If Flaubert was Madame Bovary, then Handel was Partenope. She is the title character of his 1730 opera, a big hit in its time, but…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations.…
The last time the name Anna Magdalena appeared in fiction it was attached not to a human character but to an assassin’s rifle. The perpetrators…
Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city…
It is not until the last of the eight episodes of Ripley, which dropped in April on Netflix, that Bach’s music makes an appearance. I’d…
The Eurovision Song Contest cannot be neutral. There is just one winner. That winner is chosen by combining the popular cellphone votes of millions of…
In the summer of 1983 Ted Kaczynski was feeling hemmed in even in remote Lincoln, Montana. “There were too many people around my cabin,” he…
O.J. hovered over the end of my bed. His white turf shoes were inches above the Astroturf and he’d never return to earth, even if,…