Billionaire John Paul Getty II has died. “He donated millions to various galleries and institutes but rarely sought publicity for the money he gave away. Among the beneficiaries was the National Gallery in London, which received £50m in 1985 to support its bid to buy national treasures.”
Tag: 04.17.03
Musicologist’s Death – The Schumann Theory?
Did Boston University musicology professor John Daverio try to end his life in the same way as one of his great heroes, Robert Schumann? Daverio’s body surfaced in the Charles Monday night after he had been missing since March 16. Daverio wrote the 1997 biography ‘Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age’, which of course mentions the brilliant, disturbed composer’s attempt to commit suicide at age 44 by throwing himself into the Rhine…”
Updike And The Gardner
John Updike has written a poem about the 1990 theft of paintings from Boston’s Gardner Museum. Updike felt a personal connection to the theft, he said: “It happened on my birthday night, so that I felt slightly at fault in this matter.” (He has not been charged.) “It’s remained in me. My wife and I do go to the museums now and then. I have always especially loved Vermeer. And so all this especially made it meaningful to me.”
Brazilian Passion Play Divides A Community
Fifty years ago a passion play was first staged in a remote Brazilian village. “Now titled ‘The Passion of Christ in New Jerusalem,’ it has become the best-known religious entertainment in Brazil, the largest Roman Catholic country. The play, being performed nightly through Saturday, has grown into a lavish million-dollar spectacle that annually draws as many as 70,000 people to what is described as the biggest open-air theater in the world. It is so successful that it has even inspired a rival, dissident pageant.” But last year the founder died, and attempts to modernize and show-biz it up are ignited big controversy.
Ancient Athens Theatre Had Terrible Views
Scientists have sonstructed computer models of Athens’ Odeon Theatre, built 2,500 years ago in the time of Pericles. “They have reconstructed the world’s first indoor theatre in three-dimensional virtual reality, only to find that 40% of the audience would have had an obstructed view. They say it would have been worse ‘than being stuck behind a 6ft 10in bodybuilder at a modern cinema multiplex’. Athens in the 5th century BC was the home of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and other playwrights of the golden age. The Odeon was next door to the open-air theatre of Dionysus, near the Acropolis.”
Post-Partisan Depression
The demise of the Partisan Review doesn’t mean the magazine will be forgotten. “From its inaugural issue as an independent journal, in 1937, which included Delmore Schwartz’s short story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,’ a poem by Wallace Stevens and contributions by Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson, to its heyday in the 1940’s and 50’s, the journal published an astonishing range of landmark work. For many Americans, Partisan Review was their introduction to Abstract Expressionism, existentialism, New Criticism and the voices of talented young writers like Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag.”