is a masterly depiction of the confusion, cowardice, and courage of war on a par with Hemingway’s portrayal of the rout at Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms. The real-life withdrawal had left Waugh deeply disillusioned about any heroic sense of war.

This disgust carries over to the last volume, which, in many ways, sums up Waugh’s attitude to the war. In Unconditional Surrender (1961), Guy Crouchback has lost all his remaining illusions about the war’s still having any meaning. Waugh uses the presentation of the Sword of Stalingrad to Stalin by the British government as a symbol of the moral cowardice that the alliance with Communism represented. Interestingly, this view was shared by George Orwell, who described the entire concept as a master class in political hypocrisy.

Unconditional Surrender ends as Guy is sent on a mission to Yugoslavia, where he witnesses the beginning of Soviet treachery. He attempts to help a group of Jewish refugees flee persecution from the Nazis only to see them betrayed into the hands of the Communists. Guy returns to England disgusted by what he has seen.

In line with his fervent Catholicism, Waugh gives the novel a somewhat positive ending. Guy’s wife Virginia, having betrayed him, becomes pregnant and is abandoned by her lover. She contemplates having an abortion, but she is saved when Guy agrees to marry her. After her death in a bombing raid, Guy decides to raise the child as his own. This act of affirmation returns meaning to his life. Originally, Waugh had Guy remarrying and having children with a second wife. But then he reconsidered: “no nippers for Guy,” he told the novelist Anthony Powell.

Sword of Honour is Waugh’s last triumph, a serious contemplation of the meaning of war and its consequences, both good and evil. The story is a mix of traditional patriotism and political betrayal, in the end redeemed by an act of Christian conscience. The blend of comic characters and grim battle scenes in Dakar and Crete raises the trilogy above all other novels of the Second World War.

Standing six feet, four inches in height and with silver hair, Russell was handsome, though he was somewhat ungainly in gait, with what his niece called a “drooping head and downcast eyes.” The Austrian Rudolf Kommer, another great friend of Diana Cooper’s, described him as a “Gothic farmer.” Russell was proud to be a farmer, holding tenant farms first in Sussex and later in Somerset. Earlier in life, he had worked at the Colonial Office and the London Stock Exchange (and spent a few months at the exchange in New York in 1907). He forsook town life without regret, though his experience at the stock exchange helped him to live with comfort and give friends presents. He was more doubtful about being called Gothic, though he told Diana Cooper he was sure the appellation was kindly meant. (Russell was unlikely to have heard of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, which may have given Kommer the idea.) To him, Goths were the savages that invaded Rome, and their namesake architecture was the opposite of classical. Rather than Gothic, Russell saw himself as “unromantic and matter-of-fact.”

Classical or not, he worshipped women in a way best described as romantic. His adoration seems never to have gone beyond chaste friendships, even though he described Daphne Fielding as his “loving mistress.” Despite what some people now might assume, he was not at all homosexual. In a way not unknown to many born in the nineteenth century’s later decades, Russell may have been either asexual or perhaps too diffident to be an effective suitor. People of the past sometimes did things differently.

Even so, in his youth, Russell toyed with asking the dazzling and intelligent Venetia Stanley to marry him. Even if he never proposed to her, he did ask her out: “There is nothing to prevent you dining with me,” he wrote her, “neither in Leviticus nor Numbers, nor Ecclesiastes . . .” and so on, with Russell continuing through the rest of the Old Testament. Whether he went further is unknown—Venetia, after captivating Henry Asquith (Raymond’s father and then the prime minister), married one of Henry’s private secretaries, Edwin Montagu. Russell was displeased by her marriage, not because Montagu was Jewish and required Venetia to convert (Russell was pro-Judaism), but because the bridegroom was ugly. Raymond Asquith told Russell that women were less delicate than men about looks. After Raymond’s death in battle in 1916, his wife Katharine converted to Catholicism and made Mells Manor in Somerset, which she inherited, a center of Catholic activity. Russell asked her to marry him, but she, devoted to despondency and her faith, refused, though the two grew closer after he became a tenant farmer at Mells.

Theology was one of Russell’s great interests, despite his claim that he lacked any religious sense at all. He and Katharine often sparred about Catholicism, and later about Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement, which Katharine warmly extolled, as she did Mussolini’s fascism. To Russell, Chamberlain was “the Coroner,” just as he was to Duff and Diana Cooper. When Katharine told him that there was a lot of good in fascism, Russell told Diana Cooper that “if it had been Tom [Sir Oswald] Mosley at the other end the conversation couldn’t have been different.” He was much more attuned to Diana Cooper, who was full of vitality despite an element of melancholy and who shared his doubts about religion, though she respected it. He wrote to Diana that in all their years of friendship, he had never discoveredany of her faults, even if he was annoyed when she fell for the Swiss diplomat Carl Burkhardt in 1939, as she mooned over “Carl, Carl, Carl like a jackdaw calling.”

Perhaps because of childhood fragility, Russell was spared from being sent to school, but he attended Oxford’s Balliol College, where he made such friends as Raymond Asquith, John Buchan, Aubrey Herbert (who became Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in his Richard Hannay series), and Auberon Herbert. Russell was less conspicuously brilliant at Oxford than they, devoting more time to his social life than to his studies, but he later told Katharine Asquith, who was confused about where to educate her son, that, while in his view Eton or Winchester (Raymond Asquith’s school) could be skipped, Oxford was essential. Slow in his studies, Russell nevertheless learned enough to read and love Virgil and Horace later in life. In 1918, he wrote from the war front to Katharine that “Shakespeare is a tremendous swell—perhaps the greatest man who ever lived. I never knew it before. In fact I thought it might be a swindle . . . but, by God, it isn’t.”

Russell joined the army in 1915 out of a sense of duty, even though he was essentially a pacifist: he wrote that “soldiering . . . is horrible and has always been distasteful to me.” Like many an aristocrat in that time, he felt an affinity with ordinary people, and his sympathy was with the troops. “I never saw a General who was good enough to black their boots.” When a general told him that he must be disappointed to miss fighting, Russell thought he could bear that disappointment “with a smiling countenance.”

