This pure reflection of our crime

In the post-traumatic stress

disorder of living conscious-

ly in America, we continually

turn to each other and ask,

as if Vito Corleone in a gang-

land summit hosted by Barzini,

how did things get so far? 

In one capacity, at least, I

trust we are all alike. We do

not favour the annihilation,

ever - or as the President of

the United States put it this

afternoon, prematurely - of a

human's innocence.

As must be apparent, I openly

and energetically differ with

St Paul, on the honourable con-

dition of thinking as a child.

I resist demands to put away,

childish things, if their sub-

stitution brings a consensus 

of fabrication, delusion, and

ferocious self-interest. But

I proffer no boast in this im-

maturity, no rant of risible

puerility. I merely cite that

state of nature into which my

Lord deposited me by accident,

in longitudes of endless fal-

sification of His favour. To

think of the one picture here

today, without consciousness

of the other, is untenably

ridiculous. And who will now

give himself sleep, with this

pure reflection of our crime?

But I'm a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him, .. or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning, then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room. And that, I do not forgive.

Francis Ford Coppola, director
Mario Puzo and
  Francis Ford Coppola, script
The Godfather
Paramount, 1972©

Michelle McLoughlin, Reuters©

Senate of the United States

Suppose it were Friday lxvii: And it were our river

    Time is a game played

  beautifully by children

Kozák Lajos

Boys at the Margaret Bridge

1930

André Kertész

Shadows

1931

Heraclitus

6th Century BC

Fragments

Brooks Haxton,

  translation

op. cit.

Sunrise at SPIA: speaking truth to power

   I cannot doubt, the heart of every 

   Princetonian fills with pride in 

   Duncan Hosie, and embraces his mat-

   riculation with confidence, hope, 

   and gratitude. Justice Scalia has 

   had his Joseph Welch moment, and 

   we can be glad to trace his down-

   fall to a son of Nassau Hall.

   They are in what we used to call,

   Spia, which rhymes with Spear in

   an arch accent: the school of pub-

   lic and international affairs, hon-

   oring Woodrow Wilson and designed

   by the architect of the World Trade

   Center, Minoru Yamasaki.

   The Manichaean heretic of sadistic

   jurisprudence has come to twit his

   last audience of sheep.

A time to take notice

Do you remember, Hercule?

Our sweet Gretchen, Auguste.

    Who knew, a Choirmaster

    at Winchester Cathedral

    would launch a Counter-

    Reformation on ice this

    Advent -

  

  and that ACT UP's logo-sailors

  would inspire research to heal

  leukemia in time, just in time

  for the parade?

Sir Henry Raeburn

The Reverend Robert Walker
  Skating on Duddingston Loch
ca 1798
National Gallery of Scotland

Emma Whitehead
At home 

Ivan Terestchenko
Parade in Manhattan

Emanuel Picoli

Charles Rosen

I have given no book to more people, literally or by sociable recommendation, than The Classical Style, written by Charles Rosen and published by Viking Press in 1971. I cannot, and would not dream of venturing to forget my astonishment, not yet a year from the college where we both had studied, that the music I had so come to love could be unveiled so endlessly by a single mind. This afternoon I discovered at the website of The New York Times that he had died in New York; and I find this evening that he has been remembered by National Public Radio, as he has been by the newspaper, as a "polymath" and musician of rare capacity.

The foregoing three sentences are alike in their misdirection of the superlative. The character in which Mr Rosen not merely excelled but convinced, lay in his articulation of the precedence of structure in the coherency and power of all art and of its indispensability to the giving of pleasure. With his distinctive book on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, he extracted from music of accepted stature the Rosetta stone of classicism, of why it spontaneously works, and laid before the common reader, with a transparency and fire to make one gasp, principles of criticism of such diverse portability that they afford the same insight into the longevity of wine, the viability of states, the contentment of people in their dwelling, and in the shirt on their back. 

It was no more than typical of him, engaged in a month-long debate with Alfred Brendel in The New York Review some 16 years ago, on the reading of a manuscript marking in a Beethoven sonata, to invoke a musical commoner in his argument against applying "too many dynamic accents" in a 24-bar phrase of no dynamic indications at all, as tending to "forfeit the simplicity that Proust's grandmother justly claimed was the way to play a Beethoven sonata, as well as the way to receive visitors and prepare a steak with potatoes." Mr Rosen belonged to a world of taste that was modest but could be audacious, learned but could be humble, and was sublimely indivisible. A gentleman of the mind, as fine and indefatigable a companion as it may wish, and so generous as to stay, for which one gives indebted thanks.

Charles Rosen
The Classical Style
  Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
The Norton Library edition,
  with a new preface by the author,
  1972©

The expanded Norton Library
  edition, 1997©


Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Sonata, Op. 110
  1. Moderato Cantabile,
  Molto Espressivo
1821
Charles Rosen, piano
American Academy of Arts
  and Letters, 1996
Norton, 1997©