Monday, June 29, 2009

More Latin Reading links

Scott and Horn's Latin Book One is on line and has macrons marked. This text
published in 1936 stands in a line of Latin texts including the later
editions under the title Using Latin from Scott Foresman. This book is
widely available through used book sellers at very reasonable prices. It is
also posted on-line at the Yahoo Group

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Latinbk1/

This site requires that the users join (in order to discourage spammers).
This membership is entirely free. The Files section contains PDF files of
all the lessons along with Answers from two different sources. There are
some audio files to help students learn pronunciation and links to a number
of other Latin resources.

------------------

Try looking in google books, if you are in the U.S.  Many of the
textbooks from the late 19th and early 20th century, which are now in
the public domain, have vowel lengths marked.  These are all PDF files:

Ritchie's "Fabulae Faciles" (Kirtland) <http://tinyurl.com/ltuqo4>

Lhommond, "Viri Inlustres," selections (D'Ooge) <http://tinyurl.com/lut8fv>
;

Cornelius Nepos, selections (Rolfe) <http://tinyurl.com/l37qqj>

Caesar, Gallic Wars (Allen & Greenough) <http://tinyurl.com/m42qwg>

Cicero, selected orations and letters (Allen & Greenough)
<http://tinyurl.com/kqga8m>

Livy, selections (Rolfe) <http://tinyurl.com/mewmhr>

"Readers" with selections from Latin authors, also sometimes have the
quantities marked.  You can find some of these in google books as well.

Many of the texts at <www.textkitcom>, also PDF files, have quantities
marked.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Turretin on Law/Gospel

Thanks to the Reformed Reader (http://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/turretin-lawgospel-and-otnt/)

"There is not the same opposition throughout between the Old and New Testaments as there is between the law and the gospel.  The opposition of the law and the gospel (insofar as they are taken properly and strictly for the covenant of works and of grace and are considered in their absolute being) is contrary.  They are opposed as the letter killing and the Spirit quickening; as Hagar gendering to bondage and Sarah gendering to freedom, although the law more broadly taken and in its relative being is subordinated to the gospel."

"But the opposition of the Old and New Testaments broadly viewed is relative, inasmuch as the Old contained the shadows of things to come (Heb. 10.1) and the New the very image (ten eikona)."


Francis Turretin, Institutes, XX.XXII.VIII.xv (easier: pages 236-237 of volume two)

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Gregory Wolfe on Thomas Kinkade and Sentimentalism

http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/editorial-statements/the-painter-of-lite

Image Journal, Issue #34 · Spring 2002

The Painter of Lite™

LAST night, after the kids' final day of school and a hard slog at work, our family sat down to watch Jurassic Park III, the kind of movie we call E.T. ("entertaining trash"). Like most Hollywood sequels the film is full of recycled scenes—mainly dinosaurs energetically masticating just about any piece of flesh that comes their way—but one episode was particularly memorable. During a harrowing encounter with yet another super-sized reptile, one of the terrorized human beings manages to place a call on a satellite telephone. The call is answered by a three year old in a suburban American home, but instead of going to give the phone to his mom, he gets distracted by the television, which is showing the children's program featuring Barney the cuddly purple T. Rex. While the bloodcurdling sounds of human screams and dinosaur roars come out of the phone, the boy is transfixed by the sight of Barney, who is galumphing about the TV screen to the rhythms of a happy song.

Reflecting on the pleasure I took from that scene, I decided that it was a salutary warning about the difficulty of writing about sentimentality and popular culture. The sheer fun of beating up on artistic kitsch is hard for some of us to resist, and in my title I have succumbed to temptation. The reference, for those who have been living in a different galaxy, is to the painter and marketing genius Thomas Kinkade, who styles himself The Painter of LightTM. Kinkade's saccharin, soft-focus paintings of Cotswoldy cottages, glowing gardens, misty lighthouses, and quaint villages have been reproduced over ten million times, and now adorn not only people's walls, but also La-Z-Boy recliners, screen savers, and coffee mugs all over the world. But Kinkade isn't satisfied with his role as artist: he has invested his work with the aura of patriotism and the intentional language of a Christian missionary. When you buy one of his works, whether it is a mug or one of the mass-produced prints that are then "highlighted" by "trained master highlighters," Kinkade wants you to believe that you are furthering the work of the Kingdom.