Russell’s feelings about Evelyn Waugh (“Wu” to Diana Cooper and Russell), whom he knew through Katharine Asquith’s Catholic circle as well as Diana Cooper’s group, were mixed. He was sick with laughter when reading Waugh’s Black Mischief aloud to Diana’s aunt, but several letters to Diana about Brideshead Revisited showed much less enthusiasm, even if he admitted that “a great deal of the book is good.” He found the soldiering at the beginning the best, Oxford the worst. “What a snare the peerage and titles are to the unwary,” he confided to her. In the book, the dying marquess muses that since his son will have no children, the barony will be inherited by the eldest daughter because it descends in the female line. But in fact, since the novel features two daughters, the barony should fall into obeyance between them. “Should we tell Wu?” Russell asked Diana. “Or will it kill him?”

Russell’s health declined at the end of the Second World War, and he died in 1947 at the age of sixty-nine. After years of detached, mocking observation of the Catholics at Mells Manor, Russell converted to Catholicism, telling his sister Diana that he wanted to find out if there was anyone at the other end of the telephone. John Julius Norwich, Diana Cooper’s son, thought that an edition of his mother’s correspondence with Russell would be worthwhile, and one wishes an enlightened publisher would agree.

The goal, I believe, is to make us more curious about what Gorra has discovered. He is effectively an evangelist: “Come, see what I found!” is what he says as he thrusts the bounty into our lap. After almost three hundred absorbing pages, he writes: “I had thought when I began that this would be a short book, a book as quick and darting as its subject, but as I reach its end I find myself wishing it were longer. For there are so many stories left!”

The short story is a curious thing, in which curious things happen. One lens through which Gorra views the art is Goethe’s, who described the novella as “a peculiar and as yet unheard-of event.” Another is Frank O’Connor’s “submerged population,” the idea that people on the margins of society get to be centered in the short story (think of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich), as he presented it in The Lonely Voice (1962), his slim volume on the form. Gorra has no theories of his own; he tests the limits of proposed axioms by trying them on a hoard of eclectic stories. Sometimes they fit and sometimes they do not, but Goethe’s provides the most “enduring formula.”

The Germans dominated the form throughout the first half of the century. Besides Goethe, there was Jeremias Gotthelf, Heinrich von Kleist, and the defining genius of the first major stream of short fiction, E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose riveting tales of psychic torment and riven selves prompted Walter Scott to write the 1827 essay, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” Hoffmann had great talent, Scott said, but it was marred by something “unfortunate”—his extreme excursions in the fantastic were unchecked by good taste. The example of a story like “The Sandman” (today Hoffmann’s most anthologized piece) had to be avoided.

Scott missed the point, though his short story “The Two Drovers” (1827) is a good example of the form. Gorra notes that the British would not make any striking showing in short fiction until the close of the nineteenth century. The many tales printed by Blackwood’s Magazine (published in Edinburgh but read widely across Great Britain during this time)lacked concrete character. They aimed for what Gorra deems “indeterminacy, that deliberate generic confusion” (the sort of stories Edgar Allan Poe satirized in “How to Write a Blackwood Article”). Moreover, the success of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) and his other novels, which ran first in journals, secured a market for the serialized novel and established its place. Excellent British authors had no incentive to write short fiction.

Conversely, the American climate was favorable. Similar to Germany’s fragmented statehood before the unification in 1871, “the centripetal nature of [America’s] polity” contributed to its writers’ attraction to the form, Gorra argues. And there was a market. Whereas books struggled to find a large national readership during this time, periodicals were there to sate local audiences. In consequence, there was “an enormous collective need for copy; so enormous that [periodicals] also stole from each other.”

Interestingly, while there existed surplus collective space to be filled, Gorra notes that the available space in each paper was usually slim. The American short story, therefore, had to be brief. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s greatest stories equal Hoffmann’s but are curt in comparison. Nothing like “Michael Kohlhaas” (1810), Von Kleist’s tenaciously drawn out and absolutely mad story about a man seeking justice, would ever be done in American literature—certainly not after Poe, who championed “tales of effect” above all and put his seal on brevity as the way to achieve them.

In 1847, in response to a solicitation, Ivan Turgenev began publishing his sketches of ordinary Russian life (unadorned, refreshing, and vital) in the literary magazine Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Collected in 1852 as Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, the stories were revolutionary in many ways. But most important: for Turgenev, “the unprecedented thing”—the peculiar and as yet unheard-of thing—was “the individual human soul,” nakedly presented. (Anton Chekhov extended this idea in his own work, and Ernest Hemingway stretched it over the twentieth century.)

Why did few women writers in the English language excel at the short story in the nineteenth century? According to Gorra, Britain’s most gifted women writers did not write stories—“the novel offered more profit and prestige.” The one exception was Elizabeth Gaskell. Her stories are still read today, but her most important work is a novel, Cranford (1853), serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words (founded in 1850). The book skipped the Atlantic to feed American local-color writing, particularly the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose classic The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) Gorra says is unimaginable without Gaskell’s example.

Local-color writing emerged after the Civil War, at a time when industrial and technological innovations were altering the face of American society, tying its various threads into one knot. The stories of Jewett, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the author of The Conjure Woman (1899), Charles W. Chesnutt, Gorra argues, were prompted by “the homogenizing force of the present” and were an attempt to safekeep what was passing.

The success of two writers precipitated the loss of a certain kind of short story. On one hand, there was Chekhov’s achievement: his epiphanic stories in which the unprecedented thing is that there are no unprecedented things. In “The Kiss” (1887), we are made to accept the conclusion that the strangest event of a man’s life is “really a very commonplace thing.” On the other, there was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose effectiveness at churning out stories based on the same patterns proved to be both lucrative and replicable—and there is the strict separation of genre from literary fiction, a legacy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Through these writers we lost:

the sheer variety of the short fiction of the century that preceded [Chekhov] . . . the madness and the fantasy, the elaborate and polyvocal framing and the sheer range of formal invention, the case histories and the horror, the shockingly extreme effects, the sense of the peculiar and the unprecedented, the mysteries around the corner.

One feels the pain in how Gorra tells it, and perhaps that will do.

For this milestone year, the festival originally planned to stage all ten of Wagner’s “mature” works, but budget limitations reduced that figure to six, along with the festival premiere of the composer’s earlier work Rienzi (1842), which he had wished to exclude. Bayreuth commissioned a new staging of The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner’s mythological tetralogy that explores the creation and destruction of the world. But how could it be new? The centenary Ring staged by Patrice Chéreau in 1976 adopted a stark industrial-age idiom that provoked outrage before becoming a beloved classic. Frank Castorf’s Ring, presented for the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth in 2013, tried to replace the work’s magical gold with oil as the commodity inspiring human greed and corruption, but it quickly collapsed into a farrago of disjointed anti-capitalist symbolism.

