This week: Joseph Johnson, Tommaso Traetta, the Oratorio Society, La traviata & more.
Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books & Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, by Daisy Hay (Princeton University Press): While Samuel Johnson’s Club was meeting in Soho, another intellectual group was active a half-hour walk away. Joseph Johnson’s dinners were not so formalized as those of the Club—the bookseller of 72 St Paul’s Churchyard was said to greet visitors with, “How d’ye do Sir, I dine at three”—but the guestlist was often as illustrious. In her new book Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books & Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, Daisy Hay lists Henry Fuseli, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Paine, among many others, as guests at Joseph Johnson’s table. Here is a vivid picture of an age teetering between rationalism and Romanticism. —BR
Tommaso Traetta and the Fusion of Italian and French Opera in Parma, by George W. Loomis (Academica Press): Developments in the arts come in fits and starts; only in retrospect can we tell the final destination from the detours. A good example is the history of opera seria in the eighteenth century. For the achievement of paring back the ornamented, aria-heavy form and infusing it with a fresh dose of classicism, we tend to think first of Gluck, followed by Mozart. But in fact such reforms were already underway throughout Europe, in various guises, when Gluck’s neoclassical Orfeo ed Euridice premiered in 1762. In his new book, George W. Loomis locates one such effort in Parma, under French control in 1759–61, where the composer Tommaso Traetta combined Italian opera seria with elements of French opéra-ballet and tragédie lyrique in four new works: Ippolito ed Aricia, I Tindaridi, Enea e Lavinia, and Le feste d’Imeneo. For his part, the innovative Traetta saw himself as not a reformer but the proud custodian of an Italian tradition. —RE
A Nation of Others, performed by the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall (November 15): This Tuesday the Oratorio Society of New York will take the stage at Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of A Nation of Others. The new oratorio by the composer Paul Moravec and the librettist Mark Campbell is set in 1921 Ellis Island and tells the stories of new arrivals from Sicily, Ireland, Spain, and points farther afield. The soloists will include Susanna Phillips, Maeve Höglund, Raehann Bryce-Davis, Martin Bakari, Steven Eddy, and Joseph Beutel, with Kent Tritle conducting. The premiere will be paired with Whitman’s America, a piece featuring six of the poet’s works set to music by Robert Paterson. —JP
La traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi at the Metropolitan Opera (November 16 & 19): Nadine Sierra is the name to know in this season’s production of La traviata at the Met. After a stellar turn in last season’s coloratura showpiece Lucia di Lammermoor, the soprano can be caught for two more dates, this Wednesday and Saturday, as Violetta in Verdi’s tale of thwarted love—a diverse role that runs the gamut from coloratura sprint to dramatic marathon. Joining her is the tenor Stephen Costello as her lover Alfredo and the baritone Luca Salsi in the role of Alfredo’s meddling father, Giorgio, under the baton of Daniele Callegari in a glitzy production by Michael Mayer. —IS
By the Editors:
“‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ Is Just the Beginning.” An adaptation from the December issue of The New Criterion.
James Panero, The Wall Street Journal.
Podcasts:
“James Panero on ‘A library by the book.’” A new podcast from the executive editor of The New Criterion.
From the Archives:
“The other other Frost,” by William Logan (June 1995). On the moral confusion found in Robert Frost.
Dispatch:
“On a roll” by Anthony Alofsin. On “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3,400–2,000 B.C.” at the Morgan Library & Museum.