My high-school piano teacher, Denning Barnes, liked to assign me pieces that I had no hope of being able to play. The idea was to experience the music from within, however pitiful the results. One day, he placed in front of me the score of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor—a deceptively thin document of thirty-five pages. By the middle of the second page, I was floundering, but I had already received a constructive shock. Liszt was hailed in his lifetime as the demigod of the piano, the virtuoso idol who occasioned mass fainting spells, and in the hundred and thirty-seven years since his death no one has challenged his preëminence. Yet the Sonata begins with seven bars of technically unchallenging music, which anyone who reads notation can manage. The intellectual challenge is another matter.
You first encounter two clipped G’s on the lower end of the piano, spread across two octaves. Liszt indicated that these notes should sound like muffled thumps on the timpani. You then play a slowly descending Gminor scale, doubled at the octave. The second and seventh degrees are lowered a half step, meaning that the scale assumes the contour of the Phrygian mode, which medieval theorists considered mystical in character. (The Hindustani raga known as Bhairavi, which is associated with tranquil devotion, is similar in shape.) Liszt’s scale, though, has an unmistakably gloomy aspect, its downward trudge recalling the passage to the dungeon in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” We are in an echt-Romantic realm—sombre, religiose, remote, forbidding. “Abandon all hope” could be written above this Phrygian, Stygian staircase. Faust might be brooding in his laboratory; Byron might be dreaming of death and darkness.
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Denne historien er fra September 11, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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The Football Bro - Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
If, on a cool weekend morning in autumn, you happen to be watching “College GameDay,” on ESPN, don’t worry about figuring out which of the broadcasters behind the improbably long desk is Pat McAfee. He’s the one with the roast-pork tan, his hair cut high and tight, likely tieless among his more businesslike colleagues. The rest of the onair crew—Lee Corso, Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and, newly, the former University of Alabama coach Nick Saban—tend to look and dress and talk like participants in an old-school Republican-primary debate. McAfee, though, favors windowpane checks on his jackets and a slip of chest poking out from behind his two or three open buttons. If the others are politicians, he’s the cool-coded megachurch pastor who sometimes acts as their spiritual adviser.
The Dark Time. - On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging. The point of contact between NATO and Russia's nuclear stronghold is the small town of Kirkenes. For years, Russia has treated the area as a laboratory, testing intelligence and influence operations before replicating them across Europe.
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