This year, the novelty was to drop the role of a “director” in favor of a “curator,” Marcus Lobbes, who had no original production concept but instead programmed an artificial-intelligence system to project images from earlier Bayreuth Ring productions, along with selected photographs of world events from around the time of those productions. Lobbes, who is the director of Dortmund’s Academy for Theater and Digitality, conceived his project as an experiment that explores the boundaries between art and technology, and between creativity and digitized logic. As the orchestra plays, the AI system correlates the sounds to scenic representations, which are then projected on the stage. The singers perform on the stage, though their room for interpretation is limited. Their costumes, designed by Pia Maria Mackert, are odd black and gray vestments decorated by plumage and, for some characters, angelic wings. The effect left the characters subdued and with little hope of individuality.

The projections themselves became rather monotonous over the course of four evenings. Each act opens with a stage-wide image of the original illustrations for the world-premiere production of the Ring in 1876 before proceeding without any particular order through later productions. Only artificial intelligence—or, as Germans call it, künstliche Intelligenz—knows why particular images were sequenced, but one admittedly nonscientific explanation could be that it favored images from certain productions because of their popularity on the internet. Harry Kupfer’s artfully dystopian interpretation, which held Bayreuth’s stage from 1988 to 1992, popped up quite a bit in Act III of Die Walküre, the second opera in the cycle, featuring that production’s laser-lit cube in which Wotan puts his disobedient daughter Brünnhilde into a magic sleep. When Kupfer’s work appeared there and elsewhere, the AI system also selected images from the end of the Cold War, including pictures of Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Helmut Kohl. Much of Siegfried, the third opera, dwelled on naturalistic productions from the 1970s and 1980s by Wolfgang Wagner—the composer’s grandson—and Peter Hall. The photo accompaniment incongruously rendered an astronaut walking on the Moon. Other passages featured Heinz Tietjen’s sleek modernist production, which was staged from 1933 to 1942, and the inevitable Hitler photos turned up.

To truly appreciate the effect of the AI-selected images, which were often out of focus, would require quite detailed knowledge of historic Rings in Bayreuth. A more accessible approach might have chosen images from specific productions to illustrate particular scenes in a chronological or otherwise intelligible progression. If Lobbes, who looked terribly disappointed by the intense booing he received at the final curtain calls, really sees this as an experiment, the most rational conclusion would be that technology cannot replicate human creativity. One might wonder if that could change over time, but as far as his efforts go, we will not find out. The production staged this summer will not be revived, as the 2027 Festival will take place during what Bayreuth regulars call a “non-Ring year” and will present other Wagner operas. In 2028, the director Vasily Barkhatov will stage a new cycle, presumably with real sets and a conceptual interpretation of his own.

Fortunately, the music carried the day over artificial intelligence. The bass-baritone Michael Volle, who is now well over sixty, faces more and more competition for Wotan’s mantle these days but delivered a strong and steady effort that never flagged, soaring on his splendid legato. The tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, best known for singing lighter Wagner heroic parts, took on exceptional responsibility first as Loge, the god of fire and trickery in Das Rheingold, then as Wotan’s son Siegmund in Walküre, and finally in the even more demanding part of the eponymous hero in Siegfried and in Götterdämmerung, the finale. These roles are almost always distributed to different singers to spare a single tenor’s vocal cords, but Vogt delivered the whole collection majestically. His voice still sat a bit too high for the more experienced Siegfried of Götterdämmerung, but listening was a sheer pleasure. Alas, that was not the case with the soprano Camilla Nylund’s Brünnhilde. Her appealingly lyrical middle register notwithstanding, her high notes were strained and sometimes elusive. Like Vogt, Nylund has a strong career in Wagner’s lighter roles but she might have found it more judicious to stay there. In Die Walküre, she was bested by the soprano Elza van den Heever’s brassy Sieglinde, Siegfried’s doomed mother.

Apart from a few muddy low notes, the bass Mika Kares was a menace in the parts of Siegmund’s nemesis Hunding, Siegfried’s murderer Hagen, and the hapless giant Fasolt, a demanding progression that basses also tend to share rather than take on all at once. Jochen Schmeckenbecher played the glibly evil Alberich, whose theft of the magic gold to forge the ring starts and sustains the whole drama—he owns the role internationally. The mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer descended into gorgeous contralto singing for the roles of the earth goddess Erda and of Brünnhilde’s importuning Valkyrie sister Waltraute. Anna Kissjudit, a mezzo-soprano, was an imperious Fricka, Wotan’s wronged and hectoring wife.

The production’s standout star was without a doubt the celebrated conductor Christian Thielemann, now the director of the Berlin State Opera, who demonstrated an absolute mastery of the score. He took a brisk pace but kept a sense of balance, harmonizing Wagner’s driving percussive moments with the most intimate orchestral solos. No moment was missed, and every note emerged in sharp relief.

Rienzi premiered in Dresden in 1842 and was Wagner’s first artistic success. Though rarely performed today, the work held the stage for decades and made Wagner’s reputation as a composer after a long period of suffering. A few months after the premiere, the king of Saxony appointed him kapellmeister of his court opera, a post that granted Wagner continuing artistic success, room for theoretical deliberation, and ultimately a platform for political rebellion. Nevertheless, in later life Wagner came to find Rienzi repugnant and too suffused with earlier conventions of French grand opera to count among his ten “mature” works, all of which are regularly performed in Bayreuth in productions that are replaced every few years.

Rienzi tells of the medieval Italian upstart Cola di Rienzo, a lowborn but aspirational thinker who in 1347 led the people of Rome in an uprising against the city’s ruling oligarchy. Governing as Rome’s tribune, he espoused principles of egalitarian citizenship, ideals of the grandeur of antiquity, and hopes of uniting Italy before foundering because of the bare political fact that he ruled as a dictator. He lasted some seven months before his promises came up short, good will ran out, and his enemies ousted him. Rienzo left in exile and was killed some years later in an attempted comeback, but dramatic adaptations generally find it more expedient to eliminate him with the collapse of his rule.

