This week: Willa Cather, J. S. Bach, Neo-Romantic painters, an Independence Day parade & more.

Peter Tchelitchew, Blue Boy with String, 1927, Oil on canvas. Featured in Theatres of Melancholy: The Neo-Romantics in Paris and Beyond, by Patrick Mauriès.

Nonfiction:

Cather and Opera, by David McKay Powell (LSU Press): The novelist Willa Cather, who spent half her childhood in Nebraska, once quipped that “the old-fashioned farmer’s wife is nearer to the type of the true artist and the prima donna than is the culture enthusiast.” She was referring to a quality of vitality and self-possession in American frontier life, which, though it could verge on melodrama, she still rated as preferable to the supine, sneering posture toward beauty so often practiced in urban centers. (She elsewhere warned audiences not to “confuse reading with culture or art . . . not in this country, at any rate.”) In his new Cather and Opera, David McKay Powell explores what it was about the medium of opera in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a form much more malleable than we tend to realize today—that made the “opera house” an essential element of any self-respecting frontier town and prompted Cather to lavish so much attention on the genre in her novels. —RE

Art:

Theatres of Melancholy: The Neo-Romantics in Paris and Beyond, by Patrick Mauriès (Thames & Hudson): As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus & Cressida, “untune that string,/ And, hark, what discord follows!” Picasso may have done just that with his 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, leading painting down a jaggedly abstract path forever after. But such an easy narrative belies the nature of modern art, which was nothing if not multifarious. Take the so-called Neo-Romantics, a loose group based in Paris during the Twenties who took inspiration from Picasso, but his Blue and Rose periods rather than his increasing abstraction. Patrick Mauriès’ new book throws light on Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchew, Eugene and Leonid Berman, and others who approached figurative painting with twentieth-century eyes. Look out for a review of the book in a forthcoming issue from the painter and critic Andrew L. Shea, formerly of this precinct. —BR

Music:

“Masterworks Series: Complete Bach Cello Suites, Part 1,” featuring Jeffrey Solow (July 2): Since 1977, New Yorkers have had their very own floating classical music venue in the shape of Bargemusic, a barge and stage moored in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood on the East River. Though the summer doldrums are upon us as we await the fall season at most venues, Bargemusic is under full sail with at least three concerts a week through August. Stop by this Saturday for a performance of J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites Nos. 1–3 by Jeffrey Solow, once a student of the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. —IS

Other:

“July 4th Parade,” hosted by the Lower Manhattan Historical Association at Castle Clinton in Battery Park (July 4): From the very start of the American Revolution, Lower Manhattan served as a hotbed of patriotic activities that first supported and then celebrated our nation’s struggle for independence. Despite this history, the neighborhood’s Independence Day festivities were gradually neglected, to the point that Lower Manhattan held no official Fourth of July events from 1976 to 2015. To revitalize the area’s deep patriotic roots, the Lower Manhattan Historical Association held its first annual Independence Day parade in 2015. Now in its seventh year, the parade passes by many of the city’s most notable landmarks, including the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, the New York Stock Exchange, Federal Hall, and the South Street Seaport. The procession begins behind Castle Clinton in Battery Park before traversing Wall Street and lasts from 12 to 2 p.m. —JW

From the archive:

“Treasons of the heart,” by David Pryce-Jones (September 2006). On anti-nationalism and public debate.

Dispatch:

“Des enfants Valois,” by David Platzer. On “Clouet: À la cour des petits Valois,” at the Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, Oise.

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