The critics, on the other hand, are not impressed. They have called Kinkade "a male Martha Stewart" and dubbed his work "art as a Happy Meal," "cultural Prozac," and the painterly equivalent to Beanie Babies.

The problem with comments like these is that they run the risk of backfiring, amounting to little more than a bloodsport of the cultural elite. After all, in America there is an ingrained populism which holds that ten million people can't be wrong. And it is hard to argue with a number that large; Kinkade has connected with some deep human need.

However, it would be a mistake to reduce the discussion of sentimentality to a conflict between earnest populists and alienated elites. There have been popular artists, like Shakespeare and Michelangelo, who never seemed to indulge in sentimentality, while some sophisticated artists, such as Raphael and Tennyson, can't be thought of apart from it.

In the eighteenth century, idealist moral philosophers used the word sentimental to express a sense of refinement and sensitivity. The idealists were Enlightenment figures who believed in the innate goodness of man; they felt that the cultivation of emotion allowed that goodness to gain greater social force. Nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens and Thackeray were deeply influenced by this way of thinking, but within fifty years of its coining, the word was being held up to ridicule.
The word sentimentality is now a term of opprobrium, but it is notoriously hard to define. Of course, that hasn't prevented it from being the source of a few witty epigrams. The Zen scholar R. H. Blyth once noted: "We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." That's good, but as usual Oscar Wilde hits closer to the mark: "a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."

Some thinkers have tried to characterize certain emotions as inherently sentimental, but I am convinced by Mark Jefferson, who argues in a brilliant essay, "What's Wrong with Sentimentality?," that the phenomenon resides not so much in the emotion itself as in the disjuncture between emotion and object. The heart of the problem is that of a misrepresentation of the world in order to indulge certain emotional states. For Jefferson, sentimentality is the product of moral choice. Our vision of the world is shaped by many small choices, which can include a tendency to ascribe "qualities of innocence" to certain objects. Sentimentality, he concludes, ascribes "sweetness, dearness, littleness, blamelessness, and vulnerability" to a select group of things.

Sentimentality, Jefferson admits, can be harmless. A penchant for Hallmark cards and posters of kittens playing with balls of yarn is not in itself a mortal sin. But when the misrepresentation of the world takes on a particular consistency and brittleness, darker consequences are possible. "The unlikely creature and moral caricature that is someone unambiguously worthy of sympathetic response has its natural counterpart in a moral caricature of something unambiguously worthy of hatred," Jefferson concludes.

Which is why some observers have noted a relationship between sentimentality and brutality. The example that is usually trotted out here is that of the Nazi doctors, men who could shed tears over a string quartet one moment and then butcher a human being the next. It's a compelling story, but I would contend that it is such an extreme example as to do more to blind us to the quotidian dangers of sentimentality than to enlighten us. To the extent that anything is considered innocent—whether it be a race, nation, class, ethnic group, religion, or what have you—it is held up as something pure, something that can only be tainted or displaced by outside influences. When we are too tender about something we can easily become too violent in seeking to defend or preserve it.

To return to my earlier example, what scares me about Thomas Kinkade is not so much the treacly emotion he seeks to evoke or his inveterate prettifying of nature, but the political subtext underlying his iconography. The only folk who could ever have inhabited his cottages and lighthouses are prosperous white people. Nearly all of his paintings are of a world circa 1800-1914, with perhaps a small percentage depicting a world between 1914 and 1960. He likes to say that he is a painter of "memories and traditions," but he is highly selective in what he chooses to remember, and that choice bears an unnerving resemblance to a world that is comfortingly pre-modern and Anglo-Saxon in composition. The views of these homes are always from the outside looking in, the point of view as a yearning gaze at windows glowing with light and wisps of smoke rising from chimneys. Here Kinkade demonstrates his genius, because he leaves us free to imagine the idealized world within.

The essence of Kinkade's sentimentality is the packaging of nostalgia. It's an oxymoronic idea, but it has become a major part of our cultural life, as Florence King has noted: "True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories...but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu."

Kinkade's patriotism and his attacks on the horrors of artistic modernism are standard-issue conservative notions. When it comes to theology, however, he is a little more original. The majority of his expressions of faith are fairly conventional, solidly within the evangelical mold, but his theological defense of the world depicted in his paintings is that "I like to portray a world without the Fall." I have yet to encounter any evidence that Kinkade cites scriptural or other warrant for this modus operandi. The Bible, as a narrative, seems fairly explicit about there being a Before and an After. Moreover, Christ's message was not to pretend the world isn't fallen but to take up our crosses and follow him through suffering and sacrifice. To create a body of work illustrating a world without the Fall is, for a Christian, to render Christ superfluous.