Because of its nationalist themes and “people versus elites” narrative, Rienzo’s story was popular during the Romantic era, with adaptations appearing in literature and on stages across nineteenth-century Europe. Wagner’s immediate source was the English writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1835 novel Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes, which endowed the hero with a heroic populism and embellished a love plot between Rienzi’s sister Irene and Adriano, a scion of the princely Orsini family. The opera opens with the Orsinis and the Colonnas in contention for control of Rome. Rienzi rises to power but turns brutal after an assassination attempt. In the end, he perishes along with Irene and Adriano as his enemies storm the capitol, a forlorn hero who could not sustain his quest for greatness.

Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, the codirectors of this production, view Rienzi as a “contaminated” work due to its later associations. Adolf Hitler frequently referred to it as his favorite opera and even as the inspiration for his nefarious political career. In 1939, he received Rienzi’s original manuscript from the Wagner family as a fiftieth-birthday present and kept it with him in his bunker, from which it never emerged after the chaos that ended World War II. The premiere performance’s score was also lost in the February 1945 bombing of Dresden, leaving subsequent production teams to reconstruct and adapt extant material for performance. Drawing a connection between Nazi totalitarianism and the populist surge in contemporary European electoral politics is a stretch, but the latter sentiments are on the upswing, and the notion of storming a capitol has a particular resonance on our side of the Atlantic.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Szemerédy and Parditka should stage Bayreuth’s first Rienzi in a dystopian present, where Rome’s political contest is an election campaign in which the populist candidate coasts to victory, winning a plurality over his Orsini and Colonna rivals, in part thanks to instant messaging and social media; scrolling screens are displayed for the audience’s consumption. Rienzi’s supporters, who in writing communicate in English, carry signs promising to “Make Rome Great Again” and, referring to one of his rivals, “Lock Him Up.” Flags bearing Rienzi’s image flutter around the stage. His party’s main symbol is a thumbs-up. The references are obvious, though production materials diplomatically avoid mentioning Trump by name.

The idea of updating Rienzi in this way is not especially original, however. In 1983, an English National Opera production envisioned it as a modern admonition against authoritarianism. The director Philip Stölzl’s 2010 Deutsche Oper production drew on imagery of Hitler and Mussolini to depict the title character. Bayreuth’s premiere production seizes onto another overdone trope in Regietheater—personal trauma—to explain Rienzi’s motives. Historically, the leader was said to have been aggrieved by the unjust death of his younger brother. In the Bayreuth production, the brother dies in a pantomime set to the overture, apparently of injuries sustained in a hit-and-run accident for which the Colonna rival is acquitted.

The action unfolds in a modern setting, with the inhabitants of Rome dwelling in functional Bauhaus-style apartment buildings. The Act II ballet—a de rigueur feature of French grand opera—is here substantially reduced and is self-referentially set at the Bayreuth Festival. Spectators celebrating Rienzi’s rule crowd into a stage model of the theater for a series of entertainments referencing all of Wagner’s mature works, which are recognizable from traditional costumes and props. It may have been unwitting, but the suggestion that Bayreuth would perform traditional stagings of Wagner’s operas might be the production’s most radical innovation. In the finale, Rienzi promises that as long as Rome stands, someone like him will be there. He perishes in the collapse of the state house as he curses—and is cursed by—the enraged populace, and a projected video shows the city crumbling to dust.

The superstar heldentenor Andreas Schager was cast for all performances except the one I attended. The tenor Magnus Vigilius took over with admirable strength and sustained vocal authority over the long and difficult part. The soprano Gabriele Scherer sang serenely as Irene. Adriano, her love interest, is a trouser role and fell to the superb soprano Jennifer Holloway, who captured the part’s perturbed intensity. Michael Nagy and Andreas Bauer Kanabas were frightful rivals as Orsini and Colonna, respectively. The bass Vitalij Kowaljow sang the part of Cardinal Raimondo, who comments on the Catholic Church’s view of events. Nathalie Stutzmann’s conducting started out slowly and did not deliver the overture’s crescendos with complete satisfaction. But as the evening continued, she adopted a brisker and more engaging pace.

Unlike Maometto, which was initially coldly received, Le siège was a huge success at its 1826 premiere. But when both operas reappeared following long dormancies—Maometto and Le siège were performed in Pesaro in 1985 and 2000, respectively—Maometto was the critical favorite. It was praised in particular for its large-scale, interlocking musical units, a bold advance in Rossini’s style exemplified by a thirty-minute terzettone (big trio), which occupies about a third of Act I and comprises a number of dramatic events.

The Rossini scholar Philip Gossett pronounced Maometto II “one of the greatest serious operas written during the 19th century.” Modern productions were seen in Venice in 2005, Santa Fe in 2012, Naples in 2023, and elsewhere. By contrast, Le siège has remained the province of Pesaro, where it was given in 2017 in a new critical edition by the musicologist Damien Colas, as well as this year. (L’assedio di Corinto, a bastardized Italian-language mix of elements from Maometto and Le siège,was performed at La Scala in 1969 and at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975. It included for the soprano Beverly Sills a spectacular aria inserted in Act III, composed by Rossini’s contemporary Giovanni Pacini.)

In Le siège, Maometto II’s structural audacities were smoothed over by Rossini’s revisions, which were largely intended to bring it in line with French practice. At least, that is how the process began, as Colas explains in an article in the festival’s program book that gives Le siège its due. Building on work by the musicologist Anselm Gerhard, Colas explores in detail how the librettists of Le siège, including the poet Alexandre Soumet, broadened the opera to connect it with the Greek War of Independence, as the French were hugely supportive of the Greeks. The opera’s new title, following Lord Byron’s 1815 narrative poem “The Siege of Corinth,” heralded the link. The war, which began in 1821 (after Maometto was written and performed), reached its tragic nadir with the siege and battle of Missolonghi just months before Le siège’s premiere in October 1826. In a classic demonstration of the pre-cinematic capacity of opera, In a classic demonstration of the pre-cinematic capacity of opera, the final scenes of Le siège were viewed by the audience as a reenactment of accounts it had previously read in newspapers. The result was a box-office sensation.

Unlike in the first half of Le siege, which reworks stretches of Maometto, music from the middle of Act II to the end of the opera is preponderantly new. In a scene that looks forward to the grand operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a ballet preliminarily celebrates a wedding between the sultan Mahomet II (as he is known in Le siège)and Pamyra, the daughter of Corinth’s governor. The event is dashed by the intrusion of her suitor Néoclès, a Greek officer. To save his life, Pamyra impulsively announces that he is her brother but nevertheless precipitates a furious ensemble finale during which the two of them escape and Mahomet vows to kill every Greek by sunset.

