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In 2023, I emailed 215 art-related items to supporters of my Sunday Recommendations list. This week: my favorites in decorative arts, music (including opera and ballet), movies, and TV. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/2K8mLCtgtdg .

Decorative Arts

Tied for first

• Sullivan, Louis. Sconce from Henry B. Babson House, Riverside, Illinois (house demolished 1960). (ca. 1907). Sullivan was on my mind because he designed one of the buildings for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which I was researching for the Resurrecting Romanticism conference. We know that Babson attended the Exposition, because it inspired in him a yearning to own purebred Arabian horses, which by the 1930s he did. (“Babson Egyptian horses” are still a recognized bloodline in the thoroughbred world.) In the context of this week’s recommendations, the striking point about this sconce is its quality. It’s one of many cast by Winslow Brothers Ornamental Iron Company for the home of a wealthy (but not fabulously wealthy) man – but the workmanship is better than that on Abbot Suger’s chalice, which was unique. The sconce is on display at the Museum of American Arts & Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida, alongside many other items by Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and contemporaries. One of these days I’ll do a blog post on the MAACM.

• Rohlfs, Charles. Revolving music stand and holder (1901). In the 19th century, before the advent of the phonograph, most middle-class Americans owned musical instruments. A few fortunate ones also had this elaborate revolving stand with its assortment of retractable shelving and arms to hold sheet-music. As a young man, Rohlfs (1853-1936) earned several patents for designs of cast-iron stoves. After marrying Anna Katherine Green (one of the first American writers of detective fiction) in 1884, he began producing furniture as a hobby. Beginning in 1897, Rohlfs sold furniture commercially, but in very small quantities. His unique style shows the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Glasgow School, Art Nouveau, Gothic Revival, East Asian art … and maybe a bit of cast-iron stove-making. This piece is on display in the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida. It might be the same one sold at auction in 2014, for $56,000.

Tied for second (3 items):

• Ashbee, Robert. Manxman upright piano (model 8), (1902). By the late 1800s, upright pianos were very popular in middle- and upper-class homes. Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865-1945), a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement, designed a new type of case: one with doors to enclose the keyboard, music stand, and light-holders. When opened, there was much room for elegant decoration. Here, the plain oak case opens to show enameled flowers on the sides and top. The style of piano case was dubbed “Manxman” because Scott lived for some time on the Isle of Man. More on Manxman pianos here. This one is on display at the Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, St. Petersburg, FL.

• Myōchin Munekazu. Dragon jizai (ca. 1850-1900). Jizai are articulated figures made of iron. The earliest one dates to 1713 and was created by the Myōchin family, who were famed for creating armor for samurai. When there were fewer wars in Japan, the samurai became bureaucrats and courtiers, and the Myōchin family became artists of jizai figures, including dragons, insects, and sea creatures. This iron sculpture is just over 26 inches (67 cm). The body can be made to wriggle like a snake, and the tongue, jaws, and claws also move. After the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa – Japan’s first treaty with a western nation – Japanese artworks such as this one gradually became more sought after in Europe and America. More on this Christie’s page. I saw this one in the Worcester Museum of Art.
• Parure with cut steel (ca. 1810). This matching 17-piece jewelry set (at the Metropolitan Museum) includes a tiara, a necklace, two pairs of bracelets, a lorgnette, and earrings. The pieces are decorated with multifaceted and polished steel studs that reflect the light, mimicking the appearance of diamonds. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cut steel was a fashionable and rather expensive substitute for precious metals and gemstones: for example, Napoleon presented a cut-steel parure to his second wife, Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria. It wasn’t until the invention of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes made the price of steel drop that it became too commonplace for jewelry.

And on to music.

Ballet

• Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich. Waltz of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker (1892). The loveliest of snowflakes. Performed by the Royal Ballet in 2012, with Meaghan Grace Hinkis as Clara, Ricardo Cervera as the Nutcracker and Gary Avis as Drosselmeyer.

Opera

Winner

• Donizetti, Gaetano. “Chi me frena in tal momento?” from Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). There are 48 sextets in the opera repertoire. This one is by far the most famous: the interplay of words and music is amazing. PDF of the situation and the Italian / English lyrics here.