The more I've thought about it, the more it seems to me that Jesus took every opportunity he could to counter sentimentality. At just about every juncture when those around him are tempted to rely upon sentiment, he brings them up short. To the announcement that his mother and brothers have arrived at the edge of the crowd—a Hallmark moment if there ever was one—he replies that only his disciples are his mother and brothers. And the one recorded instance when Jesus weeps takes place after he has deliberately delayed coming to see the dying Lazarus. In John's recounting of the story, Jesus is clearly moved by the suffering of the man's family, and perhaps his awareness of this death and resurrection as proleptic of his own passion. But whatever emotions he was feeling—grief, pity, regret—they were inexorably shaped by the reality of the Fall.

Kinkade's apologetic seems to fit the definition of sentimentality as the "misrepresentation of the world in order to indulge certain emotional states." That he is tapping into a deep human need seems unquestionable. But the response that he and many other purveyors of subcultural religious kitsch provide to that need is both inadequate and dangerous.

Conservative Christianity does not have a monopoly on sentimentality. There are myriad forms of it out there. For the past few months, I have followed in my local newspaper the saga of a stranded orca in the Puget Sound, complete with tales of how the orphaned creature has adopted a pet log as a friend and companion. Yesterday's paper recounted the orca's safe capture, in preparation for an attempt to reunite it with its pod. The other front-page story was that of the Washington Supreme Court ruling that a set of human embryos caught in a custody battle may be destroyed. Today the orca is back on the front page; the embryos are not.

There are times when criticizing sentimentality seems like overkill. But it would be wrong simply to dismiss the phenomenon—and the specific instance I've been discussing, religious kitsch—as nothing more than examples of harmless mediocrity. The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: "There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy."

Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless. Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without having to pay the price for it.


Monday, June 22, 2009

Mark Dever's Recommended Christian Classics Reading schedule

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reading.php?a=109

Christian Classics Curriculum
By Mark Dever and Michael J. Thate

January (Early Church):
Year One: Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Early Church and The Martyrdom of Polycarp
Year Two: Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians and Irenaeus, Against All Heresies
Year Three: Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians
Year Four: St Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St John and The Epistle to the Hebrews
 
February (Augustine):
Year One: Confessions
Year Two: City of God
Year Three: Doctrinal Treatises (especially On the Holy Trinity), and Moral Treatises
Year Four: Anti-Pelagian Writings
 
March (Martin Luther):
Year One: Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther and Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and Devil
Year Two: Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell, eds., Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings (2d ed.; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2005)
Year Three: Luther, The Bondage of the Will
Year Four: Luther, Table Talk and the prefaces of his commentaries on Romans and Galatians
 
April (John Calvin):
Year One: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume One
Year Two: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume Two
Year Three: Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography and Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin
Year Four: Read through various passages in his many commentaries on Genesis, Psalms, Romans, Galatians, Philippians, or your other favorite books of the Bible. 

May (Richard Sibbes and Richard Baxter):
Year One: Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and the Smoking Flax and Sibbes, The Glorious Feast of the Gospel
Year Two: Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, and Baxter, The Practical Works
Year Three: Sibbes, The Spiritual Man's Aim and Sibbes, A Glance of Heaven
Year Four: Sibbes, The Saint's Comforts, and Sibbes, Salvation Applied

June (John Bunyan and John Owen):
Year One: Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress and Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor, eds., Communion with the Triune God (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2007).
Year Two: Kapic and Taylor, eds., Overcoming Sin and Temptation: Three Classic Works by John Owen (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006).
Year Three: Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and Owen, Death of Death in the Death of Christ
Year Four: Owen, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith
 
July (Jonathan Edwards):
Year One: Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Banner of Truth, 1996), George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Year Two: Edwards, Freedom of the Will and Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits
Year Three: Edwards, Religious Affections and John Piper, God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (With the Complete Text of "The End for Which God Created the World") (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1998). 
Year Four: Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), and Edwards, Resolutions.   
 