In Act III, Pamyra’s exquisite prayer, moved from Act I of Maometto, captures the resignation of the Greek women in facing death, but the rest of the act also draws on specific accounts of the 1826 siege of Missolonghi for inspiration. Reports that the Greeks had sworn not to be taken prisoners, Colas argues, supplied the germ for the stirring patriotic scene in which the priest Hiéros leads a hymn blessing the Greek flags. Similarly, the opera’s final bloodbath corresponds to a report that, on Greek orders, mines were detonated to destroy the city’s walls immediately upon the invaders’ entry, thereby killing them and the remaining Greeks alike.

Unfortunately, the festival’s lightweight production by Davide Livermore was often at odds with the opera’s seriousness. It did address the past glory of the Greek nation, but in a rather cheeky fashion, with streams of video projections seen within a golden frame. Credited to the media company D-Wok, they were colorful and sometimes clever, featuring imagery of ancient Greece. But it didn’t help that the singers sometimes froze in position, as if posing for a painting. Nor did the Turks, looking effete in light-colored summer suits, appear to present much of a threat. Still, confrontational scenes were staged effectively, and Act III made an impact. Eleonora Peronetti, Paolo Gep Cucco, and Gianluca Falaschi shared responsibility with Livermore for the set designs, and Erika Rombaldoni’s choreography enlivened the Act II divertissement.

Pamyra was sung by the young soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, who made her international debut as a mezzo-soprano in Pesaro a decade ago and has appeared just about everywhere since. Her Rossinian credentials include singing the heroine of Maometto II in Naples four years ago, but she seemed more comfortable with the Italian idiom of that opera than with the French of Le siège. Though vocally and technically strong, her singing wanted more precision and a firmer melodic line. Nevertheless, she was enthusiastically received. The bass Adrian Sâmpetrean’s Mahomet was more nuanced than vocally frightening. The tenor Maxim Mironov made a fine moment of Néoclès’ moving Act III aria, and the tenor Matteo Roma declaimed with dignity as the governor Cléomène. Singing with fervor, the bass-baritone Simón Orfila invested Hiéros’s pronouncements with due gravity. Carlo Rizzi conducted crisply, yet with a feeling for the opera’s tragic dimension.

The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction, by Michael Gorra (University of Chicago Press): What we want from a short story is “some nugget of counsel rescued from the great wash of our lives,” Michael Gorra writes in his new book The Storytellers. More of a loving meditation on the short story and its variants than an academic survey, the book covers E. T. A. Hoffman, Goethe, Chekhov, and other short-fiction writers of the nineteenth century and offers some theories on the form’s development. As Gorra explores the fantastical nature of the short story, he emphasizes that its meaning “lies less on the page than in the effect it has on its readers.” Keep an eye out for Ernest Jesuyemi’s upcoming review of the book for Dispatch. —EE

Art:

“Aperture Loves New York,” at Aperture (through November 1): The new headquarters of Aperture, the storied photography publisher and exhibitor founded in 1952, is bare-bones in the best of ways—if you arrive here asking for the exhibition gallery, chances are you are already in it. The public spaces in this nineteenth-century apartment building on Columbus Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street have been stripped to the studs, or, more precisely, to the bricks and steel. Redesigned by Stella Betts and David Leven of the firm Levenbetts, the exhibition gallery does double duty as a reading room and check-out area. An adjoining street-front space features Aperture’s exquisite catalogue of publications laid out for easy flipping. The result is an intimate, free gathering place for photography enthusiasts to linger. An inaugural exhibition, “Aperture Loves New York,” features a survey of twenty-five city-focused photographers selected by Aperture’s executive director, Sarah Meister, with work propped up on shelves rather than hanging from the walls (look for a dog-eared checklist on the reading table). A series of inaugural talks is also planned for the location. An October 3 conversation between the photographer Stephen Shore and MOMA’s photography curator Lucy Gallun is already at capacity (though running a waitlist), but other events are still available with the purchase of a $5 store voucher. —JP

Architecture:

Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier: Greece and Albania in the Age of Ali Pasha, by Emily Neumeier (Penn State University Press): Once, while on the Greek island of Corfu, I took a slow boat to Sarandë, Albania, which, despite its Soviet Russia–meets-Miami stylings, didn’t seem so different from the Ionian island I’d just left. I was reminded of this happy sojourn on reading Emily Neumeier’s Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier, modestly described as a “spatial history of an Ottoman frontier zone” but in fact so much more. The similarity of the Albanian mainland to the Ionian islands should come as no surprise, as “Corfu and Lefkada are extremely close to the mainland, at points with only one or two kilometers between them—a razor-thin border between empires, ‘east’ and ‘west.’” That proximity was of particular concern for Ali Pasha (1743–1822), the Ottoman ruler of the Pashalik of Ioannina, which encompassed parts of present-day Albania and the current Greek regions of Epirus and Thessaly. From military fortifications to palaces and even Orthodox monasteries, Ali Pasha oversaw a large and varied building program, one that set him on a collision course with his paymasters in Istanbul. Neumeier’s book is a fine production and a testament to painstaking research. It will be of interest to anyone with an affinity for the region. —BR

Music:

“Dudamel Conducts Mahler & Tania León,” at the New York Philharmonic (September 24–29): Given the popularity of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on film, disc, and stage, writing about it feels a bit like limning that other great Fifth for the umpteenth time: Beethoven’s. Incidentally, Mahler echoes Beethoven’s unmistakable four-note motif throughout the opening of this symphony, which contains some of his most daring and at times bewildering orchestral writing, as well as this rather cagey composer’s most sincere statement of passion, the Adagietto. Gustavo Dudamel continues his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic with five performances of Mahler’s Fifth this week and the next. Tania León’s Imágenes Mestizas receives its world premiere as well. —IS

Dispatch:

“If these stones could talk,” by Conor McKee. On Stories of the Stones, by Paul Robichaud.

By the Editors:

“Who’s afraid of AI?”
Roger Kimball, The Spectator

From the Archives:

“The Massachusetts Machiavel,” by Justin Zaremby (March 2017). On The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, by Bernard Bailyn.