Runners-up

• Rossini, Gioachino. L’Italiana in Algeri / The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813). L’Italiana has a light-hearted and silly story: the Bey of Algiers lusts after an Italian girl who was captured by his pirates; she loves an Italian who is a slave of the Bey. It also has light-hearted and silly music, which made it one of my favorite things to listen to toward the end of the day in the office, when my energy level was flagging. When researching Timeline 1700-1900 (still in the works), I learned that L’Italiana was 21-year-old Rossini’s eleventh opera. He claimed to have composed it in 18 days. But to be included in the Timeline, a work has to be important of itself, and preferably have some interconnections with other important works. Of Rossini’s early operas, this one made the cut for two reasons. First, it illustrates the unexpected effect of Napoleon’s brief expedition to Egypt and the Near East in 1798-1799: artists in many genres suddenly began to create works with exotic settings. Second: here and in his later operas, Rossini is attempting no less than to reform opera. Opera seria, which had dominated the genre since the late 1600s, focused on virtuoso displays by soloists. It used conventional plots (often mythological or from distant history) that were meant not only to entertain but to instruct. Like dramas of the same period, operas were structured in accordance with the “classical unities”: unity of action (one main action), unity of time (within 24 hours), unity of place (a single location). Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Haydn all wrote opera seria. Rossini broke the mold by adopting unconventional stories that are light-hearted and don’t abide by the unities. His operas also give more scope to the chorus and the orchestra, rather than focusing on soloists. L’Italiana is sometimes ranked as an early work of the Romantic style in opera.
• Romberg, Sigmund (music); Oscar Hammerstein II, Frank Mandel, and Laurence Schwab (lyrics). New Moon (1928). This was the last operetta to be a success on Broadway: World War 1, the Jazz Age, and then the Great Depression made the genre seem very old-fashioned. If you already love operetta, and happen to love Fledermaus, then you should watch this video because it has that mood. For the rest of you: I know many people (many, many, many people!) are resistant to commit to watching an opera, so let me give you some reasons to watch this 2.5 hour YouTube video, a New York City Opera production of 1989 that includes comments by Beverly Sills.
  • 1) It’s cheerful and uplifting.
  • 2) It’s in English.
  • 3) Lyrical melodies. Even if you’ve never heard any of them before, they’ll stick in your head.
  • 4) Top-notch singers. If you’re used to pop singers, be prepared to be stunned at the range, the dynamics (loud to soft), and the emotion of these performers.
  • 5) Top-class performers. They not only sing, they act and dance. (Not always true in more serious operas.)
  • 6) Fun choreography.
  • 7) “Lover, Come Back to Me” – performed as a slow, lyrical piece in the YouTube video at 1:36:00 (solo) and at 1:59:00 (trio). The melody was influenced by a Tchaikovsky piece (The Seasons, Op. 37a, June, Barcarolle). Today “Lover” is often performed as jazz: see these versions by Billy Holiday, Patti Page, and a ridiculously young Barbra Streisand.
  • 8) “Stout-Hearted Men,” a rousing call to fight for your values. On YouTube at about 55:00. The version by Percy Faith & Earl Wrightson has an intro not in the NYC Opera version.

Music – orchestral & piano

Winners (3 items)

• Haydn, Joseph. Symphony No. 45 in F♯ minor (“Farewell”) (1772). The story behind the symphony: Nikolaus I, Prince Esterhazy, was known as “the Magnificent” for his palaces, his clothing (he owned a jacket studded with diamonds), and his grand musical productions. Some said he had a larger income than the Austrian emperor. By the early 1770s, Nikolaus was spending as much as 10 months of the year at Eszterháza, his huge palace in rural Hungary. An extremely musical man, he played the cello, the viola da gamba, and the baryton, and kept some 15-20 musicians on his palace payroll. Haydn, the leader of those musicians, wrote 126 trios incorporating a baryton for Nikolaus, as well as numerous symphonies and hundreds of other works. But there was a problem: the musicians were missing their families, who stayed in Eisenstadt, a day’s journey away. Then as now, long-term, well-paying gigs for musicians were rare, so tact was required in making a complaint. Haydn (according to a story he told his biographer) conveyed the musicians’ desire in the “Farewell” Symphony. While performing the adagio of the final movement, the musicians one by one snuffed out the candles on their music stands and left the stage. By the end of the movement, only Haydn and the concertmaster were still performing. Nikolaus’s court returned to Eisenstadt the following day. This YouTube video is of the Sinfonia Rotterdam conducted by Conrad van Alphen; the final movement (Presto Adagio) begins at 18:30. Do not hit “play” and walk away from the screen!
• Joplin, Scott. “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899). One of my favorite Joplin rags to play on the piano. It was Joplin’s second published work and first big hit. Despite its technical difficulty, it’s considered the quintessential rag and served as the model for rags by other composers. Joplin composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, but their sales never surpassed those of “Maple Leaf Rag”, which brought him a steady income for the rest of his life.
• Schumann, Robert. Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op. 44 (1842). I’d somehow missed discovering Schumann … until the chamber music concert at the Resurrecting Romanticism conference. I love this Piano Quintet, the first composition to combine the well-established string quartet (two violins, viola & cello) with the piano, which had only recently become powerful enough to hold its own in such a setting. The work is dedicated to Schumann’s wife Clara, who was to be the pianist for the first private performance. When she fell ill, Felix Mendelssohn stepped in, sight-reading the part. Clara performed it a few months later in Leipzig, at the work’s first public performance. Quoting from Stephen Siek’s program notes at the Resurrecting Romanticism conference: “While the Piano Quintet certainly adheres to Classical forms, most listeners may be far more captivated by the endless stream of lyrical melodies that flow continuously from its four movements. Throughout the entire work, Schumann’s imagination seems inexhaustible, and he even allows each of the five instruments to share the soloist’s spotlight, while his ensemble writing is often so rich that it sounds virtually orchestral. The second movement, which has at times been described as a funeral march, features a haunting violin solo enriched by the composer’s effortless resolution of stark, at times even grating, dissonances. The Scherzo which follows is a wild, frenetic romp, with the piano and strings often erupting into explosive virtuosity, while the Finale is a masterpiece, as the haunting theme introduced in the piano is passed among the instruments in seemingly endless modifications. The work concludes with a massive double fugue which revisits the principal melody from the first movement, but this long-revered Baroque device in no way sounds pedantic. Instead, it forms a powerful climax to one of the grandest chamber works from the Romantic period.” The current gold-standard performance is by the Emerson String Quartet: the first 4 pieces on this playlist.