August (Charles H. Spurgeon):
Year One: Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students and Autobiography
Year Two: Spurgeon, Till He Comes
Year Three: Spurgeon, The Treasury of David
Year Four: Spurgeon, any number of his various sermons
 
September (B. B. Warfield):
Year One: Warfield, Revelation and Inspiration (vol. 1 of his complete works)
Year Two: Warfield, Biblical Doctrines (vol. 2)
Year Three: Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism (vol. 5)
Year Four: Warfield, Studies in Theology (vol. 9)
 
October (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones):
Year One: Iain H. Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (1899  1939) and David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith (1939  1981)
Year Two: Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures
Year Three: Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
Year Four: Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible: God the Father, God the Son; God the Holy Spirit; The Church and Last Things

November (C. S. Lewis and Blaise Pascal):
Year One: Lewis, Mere Christianity and Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Year Two: Lewis, The Abolition of Man and Lewis, God in the Dock
Year Three: Pascal, Pensees and Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
Year Four: Lewis, Screwtape Letters and Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress
 
December (Contemporary Authors):
Year One: J. I. Packer, Knowing God and Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
Year Two: John Stott, The Cross of Christ and Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism
Year Three: Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There; Escape from Reason; He Is There And He Is Not Silent
Year Four: Any of the books by the Council Members of The Gospel Coalition (see their writings at our About Us page)

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Oswald Chambers on "Lust"

Remember what lust is -- "I must have it now," whether it is the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind.

-- Oswald Chambers, "My Utmost for His Highest", March 14

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Time Magazine's "All Time 100 Best Novels 1923 to the Present"

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

All Time 100 Best Novels 1923 to the Present

 

A - B

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow

 

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

 

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

 

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser

 

Animal Farm

George Orwell

 

Appointment in Samarra

John O'Hara

 

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Judy Blume

 

The Assistant

Bernard Malamud

 

At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien

 

Atonement

Ian McEwan

 

Beloved

Toni Morrison

 

The Berlin Stories

Christopher Isherwood

 

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

 

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood

 

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

 

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

 

C - D

Call It Sleep

Henry Roth

 

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

 

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

 

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

 

The Confessions of Nat Turner

William Styron

 

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

 

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

 

A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powell

 

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West

 

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

 

A Death in the Family

James Agee

 

The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen

 

Deliverance

James Dickey

 

Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone

 

F - G

Falconer

John Cheever

 

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles

 

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

 

Go Tell it on the Mountain

James Baldwin

 

Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell

 

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

 

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

 

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

H - I

A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh

 

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

 

The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene

 

Herzog

Saul Bellow

 

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

 

A House for Mr. Biswas

V.S. Naipaul

 

I, Claudius

Robert Graves

 

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

 

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

 

L - N

Light in August

William Faulkner

 

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

C.S. Lewis

 

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

 

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

 

The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Loving

Henry Green

 

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

 

The Man Who Loved Children

Christina Stead

 

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie

 

Money

Martin Amis

 

The Moviegoer

Walker Percy

 

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

 

Naked Lunch

William Burroughs

 

Native Son

Richard Wright

 

Neuromancer

William Gibson

 

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

 

1984

George Orwell

Read the Original Review

 

O - R

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

 

The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski

 

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

 

A Passage to India

E.M. Forster

 

Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion

 

Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth

 

Possession

A.S. Byatt

 

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene

 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

 

Rabbit, Run

John Updike

 

Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow

 

The Recognitions

William Gaddis

 

Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett

 

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates

 

S - T

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles

 

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

 

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

 

The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth

 

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

 

The Sportswriter

Richard Ford

 

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

John le Carre

 

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

 

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

 

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

 

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

 

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

 

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

 

U - W

Ubik

Philip K. Dick

 

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch

 

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry

 

Watchmen

Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

 

White Noise

Don DeLillo

 

White Teeth

Zadie Smith

Read the Original Review

 

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Ben Meyers & Kim Fabricius, Essential Novels for Theologians

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2006/01/essential-novels-for-theologians.html

Essential novels for theologians

My friend Kim Fabricius (who sometimes posts at Connexions) sent me this list of 15 essential novels for theologians, and he has allowed me to post it here.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
2. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
3. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin (1876)
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
6. Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
7. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
8. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947)
9. Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
10. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
11. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1955)
12. William Golding, The Spire (1964)
13. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1975)
14. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1983)
15. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

This is an excellent list, although I might have wanted to include Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, and Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, as well as anything by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Oh, and something by John Updike and Salman Rushdie and A. S. Byatt.