Stories of the Stones begins in the ancient world as Robichaud discusses the debated identification of the mythological land of Hyperborea as Britain. Some consider a passage from the work Historical Library by Diodorus Siculus (ca. 90–30 B.C.) to contain the first record of Stonehenge, conceived of as a round temple that honors Apollo. Diodorus sees the solar deity of his own land among the Hyperboreans’ mythology, setting the direction for Robichaud’s narrative: the weathered stones become a mirror for each coming age, and the author examines this idea successively among medieval chroniclers, early modern antiquaries, the Romantics, folklore, and contemporary popular culture.

Robichaud’s first chapter is one of his strongest. It captures the mood of Old English exilic verse, where barrows and stone circles are sinister sites beyond the reach of human society. The dual significance of the barrow as both the dragon’s lair and the final resting place of the hero in Beowulf is noted, associating Beowulf with the vices of pride and greed he shares with his foe. (The poem’s final line calls the hero lofgeornost, or the “most eager for praise.”) This detail draws out the tension between the pagan past of Beowulf, with its materialistic warrior ethic, and the Christian suspicion of worldly vainglory that the poet must ultimately submit to. Next, Robichaud traces the idea that stone circles were the work of giants. This legend is present in Anglo-Saxon texts through the High Middle Ages, where it appears in quasi-mythical chronicles, the most notable being Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136). In these texts, monuments are interwoven with Arthurian myth: Merlin is said to have directed giants to build them or, in other traditions, to have shifted through sorcery the stones that no other human could stir.

Perhaps the chapter on antiquarians will not leave the reader transfixed, but it is an important inclusion. Figures like John Leland, John Aubrey, and Inigo Jones were among the earliest to make scholarly inferences about where ancient monuments came from. As it did for Diodorus so many centuries before, Stonehenge became a microcosm and a mirror for Robichaud’s antiquaries. Though in certain respects their efforts moved away from the fantastical imaginings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, these writers still transmitted strands of medieval fable—it would be a mistake to take their methods for those of Leopold von Ranke. Under the classicizing eyes of Jones and his pupil John Webb, Stonehenge was judged to be a lost Roman temple concealing complex Pythagorean proportions and symbolic meanings. For those in touch with archaeological discoveries abroad, like William Camden, the similarity with Danish stone circles suggested a coronation site or totem to a Viking chieftain from the time of the Danegeld, when annual tribute bought off Danish invaders.

Megaliths were also a muse to the Romantics, and the chapter on this movement is a highlight of Stories of the Stones. Anglo-Saxon poets or “scops” associated stone circles with a sense of foreboding and tales of demons and exile. That terror and awe was felt by the poet William Wordsworth, who made Stonehenge a locus of the sublime in his poem “Guilt and Sorrow; or, Incidents upon Salisbury Plain” (1842), a revision of an earlier poem from 1793–94. The choicest of Britain’s ancient mirabilia returns like a leitmotif, with Robichaud sensitively comparing and contrasting J. M. W. Turner’s and John Constable’s paintings of Stonehenge. Constable’s vision is bright and airy, with arcs of light connecting sky and ground, a nod to the growing realization that the structure aligned with the sun on the summer solstice. Turner, conversely, invokes an older association with sacrifice, portraying a dead flock of sheep at the foot of the megaliths, with one of the stones catching a bolt of lightning from on high. From rainbows to lightning bolts, the two paintings illustrate the duality of the Romantic response to stone circles—they are awe-inspiring features of the landscape that uplift the soul on the one hand but supposedly tainted by occult rituals on the other. Robichaud’s analysis of the works is bolstered by the book’s attractive color plates and by accounts of critical responses, such as the art historian John Ruskin’s reading of Turner’s landscape as a Christian allegory.

The chapter on folklore broadens out the perspective to the whole Celtic world, looking closely at Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and even Breton tales of fantastical creatures. If there is a criticism to be leveled at this portion, it is that the focus wanders from the monuments themselves and the section effectively becomes a summary of Celtic folklore. The chapter on modern responses also feels too miscellaneous. Opening with the twentieth-century novel, it turns to modern sculpture, painting, and children’s fiction, and then The Wicker Man (1973), Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, and Doctor Who.

In contrast to earlier chapters, the book’s penultimate and final ones are less successful at anchoring their subject matter with focus and direction. The book suffers from the lack of a clearly expressed central argument, beyond telling us that people’s reactions to standing stones are intriguing and multifarious. This is not fatal for a book that targets the wider public, but the book’s wanderings are particularly frustrating when its conclusion does nothing to unite the strands. A last-minute swerve broaches conservation fears, the value of the right to roam, and concerns about the authenticity and preservation of the monuments, rather than leaving us with any sense of what has been accomplished. A book with a subject this interesting deserves better: it should crystallize its many symbols, images, and stories into a final insight that will stay with the reader for years to come.

“Privatize the Smithsonian”
Eric Gibson, The Wall Street Journal

How should the Smithsonian Institution deal with the recent exit of its secretary Lonnie Bunch III and President Trump’s criticisms? In The Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson argues that the institution should be privatized. This, of course, would require it to abandon the 62 percent of the budget it receives from federal funding and to undergo the congressional process of formal separation from the government, but perhaps that’s for the best. Gibson argues that “government can foster a thriving culture, but it cannot create one,” citing the Impressionists, whose enduring achievements owed to their rejection of the Académie des Beaux Arts’ official techniques.

“The spellbinding power of the du Maurier family”
Frances Wilson, The Spectator World

Daphne du Maurier considered herself “a channel for the family ghosts,” Frances Wilson writes in her review of Last Night I Dreamt: A Personal History of the du Mauriers for The Spectator World. Perhaps another channel is the author of the book, Paul de Zulueta, who happens to be du Maurier’s grandson. In his memoir-meets-biography, Zulueta covers the other fascinating members of the du Maurier family line, including George, Daphne’s grandfather, who wrote the 1894 book Trilby, and his son Gerald, an actor and all-around cad. Particularly amusing is the description of the linguistic code the du Mauriers adopted in their letters. (A “tell-him” is a “boring story about oneself” and “see-me” means “being vain or self-absorbed.”) Wilson extols the fascinating history of the literary clan, but she specifically praises the freshness of Zulueta’s reactions to his family’s legacy: he only got around to reading his grandmother’s book Rebecca in his forties.