Runners up (2 items)

• Beethoven, Ludwig van. Trio in B flat Major for Clarinet, Violoncello and Piano, op. 11 (“Gassenhauer-Trio”) (1797). One of Beethoven’s charming early chamber music pieces, still in a style reminiscent of Mozart. The third movement consists of 9 variations on “Pria ch’io impegno” from Joseph Weigl’s opera L’amor marinaro ossia Il corsaro, which premiered in October 1797. The catchy tune was very popular in Vienna, becoming a “Gassenhauer” – a song whistled in the streets. Hence this piece has been nicknamed the “Gassenhauer Trio”. (In this video from the Solsberg Festival the third movement begins at 13:36.) It strikes me as very unusual for Beethoven to incorporate a popular song into one of his works: at some point I’ll have to find out if he did that more than once.
• Paganini, Niccolò. “Moses Variations, or Variations on One String” (Variazioni di Bravura) (1818). Paganini (1782-1840) was one of the earliest virtuoso performers on the violin. This is one of his most impressive pieces, intentionally composed to be virtually unplayable by his contemporaries. The entire work is played on a single string! Paganini used as melody the aria “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” from Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt. This piece was brought to my attention by Thomas Shoebotham in his talk “Paganini and the Virtuoso Tradition,” presented at the Resurrecting Romanticism conference in October 2023.

Movies

Tied for first

• Gunless (2010). Recently I’ve been watching a lot of “old” movies, by which I mean movies 10+ years old that don’t wallop me over the head with the latest in political messages. This one was pure pleasure: an American gunslinger in extraordinarily polite Canadian town. The townsfolk and the gunslinger get together to discuss Aristotle (yes, Aristotle!), which provides the lead character’s motivation at a crucial point. Don’t miss the out-takes during the closing credits.
• 3 Idiots (2009). Over the last decade or two I’ve watched a fair number of South Korean miniseries and a few Bollywood movies. The cultures are very different from the one I live in, but once in a while (probably about the same percentage of times as with American movies) some of the values significant to the characters are also significant to me. 3 Idiots involves several male students at an engineering college in India. Their families and the culture that the live in are oh, so different from mine, but their struggles to identify and pursue values … those are very familiar, and something I have seen all too seldom in American movies of the last few years. The three Bollywood burst-into-song sequences made me laugh aloud, and the final scene (after several plot twists) was not what I expected, but very satisfying. I tell you all this because the movie runs 2 hours, 50 minutes – but it’s worth it. Available on Netflix and Amazon. HT Clytze Sun in The Objective Standard.

TV

Tied for first

• Medici: Masters of Florence and The Magnificent (2016-2019). Three seasons, 8 episodes each. Love the costumes, the characters, the intrigue, and of course the art. Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo and their works all make appearances. It’s rare for a historical series to be reasonably accurate, yet have the suspense of a well-plotted novel: this one’s quite good in that respect. It inspired me to read Christopher Hibbert’s fascinating The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall.
• Love Between Fairy and Devil (2022). A 36-episode miniseries in Chinese (with subtitles) that ranges from silly to dramatic. I couldn’t wait to see how the opposites-attract romance would play out, and it’s a refreshing change to see characters in a modern show who hold strong values, even if I don’t share all of them … The costumes, sets, and special effects are beautiful. The Netflix trailer has no subtitles, but you should be able to tell after watching it whether this is your sort of show. Don’t read the Wikipedia article: it gives far too much away.

Runner up

• Memories of the Alhambra (2022). Netflix Korean mini-series in 16 binge-worthy episodes, with a VR-game-going-weird angle plus complicated relationships (family, business, romance). The resolution is satisfying if you extrapolate … When you finish, you can ask me what the hell I mean by that, if it’s not obvious.

More

• A quick summary of what I did in 2023: At the Resurrecting Romanticism conference in Spartanburg, SC, in October 2023, I gave a talk on Romanticism and painting (1.25 hrs.) and another on painting at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago (.5 hours). I also participated in a panel discussion, “Nurturing the New Romantics”. These will eventually be available as videos. When they are, links will be on the Books & Essays page.
• Subscriptions from supporters are also helping me work on two books that will appear in 2024: Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love (companion volume on sculpture here), and Timeline 1700-1900 (a prequel to Timeline 1900-2021).
• For my writings in 2022 and earlier, see the Books and Essays page. All my books are available in Kindle and/or print format via my Amazon author page, and via Ingram at major booksellers such as Barnes and Noble. And check out dozens of videos on my YouTube channel.
• For favorites recommendations from earlier years, see the Favorite Recommendations and Photos link.
• Want wonderful art such as these recommendations delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my Sunday Recommendations list: details here.