Bach is back, bigger than ever and just in time for the holiday buying season in this 275th year since his death. The bicenterquasquigenary Bach buzz reached a frenzied fortissimo after last week’s officially sanctioned—not…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
A conductor waves his arms in front of other musicians. The audience usually sees the maestro (less often maestra, still) from the back. Hidden from the concertgoers during the performance, the conductor’s face can convey…
Nature makes music—the wind, the waves, the rain, the rustle of leaves, the creak and complaint of trees. The human impulse to transform these sounds into something that might be called Automatic Art spawned the…
The 19th century developed industrial-aesthetic machinery to keep women who harbored public musical aspirations in their place—off the concert stage and in the home. One of the most potent of these tools was the printed…
The Christianization of Scandinavia took place over a few hundred years and was completed by the early 12th century thanks to Sigurd the Crusader, the Norwegian king who subjugated the intransigent pagans of southern Sweden…
The Berlin Wall was breached on the night of November 9th, 1989. The German Democratic Republic was done. East Berliners poured through the suddenly opened border, stood on top of the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” (Antifaschistischer…
Founded in 1947, the third and youngest of Berlin’s great opera houses is the Komische Oper—the comic opera. In the rubble of war, it took up residence in the late-nineteenth-century Metropol-Theater, beloved for its racy…
Opera thrives on competition as much as collaboration—on who can sing higher, louder, longer, more passionately; what production can seduce or scandalize most abundantly; which company can hoard the most prestige while staving off bankruptcy…