Reviews and News:
The Vienna and Berlin philharmonics during the Third Reich: “One morning in January 1946, an old man living in southeast London received a letter from the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra inviting him to return as leader, a position he had been kicked out of as a Jew in March 1938, when Austria became part of Hitler’s Germany. Arnold Rosé replied by return of post. The elderly refugee, now eighty-two, had led the Vienna Philharmonic from the first violin’s seat for more than half a century. He had married the sister of its conductor Gustav Mahler; his quartet had given the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, the piece that crashed through the barriers into atonality. No living musician wielded more Viennese tradition than he. But Rosé was not about to return.”
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London’s lost modernist masterpiece: “What a strange affair it now seems, the Mansion House Square brouhaha. How very revealing of the battle for the soul of architecture that reached maximum ferocity in the late 1980s and which still echoes today.”
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Petrarch’s letters: “He longed to make Rome—and Italy—great again, and devoted himself to copying ancient Roman texts and extolling their virtues. Cicero and Seneca provided the wisdom; Julius Caesar, the example.”
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The appeal of for-profit colleges: “Panicked workers, having absorbed America’s ‘educational gospel,’ believe the only way to ascend into the middle class is to engage in ‘credentialing,’ returning again and again to school in an often fruitless quest to find stable work.”
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The short, tragic life of Dinu Lipatti: “Thomas Mann once said that Lipatti’s suffering was matched only by his deep spirituality. I think about this whenever I listen to the pianist’s final recording. On September 16, 1950, he played at a festival in the city of Besançon in eastern France, not far from the border with Switzerland—a performance that has become entrenched in musical lore.”
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Joseph Bottum on books as memory devices.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, John Byron Kuhner profiles Reginald Foster, the Vatican’s recently retired Latinist—an odd duck and a “humanist par excellence”:
“In 1970, the Procurator General of the Discalced Carmelite Order, Finian Monahan, was summoned to the Vatican for a meeting. The subject of the meeting was a promising young American priest by the name of Reginald Foster. The head Latinist of the Vatican’s State Department had tapped Foster to write papal correspondence, which was at the time composed entirely in Latin. Foster wanted the job but was bound by a vow of obedience, and the decision would be made by his superiors. Monahan intended to resist. Foster, thirty years of age, had proven himself to be both supremely intellectually gifted and utterly reliable—a precious thing at a time when the Catholic Church’s religious orders were hemorrhaging priests. Monahan thought Latin was a dead end. He didn’t want to lose one of his best to a Vatican department that would only get less and less important every year. He said Foster would go to the Vatican ‘over my dead body.’
“Foster remembers the meeting vividly. ‘So we arrive there, and we’re ushered into this office, and who do we find there but Ioannes Benelli,’ Foster says, using Benelli’s Latin name, as was customary at the Vatican at that time. He continues: ‘Benelli was Paul VI’s hatchet man—whenever he wanted something to get done, he called on Benelli. He was very energetic—got things done, and no nonsense. Everyone was terrified of him. I was too, and now here we were in the room with him, and he turns to Monahan and says, “This is Foster?” The General said yes. Then Benelli said, “Thank you very much, we won’t be needing you anymore.” And he took me by the hand and brought me down to the State Department and that was the end of that. Monahan didn’t say a word. I was now working for the Pope, and it was like I was more or less out of the Carmelite Order. A lot of the time the Order didn’t even really know what I was doing.’
“Foster would spend the next forty years at the Vatican, part of a small team of scribes who composed the pope’s correspondence, translated his encyclicals, and wrote copy for internal church documents. His somewhat unique position between the Carmelite Order and the Vatican bureaucracy meant that in fact he had a great deal of freedom for a priest. Later in his career his loose tongue—some in the church called it a loose cannon—would attract the notice of journalists looking for interesting copy. ‘Sacred language?’ he said when asked about Latin as the ‘sacred language’ of the church. ‘In the first century every prostitute in Rome spoke it fluently—and much better than most people in the Roman Curia.’ The Minnesota Star Tribune quoted him as saying ‘I like to say mass in the nude,’ which caused a small Curial kerfuffle (Foster claims he was misquoted). He appeared in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous, which featured him agreeing with the proposition that the Vatican itself was at odds with the message of Jesus, that the pope should not be living in a palace, and that hell and ‘that Old Catholic stuff’ was ‘finished’ and ‘gone.’ Foster says the pope received complaints from bishops and cardinals about his appearance. ‘They said “Who is this Latinist of yours and what the hell is he doing?” They would have fired me for sure. But by the time the film came out I was sick and a few months away from retirement anyway. So they just waited it out and let me go quietly.’ He had already been fired from his post at the pontifical Gregorian University for allowing dozens of students to take his classes without paying for them.”
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Photo: Fire and ice
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Poem: Ryan Wilson, “Face It”
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