 

> Umberto Eco, "The NAme of the Rose"

> John Steinbeck's East of Eden

> William Falkner, The Wild Palms; Absalom, Absalom; The Grapes of Wrath  (and probably a few other titles)

> Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Demons

> Cervantes' Don Quixote

> Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Beat it Away, and even more, her short story collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge

> Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest

> Huxley's Brave New World


Friday, June 12, 2009

List of Classical Music to Listen to

Some classical music to try sometime:

 

Bach, B Minor Mass

Haydn, Symphonies #94, 97, 104

Mozart, Symphony 41, Requiem, C Minor Mass, Piano Con K466 (D Minor), Marriage of Figaro

Beethoven, Violin Concerto

Scubert, "Unfinished" and "Great C-Major", his four symphonies, songs, Symphonic Etudes

Mendelssohn, Octet

Dvorak, Symphonies 8 & 9 (Unfinished)

Bruckner, 7th & 9th symphony

Sibelius, Violin Concerto

Shostakovich, 2nd Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto #1, Symphony 10

Classical Music FAQs By Jay Nordlinger, National Review Senior Editor

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjczMjc3OTM2MzI1YWQ5MzMxMjMzYTViM2ZiOWQwMzg=

 

Classical Music FAQs

By Jay Nordlinger, National Review Senior Editor

 

Maybe dip into some Monteverdi — try his Vespers, or excerpts from an opera: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria or L'incoronazione di Poppea. Maybe try some Purcell — Dido's Lament, from Dido and Aeneas. Some songs — maybe the "Morning Hymn," or the "Evening Hymn." Maybe "Music for a While." You might also check out the Ode for St. Cecilia's Day.

Bach? I tremble even to mention his name, much less to recommend particular pieces. Try a smattering: a Brandenburg concerto, a keyboard suite — maybe the Partita in B flat, or in C minor, or in E minor. How about a cello suite (any)? How about an organ compilation?

Get a hold of some cantatas, too — maybe BWV 170, "Vergnügte Ruh', beliebte Seelenlust," or BWV 159, "Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem," or BWV 82, "Ich habe genug." Also, do yourself this favor: Listen to the B Minor Mass.

Handel? What to say? See what you've done to me, you Frequent Askers? By all means, listen to Messiah, at least excerpts. Listen to excerpts from some opera — Julius Caesar. Try the Royal Fireworks music. Listen to some keyboard music — maybe the Suite No. 5 in E, which ends with "The Harmonious Blacksmith." You know? You could spend a lifetime with Handel (and with many of these others).

Sample some keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti. (He called them esercizi, or exercises.)

 

Haydn? Oh, boy. He lived a long time, and composed a lot. Listen to a symphony, one or two of his 104. Maybe No. 94 in G, the "Surprise." Maybe No. 97 in C. (No nickname — it's just great.) From his piano music? Maybe the Variations in F minor. One of his string quartets? Sure. Almost at random: No. 61 in D minor, "Fifths."

Mozart. You've got to be kidding. Listen to some opera overture — that to The Marriage of Figaro, probably, or to The Magic Flute. Symphonies? Try the last three, or one of them — maybe go to the very last, No. 41, "Jupiter." Piano concertos? Sure, practically any — try K. 466, in D minor. Listen to the Clarinet Concerto, or the Clarinet Quintet, or both. Try a selection of opera arias. And know the Requiem. Or know the C Minor Mass. Or both. Don't do this to me.

 

Take a break for a quick story? Years ago, I took a golf friend to The Marriage of Figaro. (He had never seen an opera, and perhaps not attended a classical concert.) After the overture, he leaned over to me and said, "That's the best thing I've ever heard." I thought to myself: He'll never hear anything to top it, if he listens for decades and decades. In fact, I'm pretty sure I said it.

The question of Beethoven? You're killing me. Killing me. The symphonies, sure. Any? The Fifth? Why not. The Ninth? Sure. Know the choral movement, at least. Listen to a piano sonata or two — visit the "Waldstein," maybe. You have the Violin Concerto. A work of chamber music? Okay. A string quartet? Okay. Op. 135, in F? Fine — more than fine.

Schubert — he lived 31 years, but wrote enough for 100 lifetimes. Dip into the songs — just dip into them, somehow. See what grabs you, or doesn't. Dip into the piano music — some impromptus, a sonata. (Acquaint yourself with the Sonata in B flat, Op. posth., also sometimes written as D. 960.) Try the String Quintet in C, and do a symphony: say, the "Unfinished." It's short. (Unlike the "Great C-major," renowned for its "heavenly length," as Schumann once said.)

