A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind, by Stephen Budiansky (W. W. Norton): “No army in history wrote so many letters or kept as many diaries as the soldiers who fought the Civil War,” as Stephen Budiansky notes in the prologue to his new history of Antietam, A Day in September. The Civil War was also personal in a way wars had not been before: this was a “war of peoples,” with the rank and file on both sides fighting for deeply held convictions, rather than a “war of kings,” to borrow Winston Churchill’s formulation. In nine focused chapters, each tracking a different figure in the war effort, Budiansky uncovers the human costs as well as the triumphs of that bloody day. —RE
“Emily Nelligan: Early Drawings” at Alexandre Gallery, New York (September 5–October 26): Emily Nelligan’s charcoal drawings look as though they have been recorded through the pinhole camera of her mind. Her haunting landscapes of Great Cranberry Island, Maine, which she and her artist-husband Marvin Bileck began visiting after their graduation from the Cooper Union in the 1940s, convey an inward vision. Through her mental emulsion, and a deft application of her eraser, Nelligan (1924–2018) uncovered remarkable luminosity in her dusky medium. A selection of Nelligan’s early charcoals and ink drawings on paper, all from before 1975 and never before shown together, goes on view this week at New York’s Alexandre Gallery. —JP
Jeffrey Swann performs Beethoven at Bargemusic, Brooklyn (September 8): This summer, the pianist Jeffrey Swann boards the floating Bargemusic stage in Brooklyn to play all thirty-two of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Not in one sitting, of course—this Saturday, he will perform the latest installment, a program titled “Plumbing the depths”: Sonata No. 7 in D major; Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor (“Moonlight”); and Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, (“Hammerklavier”), with his own commentary. Of the latter two sonatas, much ink has been spilled, but the untitled No. 7 is a hidden gem, an early sonata that foreshadows Beethoven’s later innovations. The pianist András Schiff fingered its slow movement as the birth of a new kind of expression in Western music, one that took the Mozartean blueprint and endowed it with a novel sense of emotional gravity. —IS
“Newport Cottages 1835–1890: The Summer Villas Pre-Vanderbilt Era,” with Michael C. Kathrens, at the General Society Library (September 12): The popular view of Newport as the home of gaudy Gilded Age architectural pastiche is, if true, not complete. As Michael C. Kathrens demonstrated in his recent book, Newport Cottages 1835–1890: The Summer Villas Before the Vanderbilt Era, an earlier era of Newport building saw talented American architects building fairly grand “cottages” in more native styles. Kathrens will next week deliver a lecture on that more obscure time in Newport’s architectural history at the General Society Library. —BR
Dispatch:
“Virtual Parsifal,” by Paul du Quenoy. On Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival.
By the Editors:
“The Committee’s Candidate: Harris’s Inconsistent Campaign”
Roger Kimball, American Greatness
From the Archive:
“The apple in our eye,” by John Derbyshire (May 2003). On Newton: The Making of Genius by Patricia Fara.
