This week: Roman time-telling, Lord Derby’s Grand Tour, the Neue Galerie, Der Rosenkavalier & more.
The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome, by James Ker (Johns Hopkins University Press): Even schoolchildren can perceive the difference between our experience of time and what the clock tells us: 3 p.m. means one thing on Monday and another on Friday, and the second hand always slows down during grammar lessons. In ancient Rome, quotidian time was in many ways more elastic than today—daily life generally followed seasonal hours, for instance, which dilate and contract over the course of the year—yet could nevertheless serve, as James Ker demonstrates in his fascinating monograph The Ordered Day, as the basis for a complex and highly ordered sense of daily life. Ranging from Caesar to Seneca, Plautus to Pliny the Younger, Ker’s new study goes beyond mere timekeeping to show what Roman activity, culture, and ultimately self-understanding owed to the Roman day. Look for a full review in a future issue of The New Criterion. —RE
A Grand Tour Journal 1820–1822: The Awakening of the Man, by Edward Geoffrey Stanley, edited by Angus Hawkins (Fonthill Media): In 1786, Goethe ventured to Italy on the Grand Tour, yet he was disappointed by what he saw there, blaming the popular vedute of Piranesi for exaggerating the grandeur of Rome. Edward Geoffrey Stanley (1799–1869), the fourteenth Earl of Derby and three-time prime minister of Britain, felt similarly let down, as we see in his journal of his tour from 1820–22, published for the first time by the Derby expert Angus Hawkins for Fonthill Media. Visiting the country in the wake of Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars, Derby was more fascinated by the excavations at Pompeii and the Italian countryside. Filled with witticisms and complaints, the journal offers a window into the mind of a young, supremely confident English aristocrat, who, in one episode, was even jailed for punching an Italian gendarme after Derby disrespectfully refused to remove his top hat. —JW
“Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” at the Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art, New York (March 30 to May 29, 2023): At the age of thirteen, Ronald S. Lauder bought his first work of Austrian modernist art, by Egon Schiele. Just over forty years later, in 2001, the billionaire philanthropist opened the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. It was the dream of Lauder and his close friend, the art dealer Serge Sabarsky (1912–96), to open such a museum to share their passion for Austrian and German art with the public. Opening this Thursday, “Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” will feature highlights from the Neue Galerie’s collection, with works from artists including Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gustav Klimt. The “crown jewel” of the Neue, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), will be on view, bought by Lauder for $135 million in 2006 after years of restitution battles between the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna and the Bloch-Bauer family. This masterpiece alone is enough to warrant a visit, and with other treasures from early twentieth-century Austria and Germany, you won’t want to miss this exhibition. —JW
Der Rosenkavalier, performed by the Metropolitan Opera (March 27 through April 20): Years ago I was surprised in a job interview to be asked my favorite recording of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. I offered Herbert von Karajan’s 1956 version without hesitation, which finds Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s soprano and Christa Ludwig’s mezzo in fine form in the spacious acoustics of London’s now-demolished Kingsway Hall. Karajan’s turn is one of several recordings of the comic opera that divide listeners into respective camps (indeed, my interviewer belonged to another); perhaps that’s because the opera has not one but three leading female roles to analyze, tackled by divas at different stages in their careers: the middle-aged Marschallin, her soldier–paramour Octavian (a trouser role), and Octavian’s eventual love interest, Sophie. Those varying technical demands of age and experience are reflected beautifully in the plot itself, a love triangle touched by the passage of time and the transfer of the mantle, as it were, from old to young. The headline soprano role is often the Marschallin, as it was for Schwarzkopf in 1956 and is now for the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen in this revival of Robert Carsen’s fin-de-siècle staging, under the baton of Simone Young. Erin Morley and Samantha Hankey join as Sophie and Octavian, and the bass Günther Groissböck sings as the crass Baron Ochs. —IS
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #72: Songs, dances, laments. . .” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
From the Archives:
“Faulkner & modernism” by James Tuttleton (September 1997). A review of William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist by Daniel J. Singal.
Dispatch:
“Pictures from a divided kingdom” by David Platzer. On “Faces of the Wars of Religion” at the Cabinet d’arts graphiques du musée Conde, Château de Chantilly, France.