“Why are there so many museum heists?”
Lucy Waterson, Apollo

There’s been a spotlight on art heists lately, from the robbery of the French crown jewels from the Louvre last year to the recent theft of two paintings from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer earlier this month. In Apollo, Lucy Waterson interviews Jake Archer, a member of the FBI’s art-crime team, to better understand the motivations and methods of these sorts of crimes. Archer points out that sometimes thieves’ motives are financial, but often they have “unhealthy passions for history, culture and notoriety.” However, it can be easier for art thieves to grab items that can be sold quickly, like jewels, rather than a one-of-a-kind painting that will generate a storm of media attention. Nevertheless, the effects of any sort of art theft can be devastating. “Having that void, that loss, is a great motivator in finding these items and bringing perpetrators to justice,” Archer tells Waterson.

There has been a great deal of press about Hofstra’s extraordinarily heavy-handed intervention, but if you’ve missed it or need a reminder, David Spector’s recent article in the New York Post, timed for the start of the academic year, presents a summary of the issues. As Spector points out, Himelfarb has on his side both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which sent administrators at Hofstra two stern letters on June 5 and July 30, and the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), which sent a formal letter of protest on June 25. FIRE emphasizes that “just because Slabodsky was hurt or felt disparaged by the ‘word salad’ remark does not make it punishable harassment under federal law or Hofstra’s own policy”; the AFA adds that “the relevant behavior involves two words on a single occasion.”

But how should we interpret the combination of the two words “word” and “salad”? The question calls for a better answer than I have been able to find.

In a footnote to its first letter to Hofstra, FIRE provides the following definition of “word salad” from Merriam-Webster: “a string of empty, incoherent, unintelligible, or nonsensical words or comments.” However, this is a definition, not the definition—the second definition, actually, after one under the heading “psychology”: “unintelligible, extremely disorganized speech or writing manifested as a symptom of a mental disorder (such as schizophrenia).”

As the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) makes clear, the clinical definition does indeed have historical precedence. “Word salad” first appears in English in 1904, a loan translation of German Wortsalat or French salade de mots, both attested from the late nineteenth century—and it remains a recognized term in psychiatry, though some speak instead of “schizophasia” (Merriam-Webster: “the disorganized speech characteristic of schizophrenia”; not in the OED or DSM-5). Manifestations of this disorder include such utterances as “Sensibly effort compound bed bubble” and “Wetness smooth dancing sheep.” Another example, which I briefly discussed in my paper “Exercises in wile,” would be “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” which reverses the five elements of the so-called Chomsky sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” with resulting syntactic incoherence as well as semantic oddity.

What we see, then, is that the technical term “word salad” has been appropriated in common parlance—or “misappropriated,” if you accept the diagnosis a prominent psychiatrist made in a 2024 piece in Psychology Today. The reason to stress this is to forestall the claim that Himelfarb used “word salad” in its clinical sense and that Slabodsky was thus subjected to a disability-based slur. Obviously this is not the case, not least since if Slabodsky did have schizophasia, he would not be an active teacher in the classroom. The metaphorical or colloquial use or uses of “word salad” follow the same pattern we find in, say, “addicted” (“I’m addicted to my phone”) and “bipolar” (“the weather is bipolar”): semantic shifts frowned upon by some, yes, but ordinary instances of language change and thus not, to the mind of a linguist, misappropriations.

In the absence of a transcript of Slabodsky’s remarks—if there is one, it has not been released—it is impossible to know what exactly Himelfarb might have objected to. There are, however, at least four common nonclinical ways in which people use “word salad.”

Let’s go through these ways, taking our lead from the OED entry for “word salad,” which does not differentiate, as Merriam-Webster does, between the clinical use and what it describes as “(more generally) incoherent speech or writing.” There are five citations of the phrase from published books, the first three of which, from 1904, 1930, and 1960, are in the context of schizophrenia. The other two, though both colloquial, are different from each other.

One of these citations is literary. It comes from Jerome Klinkowitz’s 1991 study of the postmodern writer Donald Barthelme, whose story “The Emerald” contains dialogue that “mix[es] Joycean word salad with redneck vernacular.” (Elsewhere in the same monograph, Klinkowitz describes some words in Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father as “Joycean, a language salad in the manner of Finnegans Wake.”) Whatever one thinks of the language of Barthelme or James Joyce, it is undeniably playful rather than incoherent. They were artistic geniuses: not to everyone’s taste, certainly, but their strange kinds of English were deliberate attempts to achieve an aesthetic effect.

The other citation is neither psychiatric nor literary. In his 1976 book about dysfunctional communication, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, the educator and media critic Neil Postman, best known for Amusing Ourselves to Death, comments on a description of an Esalen Institute workshop known as “Tennis Flow” that is said to “integrate principles of body awareness, movement, dance, music, and meditation with traditional methods of tennis instruction and practice.” Postman remarks sardonically, “The exorbitant fee one must pay for flowing all over the tennis court is made to seem plausible by a word salad of imposing proportions.” Again, say what you wish about Joyce, but he would never have written so insipid a sentence as Esalen’s—unless the point was insipidity, which is evidently not the institute’s.

But there is more to say about “word salad.” At least two other varieties of word salad exist that the OED does not exemplify. One is the sort of academic gobbledygook associated with the infamously opaque Judith Butler, who won first prize in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest for this ninety-four-word sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Now that is what I call an example of word salad of imposing proportions—or “thick soup” (as Martha C. Nussbaum once put it), if you prefer to consume unnecessary calories in a different form. While the fuzzy description from Esalen is somehow intended to make you feel good about parting with your money in a mystical haze of blah-blah, the goal of professorial “theorists” such as Butler seems to be to make insecure people who don’t have a Ph.D. in gender studies from Yale or Berkeley feel cowed into believing that they are the stupid ones. Anyone who has spent time at most Anglophone universities will have no difficulty coming up with other examples of this kind of academese.

Finally, there is the use of “word salad” that is likely to be the most familiar to the American public today: as a denigration of the hard-to-follow language of a politician one doesn’t care for. Surely the figure most reviled in this way is Donald Trump, who calls his own style of speech “the weave.” Left-wing and progressive outlets such as MS NOW, the Independent, the Daily Beast, the Toronto Star, and HuffPost clearly enjoy publishing pieces about Trump that contain “word salad” or “word-salad gibberish” in their title.

