Jen wrote about the love that would not die; in the modern US Schumann would be prosecuted for seducing the 15 year old Clara Wieck as a man in his mid-twenties. I am sure today’s child predators will leave art so compelling that it is performed however suck-i-ly one hudred and fifty years later. Here is an old school webpage circa 1995 about the “premier female musician of the 19th century.”
On December 2 1995 Patrick Kane was likely skipping this man’s Russian History class. Actually it was a Saturday so Patrick Kane was probably working. Goldfrank was one of only a few professors I had at Georgetown offering even a glimpse of Robert Schumann’s classic German education (in his erudition not his instruction), as “19th century Germany” was the zenith of classical education, what ancient Greece could have done had it not been a poor peninsular country of boats and goats. How quickly that dream turned into a nightmare. Anthony Grafton writes a little about this in this week’s New Yorker.
George Gurley is a writer for the New York Observer, the salmon colored weekly that contains the lunacy of Ron Rosenbaum, the most idiosyncratic cultural columnist I have encountered. Every Wednesday the Observer offers little portraits of the world’s greatest city, the city that exists in the mind of elite New Yorkers. Unburdened by crime, pollution, traffic, expenses, this world is there for us hoi polloi to witness little glimmers of when someone like Gurley profiles a citizen of the republic of privilege. Today was his most compelling portrait.
Posted by eww at October 18, 2006 7:39 AM | TrackBack