All right, Schumann: Some songs, for sure — definitely some songs. He was one of the greatest songwriters ever. Piano music? Any, really — the Symphonic Etudes. Kinderszenen. Symphonies? All four — beginning with No. 1, the "Spring." Chamber music? Sure — the Piano Quintet in E flat.

Mendelssohn? He wrote his great, immortal Octet at 16. What were you doing at that age?

You may want to know what bel canto opera sounds like — try the Sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. And know some Rossini — at least some overtures. At least The Lone Ranger! (William Tell.) Listen to an aria — maybe "Non più mesta" from La cenerentola. And, for goo'ness' sake, see The Barber of Seville — what a joy. And shot through with genius.

Maybe get a little Berlioz under your belt: a concert overture, like The Roman Carnival. "L'Isle inconnue," from Les Nuits d'été, is one of the great songs, by anybody. And you may get a kick out of the Symphonie fantastique, one of the world's most popular pieces.

What to do about Chopin? Dip in — try a nocturne, or a waltz, or a prelude, or an impromptu. Or a few mazurkas. Just try something. Oh, I have an idea: the four ballades. Go for it. (Or just one of them.) (As a rule, listen to short things, when you're starting out.) (I said as a rule.)

Brahms, Brahms. Oh, what a songwriter — absolutely great. What a symphonist — any of the four. Either of the two piano concertos, and the violin concerto, and the double concerto (violin and cello). You will like the Academic Festival Overture — guaranteed. Piano pieces? The ones in Op. 118 will do.

Mendelssohn's Octet is a staggering youthful achievement. So is Bizet's Symphony in C (which he wrote at 17). And you know Carmen, right — the soundtrack to The Bad News Bears?

Treat yourself to some Fauré: his little Pavane, or his (less little) Requiem. And, for sure, songs — sung by Janet Baker or Gérard Souzay (oops, sorry, was not going to do performers — I will not slip again). For piano music, try some impromptus (I keep mentioning those).

Dvorak! Know the Carnival Overture. And a symphony — No. 8 or No. 9 ("From the New World"). The chamber music is unbelievably good, and you may wish to hear the Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81. And how about the "Song to the Moon" from the opera Rusalka?

Wagner: Just listen to a few excerpts, from his operas. Find a collection of orchestral excerpts. Or listen to Act I of Die Walküre. Or find some vocal excerpts that include Wotan's Farewell, the Immolation Scene, the Liebestod . . . And treat yourself to his little Siegfried's Idyll (for chamber orchestra)!

Mahler? Um, some songs — maybe the Rückert Lieder. A symphony? Can't go wrong with any of the nine — but maybe start with No. 1, "Titan," and continue with No. 2, "Resurrection." On a related subject, what to do about Bruckner? Try one movement from one symphony — maybe the slow movement of the Seventh. Or be uplifted by all of the Ninth.

Let's go English with some Elgar — his Enigma Variations, and his Sea Pictures (for mezzo and orchestra), and his Symphony No. 1 in A flat. Go Norwegian with some Grieg: his Holberg Suite, say, and some Lyric Pieces (which are for piano).

Okay, to Russia: Tchaikovsky — something from a symphony: probably his Fifth or Sixth ("Pathétique"). And here is something really cool: the little march — the Andantino marziale — from his Symphony No. 2, "Little Russian." (That refers to Ukraine, not a short Muscovite.) Something from a Tchaikovsky opera — the Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin? And ballet excerpts: from The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake. The Piano Concerto (No. 1)? The Violin Concerto? Course, course.

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, either in an orchestral arrangement or for the piano. (The piano version is rather underrated.) And maybe the death scene from Boris Godunov. Rimsky-Korsakov? In an interview, the conductor Valery Gergiev told me that Scheherazade was pretty much the first piece that "hooked" him. You'll also like Capriccio espagnol, and the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and . . .

 

To the opera house: Sample some Verdi — maybe excerpts from La traviata or Otello. Sample some Puccini — maybe excerpts from Tosca or Madama Butterfly — or the little Rondine, Puccini's "operetta"!

In the song world — specifically, the world of the Lied: Try something by Hugo Wolf — maybe something from Italian Songbook (whose words are in German).

