As someone who didn’t know much about Rossini, this was both entertaining and enriching.
==
New Criterion is in my view the best magazine around, so always love seeing it on HN! Hilton Kramer, the late New York Times Critic, founded it to pursue a Modernist, as opposed to Postmodernist, approach to criticism.
It is unabashedly highbrow. While certainly accessible to a cultured layman, it is not dumbed down, and there is no pretense to accessibility or relevance for the modish chattering classes (e.g. NYT, NYBooks, New Yorker). Thus the articles can be intimidating. This is not snobbery but in an idealistic belief in unifying power of high culture – a universal striving towards perfection, accessible to anyone who makes the effort.
TNC’s contrarianism thus contributes to its small circulation of 6,000. In an age of left-liberalism / “progressivism” and relativism, it is classically liberal and aspires to universal truths. Many will thus despise what they view as a Eurocentric, chauvinistic veneration of “dead white men,” as well as an evil discriminatory belief in “high culture” – that some art is better than the rest.
TNC’s polemic (elsewhere) can be tiresome – depending where you stand, either inflammatory or preaching to the choir. But this sort of article – educating us about someone we should know – is what makes it great. For those of us who missed out on critical theory, “this is Good Art” is a lot more accessible than today’s typical Pomo. And there is a certain satisfaction that Rossini, who perhaps we knew only as a "name to conjure with," as well as his Péchés, are a little less unfamiliar than when we started.
As a professional classical musician who thought he knew a lot about Rossini... This article was fantastic.
Unfortunately it didn't mention that he wasn't just getting fat off of crap food. He was friends with the greatest celebrity chefs in Europe, including Antonin carême ("the father of haute cuisine", inventor of souffle), Casimir Moissons, and Francois Chateaubriand (yes, that's where the steak comes from). Rossini himself published two cookbooks, one exclusively about recipes with truffles, and invented many dishes. The most enduring dish is probably Tournedos Rossini, which he invented with Moissons to top the Chateaubriand steak. It's a filet mignon with foie gras, and about $200 (today's price) worth of black Périgord truffle. The legend is that when Rossini described his custom order to a cook, the man said he couldn't bear to see it made. "So turn your back, then!" Said Rossini - "tournez le dos".
Two favorite anecdotes: a biographer was interviewing people in Rossini's neighborhood, and asked the grocery owner up the street about the composer. The guy had no idea Rossini was a great composer, but "if he knows as much about music as he does about food, he must be a very great composer indeed!"
And Rossini himself used to say that he had only ever cried three times in his life. Once, when his first opera flopped. Once, when he first heard the great violinist Paganini play. And once, when he attended a boat party, and witnessed a beautiful truffle-stuffed turkey fall overboard.
"Francois Chateaubriand" (François-René de Chateaubriand -- he would not have been pleased if one forgot the de) was no chef at all. He was a writer, the most famous French writer of his time (early 19th century).
The Chateaubriand steak was indeed named after him but he didn't create it. One story says it was invented by his personal chef, another story asserts it was created to honor the publication of one of his books.
In Nabokov's novel <i>Pnin</i>, there is the academic Blorenge, who somebody says calls to mind the legendary head of a French Department who thought that Chateaubriand was a famous chef. His interlocutor says, "Be careful! That story is told of Blorenge, and it is true." (From memory, probably slightly wrong.)
The opinion pieces are uncritically conservative. That's not a dealbreaker, mind. Personally, I find both left-wing and right-wing media tedious to read when they display their biases; it's normally when they assert something baldly without considering obvious counter-examples. I read both sides to try and avoid the groupthink.
Our first question on reading that was: is there anything that feminism cannot spoil?
The answer to that query, we are confident, is “No, it ruins everything it touches.”
I don't think feminism has ruined everything it touches; and I don't think feminist critiques of socially and economically embedded power structures are all invalid. There really is something there, and it should be challenged. But criticism of the hierarchy of victimhood is also legitimate (https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017/11/devouring-its-ow... ); it's certainly gone too far.
The way I see it, criticisms are used as a way to power; the criticisms have effectiveness because of the truth of their claims, but people then pick up the criticisms and use them as clubs to bludgeon their way towards the top of the heap. The heap, and its hierarchy, never goes away.
A classical liberal, modernist approach to culture and art in a magazine would be both innovative and refreshing. I find current tastes mechanistic, repetitive, and quite frankly boring after a while. Thanks for your thoughts! I just bought my first magazine subscription in 20 years or more. (And I thought I'd never do that again)
> as we seem to be able to do even as non-subscribers
This one article is available to non-subscribers, for some reason, and indeed some others are too, but many aren't. This one about Dante for example isn't:
I'm not familiar with this publication, so it might just be that I'm not the target audience, but it throws me that there are a bunch of French phrases used in the article without translations being provided. Is this intended to just be for people who can read them, or am I supposed to just keep reading and pretend that I understand what's being said?
This sort of thing is (forgive me) _de rigeur_ in cultural criticism. It's possible to infer the rough meaning of many from context clues. The article also settles down quickly, with subsequent usages of French or Italian being titles of works.
Sometimes it's nice to be exposed to new things, n'est-ce pas?
I think it’s mostly for effect, but you’d be hard-pressed to find people in the classical music sphere who don’t understand some French. Oh also Google Translate exists?
I think its intended to enrich your literate senses in that, you probably could google these phrases and learn something new, while at the same time expanding your own perception of the subject of the article. I mean, there is a time and place for "I don't have time to look that up" and there is also a time and place for "I will take the time to look that up", and the only divider between is whether the source material is coming from a high-brow, intellectually stimulating source .. or not.
==
New Criterion is in my view the best magazine around, so always love seeing it on HN! Hilton Kramer, the late New York Times Critic, founded it to pursue a Modernist, as opposed to Postmodernist, approach to criticism.
It is unabashedly highbrow. While certainly accessible to a cultured layman, it is not dumbed down, and there is no pretense to accessibility or relevance for the modish chattering classes (e.g. NYT, NYBooks, New Yorker). Thus the articles can be intimidating. This is not snobbery but in an idealistic belief in unifying power of high culture – a universal striving towards perfection, accessible to anyone who makes the effort.
TNC’s contrarianism thus contributes to its small circulation of 6,000. In an age of left-liberalism / “progressivism” and relativism, it is classically liberal and aspires to universal truths. Many will thus despise what they view as a Eurocentric, chauvinistic veneration of “dead white men,” as well as an evil discriminatory belief in “high culture” – that some art is better than the rest.
TNC’s polemic (elsewhere) can be tiresome – depending where you stand, either inflammatory or preaching to the choir. But this sort of article – educating us about someone we should know – is what makes it great. For those of us who missed out on critical theory, “this is Good Art” is a lot more accessible than today’s typical Pomo. And there is a certain satisfaction that Rossini, who perhaps we knew only as a "name to conjure with," as well as his Péchés, are a little less unfamiliar than when we started.