Theodora was Handel’s penultimate oratorio and his least successful. The London premiere came in March of 1750, but the work closed after just three performances. English language sung dramas—oratorios—had enriched Handel in the period from…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Edward Winslow’s Good Newes from New-England published in 1624 in London begins its account in November of 1621. There is no word of the first Thanksgiving. As David Silverman shows in his This Land Is…
I’ve been teaching a music journalism class here at Cornell this semester. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings over the past eleven weeks I’ve joined eight students for an hour-and-a-quarter in a windowless rehearsal room in…
Bach would have been an excellent poll worker, even if in his professional life as a musical functionary he bristled under proto-democratic institutions and civic authority, preferring instead to work for enlightened despots. The musicologist…
Pandemic Halloween has been gifted a soundtrack: Republican rocker Ted Nugent’s ghoulish and deafening version of the Star-Spangled Banner. There is nothing—not Carl Maria von Weber’s Wolf Glen, not Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata in D…
Thursday night’s presidential debate was branded by many a pundit a historic first. The rogue Interrupter-in-Chief would be held in check by the latest technological breakthrough from the Pentagon, one developed after years of research…
The Democratic Process is in its final season. Thursday night’s line-up attempted a novel format in which the presidential candidates duked it out separately in parallel prime-time slots. In the end it all comes down…