 

From Debussy, you may want to listen to La Mer, or Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Taste some of the songs, too (especially "Beau soir"). For piano? L'Isle joyeuse? Oh, yeah. And absorb the String Quartet. Relatedly, don't neglect your Ravel: the Piano Concerto in G; the little Pavane for a Dead Princess; the Violin Sonata.

Holst's Planets — at least some of them. An amusement — an ingenious amusement — for Halloween? Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre.

Schoenberg was several different composers, which is to say, he wrote in several different styles, or went through several periods. For example, Verklärte Nacht is one thing; and the String Quartet No. 2 (which involves a soprano) is another. And the Berg Violin Concerto? A flat-out masterpiece of music.

Strauss (Richard — not of the waltz family, though Richard could write waltzes with the best of them) was quite versatile. Try a tone poem — say, Don Juan. Avail yourself of some songs — several songs. If you want the Four Last ones, fine. But there are dozens of others. Listen to a highlight or two of Der Rosenkavalier (speaking of waltzes). Watch, if you can, the short opera Salome or ElektraElektra is one of the greatest things in all of music. And maybe just listen to the Final Scene of Salome, which I have long referred to as "the mad Liebestod."

Rachmaninoff? Some piano preludes. His cello sonata. The Vespers (sublime). The Symphony No. 2. Couple of piano concertos — 2 and 3. Wanna get chilly? (We're going to Scandinavia.) Listen to Sibelius, perhaps his Symphony No. 5, and definitely — definitely — his Violin Concerto. For dessert, the little Valse triste.

Stravinsky went through more periods than Schoenberg. Sample him in The Rite of Spring, in The Firebird — and in The Rake's Progress, in the form of the aria that begins "No word from Tom." Bartok? The Concerto for Orchestra, of course. And how about his Piano Concerto No. 3 (his "Mozart" concerto)? One of the rhapsodies for violin and orchestra (or piano). Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.

To Spain: A taste of Iberia (Albéniz); a taste of Goyescas (Granados).

Prokofiev wrote a ballet on Romeo and Juliet — which you will want to sample. (Maybe get a suite.) Also consider the Piano Concerto No. 3 (speaking of those). Shostakovich? Ooh, so much: for a sheer kick, the Festive Overture; a symphony or two — No. 5, No. 10; the Second Piano Concerto (which is not well enough known, and a pure delight); the Cello Concerto No. 1; the String Quartet No. 8; and — perhaps above all — the Violin Concerto No. 1. One of the greatest things in music, frankly.

If you're an American, you'd better know all of Gershwin — and maybe even if you're not: the piano preludes; Rhapsody in Blue; the Concerto in F; An American in Paris; Porgy and Bess (certainly excerpts). Did your mother ever sing to you "Summertime"? Keeping to the home front, Copland, a Brooklyn Jew, gave us the sound of the American West in Rodeo. He gave us the sound of pastoral America in Appalachian Spring. Try a couple of songs, too — maybe "Heart, we will forget him," from the Dickinson Songs.

Find some liturgical music by Arvo Pärt. Maybe look into a little Henri Dutilleux – for example, his recent piece Sur le même accord. Try George Crumb's song-cycle Apparition. Listen to a symphony by Michael Hersch (a friend of mine, I should say). Get some songs of Lee Hoiby (another friend). Minimalism from Steve Reich? Yeah – groove to You Are (Variations).

Some musical people are offended by such products as The Perfect Bach or Chill-Out Classical Music. To heck with them (the people, I mean). Such discs — these compilations — can be a magnificent "gateway." And enjoyable in themselves. And if you like a particular performer — Horowitz, Milstein, Callas, Celibidache — just soak up the entire discography, or great chunks of it.

Anyway, just an answer — for all its inadequacy — to an FAQ.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Recommended Viewing Order for "The Prisoner"

This is the A&E DVD order, switching only the order of "The General" and "A, B, & C":


The Arrival (1)
Free for All (4)
Dance of the Dead (8)
Checkmate (9)
The Chimes of Big Ben (2)
The General (6)
A, B, and C (3)
The Schizoid Man (5)
Many Happy Returns (7)
It's Your Funeral (11)
A Change of Mind (12)
Hammer into Anvil (10)
Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling (13)
Living in Harmony (14)
The Girl Who Was Death (15)
Once Upon a Time (16)
Fall Out (17)