It is worth noting, however, that the linguist Mark Liberman, who writes extensively about Trump’s language and does not have Trump Derangement Syndrome, has spoken of Trump’s speech as “entirely comprehensible. . . even eloquent” and reiterated his assessment in the face of colleagues’ incredulity. As the psycholinguist Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. is right to point out, in an academic paper that discusses the term “word salad” and its application to Trump, the way in which we interpret the creativity or disorder of speech or writing “depends dramatically on our assumptions about the persons producing them.”

Then there is Kamala Harris. She, too, is regularly charged with speaking in “word salad,” generally by right-of-center outlets such as National Review and the Washington Examiner. Even now, nearly two years after her loss in the 2024 presidential election, headlines about Harris in the New York Post and The Post Millennial and on Fox News continue to stress her affinity for green nonsense.

Since Trump’s and Harris’s verbal styles are so different from each other—Trump might be said to speak in “clause salad” (the felicitous term of a commentator on Language Log), while Harris’s language is often of the vapid Esalen kind—it seems odd to use the same term, “word salad,” for both. (Incidentally, although Trump has often criticized Harris’s verbal ability with such statements as “She’s not a very good wordsmith, they say,” he has also said that he doesn’t like the description “word salad” for her speech.) But, as we are seeing, the term is flexible.

Arguably too flexible. True, terms often acquire multiple meanings, so the range of contexts in which “word salad” is used—clinical, literary, fuzzy, academic, and political—is not in itself remarkable. But, as Google Ngrams demonstrate, there has been a steady rise in the use of “word salad” since around 1990, and the more people use the term, the more they are moving away from its original—and, in psychiatric circles, still extant—meaning. Perhaps we will learn to do away with some of the ambiguity by adjusting our language so as to differentiate among Caesar word salad, salade de mots niçoise, and “verbal coleslaw”—the last John McWhorter’s amusing term, which, however, he has used both of Donald Trump’s speech (over eight years ago) and, just last month, of the widely ridiculed inarticulateness of Carolyn Rouse, the Princeton professor who happens also to be the current president of the American Anthropological Association.

But whatever form of salad Santiago Slabodsky may have used in that faculty meeting last November, the first order of business is for Hofstra to stop investigating Richard Himelfarb. And while we’re waiting, you may wish to order Susan Coll’s new novel, Word Salad.

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee recently and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. Throughout the pandemic, he never lacked an answer. But when the moment came to explain his decisions and admit error, he chose silence and self-protection over his duty to justify what he espoused during the pandemic. Fauci’s inability to account for his beliefs is emblematic of something broader: other officials spoke with unwavering confidence while suppressing their own doubts, and they treated dissent as a threat to be managed rather than an opinion to be considered.

The COVID pandemic stands as an exhibit of why the public has lost trust in the expert class, but it was far from an isolated one. For decades, thoughtful people sensed that our institutions were decaying—journalists editorializing rather than reporting, governments spending without accountability, universities trading free debate for conformity and advocacy. The scale of institutional failure became undeniable in 2020 because of its personal impact. Institutions built to protect freedom suspended it from the top down instead, with too little resistance from a public that had granted them extraordinary trust. Intelligent people decided the greatest moment of crisis was the wrong time to think, and especially the wrong time to speak.

That silence itself is the danger. Alexis de Tocqueville warned nearly two centuries ago that the gravest threat to free societies isn’t the tyrant but the quiet, self-imposed suppression of unpopular truth. Those who criticize a dissenter do so loudly, he wrote, while those who privately agree keep quiet. He could have been describing the controversies of 2020. In most places, the page has simply been turned, with no reckoning, accountability, or apologies. That eagerness to move on is not innocent or born out of issue fatigue. It is a way of sidestepping responsibility, and it conveniently obscures how many people were complicit in the harm that was done.

Accountability is the only deterrent against repetition of past mistakes, and it only works when displayed out in the open where it can’t be quietly forgotten. But it doesn’t happen on its own. It requires a public willing to take back the burden of critical thinking and to keep demanding truth and the admission of errors from leaders who are granted extraordinary trust and authority. This accountability should not be seen as a onetime reckoning but as a standing default. Without it, even titillating headlines like those about Fauci’s diary fade into the next news cycle. The institutions that failed the American people are still run largely by the same people, making the same paper commitments to free expression they violated without hesitation when it mattered the most. More than a hundred American universities had supposedly adopted the Chicago Principles, the so-called gold standard for campus free speech. The document existed, but the will to honor it did not.

That pattern of hollow commitment hasn’t stopped. Universities and governments are now building artificial-intelligence tools to detect and suppress what they define as misinformation, backed by more than $200 million in federal and private funding. They have appointed themselves the arbiters of truth. But there is no such thing as a neutral referee, and in truly free societies, there is no need for anyone to be designated as a “dominant authority.” “Misinformation” is just whatever that “authority” doesn’t want you to hear—which is exactly why no one should be given that title. Truth can only be decided by evidence that can stand against any challenge, and the designation of inconvenient facts as misinformation is a threat to free societies.

Edmund Burke understood that liberty is not self-sustaining; it requires constant, active renewal. Likewise, institutions do not self-correct but are instead corrected by people who insist on honest reckoning with real consequences and who protect the act of dissenting—contrary to faux assertions of “lessons learned,” structural changes that remove conflicts of interest, and groupthink that has calcified into policy.

Here’s the good news—there is more evidence of courage and interest in free debate than the headlines suggest, especially on college campuses. Even though young people care more than ever before about matters of social approval, plenty are clear-eyed about what the last six years have meant and are determined not to repeat it.

The data backs this up. According to artificial intelligence–assisted research, university presidents and deans write in favor restricting speech over protecting it by approximately two and a half to one, and the top fifty schools in the United States average a failing grade on free-speech rankings. But at those same schools, student-newspaper articles opposing censorship now outnumber those defending it by approximately two to one. The administrations are failing. The students, largely, are not.

That gap is exactly where the old consensus is breaking down. It tolerated the suppression of dissent for years; now it’s cracking, and information is finding its way around the gatekeepers who used to control it. The remedy for bad information has always been more information, not a new class of official censors. But that shift requires people with integrity willing to say publicly what they think, even when it costs them something. That obligation is not new. The Declaration of Independence made a claim that goes beyond government: when institutions seek to destroy liberty, it is the right and the duty of free people to change them. That was true in 1776, and it remains true today.