Category: Daily Dispatch

I hope you’ve been enjoying a warm and meaningful holiday season. Christmas isn’t supposed to be about the loot, but it’s always welcome to receive an exciting gift. Yes, it’s the thought that counts, and with the winter winds howling, we can all use socks, sweaters, gloves, scarves, etc. But when a gift hits the bull’s-eye, it can light you up like a string of Christmas bulbs. You know, like the ones at your grandparents’ house that were so magical and emitted uncanny odors and threatened at any moment to burst into flame. Ah, the nostalgia of Christmases past!

With the family so fragmented at this point and friends scattered willy-nilly, there is no centralized “Christmas” for me anymore. The Christmas season really is the Christmas SEASON. So the revelry and gift-gifting will continue into the New Year. Here, up to this point, are some of the winners that have appeared in my mailbox and under the tree. The bar must have been set mighty low for me to rank so highly on the “nice” list this year, since, if I haven’t exactly been naughty, I’m still not sure I’ve been exceptionally deserving of such munificence. So thanks to all you miscreants who dragged down the mean, because Santa was obviously grading on a curve!

I learned about the Copland disc of pre-LP recordings on Mather Pfeiffenberger’s breathtakingly exhaustive Copland marathon earlier this month on WHRB. It went right on my wish list. What must it have been like to have been an artist of Copland’s caliber whose career spanned the piano roll to the digital age?

The John Williams biography, the first in English issued by a reputable publisher (Oxford University Press), will probably be the book I’ll read to kick off the new year (as soon as I finish Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” which I’ve been reading for her 250th anniversary, with interruptions to dip into a Christmas anthology). I read Steven C. Smith’s biographies of Bernard Herrmann and Max Steiner, so naturally his exploration of the Herrmann-Hitchcock relationship will be of interest to me. The Edward Gorey book, published for his centenary was an out-of-nowhere, post-Christmas surprise. It is quite the handsome tome – so beautiful, I am almost afraid to touch it!

Despite my interests in music, the Faust legend, and German literature, I have never read Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus.” Much has been made of the book’s allegorical significance, mirroring the collapse of German culture and morality and the rise of Nazism, but I expect it will be especially absorbing for me in light of the musical dust-up it caused with Arnold Schoenberg (who, to be clear, was vehemently anti-Nazi), as the novel’s antihero embraces the composer’s twelve-tone technique, which Mann clearly found to be harmful to German art and culture. Also, one of the concerts depicted in the book allegedly mirrors a passage in George Antheil’s autobiography, which, according to an interview I once conducted with a representative of the Composers Guild of New Jersey, Mann clearly read. Both Thomas Mann (who lectured at Princeton) and George Antheil (born in Trenton) had local connections.

The Franco Alfano DVD has been on my Amazon wish list since 2007. Alfano is probably best known for having completed Puccini’s “Turandot.” The swagger and doomed romance of “Cyrano de Bergerac” have always very much appealed to me, but I can’t say I’m all that familiar with the opera. Perhaps I’ll watch this one, with Roberto Alagna, and the one I already own (which I’ve yet to watch), with Placido Domingo, back-to-back. I can’t think of a better way to begin a new year than with plumes and panache!

I receive all these gifts with thanks and great humility. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t know how lucky I am. By any standard, it’s been quite a Christmas!