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 of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
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 been expecting it, and not just any piece from among…
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 viewers with the tallies of the five-member juries in each…
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 later wrote, “So I decided I needed some peace.” In…
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, paradoxically, he was sure to run for a touchdown, football…
The first page of Henry Fothergill Chorley’s three-volume set of Music and Manners in France and Germany: A Series of Travelling Sketches of Art and Society published in London in 1841 finds the famed critic…
In those rare moments when the real pierces the illusions of Oscar Night, I grip the arm of my sofa, waiting for hidden burner rockets beneath the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard finally to ignite…
Just three years shy of his 100th birthday, Oscar hoisted himself off his slab to stand at attention one more time this Sunday evening at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. He’ll try his best to…
Even frivolous fictional characters have found a convenient whipping boy in the youngest son of J. S. Bach. The late, lamented Dr. Peter Schickele’s send-up biography of P.D.Q. Bach quips that the talentless rogue had…