Category Archives: Theology

ELIJAH STILL SPEAKS THROUGH MENDELSSOHN’S GLORIOUS MUSIC AT CSO

  “Elijah is the peak of religious music between Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives (1802) and Wagner’s Parsifal (1882).” –Eduard Jacob Heinrich Elijah (1846), the second oratorio by Felix Mendelssohn, pays tribute  to Mendelssohn’s love and championship of the oratorios of Handel and Bach. Elijah is Mendelssohn’s reaffirmation of his Jewish heritage and […]

The Met’s NABUCCO: Verdi’s Beautiful Prayer for those in Exile

On February 23 of last year, Naomi Wolf,  author, feminist and former advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore published a remarkable essay, “Have the Ancient Gods returned?” In it she quotes Jonathan Cahn’s book The Return of The Gods[i]           “Having accurately traced the lineage of pagan worship and pagan forces, Cahn makes the […]

LYRIC OPERA OFFERS BREATHTAKINGLY BEAUTIFUL JENUFA

Confession, repentance, and forgiveness are in woefully short supply in today’s world. So it comes as no small pleasure to find them the bedrocks upon which Leos Janacek built his amazing opera, now wowing audiences at the Lyric Opera The Moravian composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) would be called a “late-bloomer” in today’s slang. He was […]

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LEHMAN. THE LEHMAN TRILOGY AS GREEK TRAGEDY, AMERICAN STYLE

On February 10, 1949, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered at New York’s Morosco Theatre. Seventeen days later the New York Times published an essay by Miller entitled, “Tragedy and The Common Man.” From that time on, high school and college students would discuss the possibility of an American tragedy: Can a classical tragedy […]

STEPPENWOLF’S NO MAN’S LAND: THE HOSPITALITY OF HIRST

As a theater student in college during the 1960s, nothing excited my classmates and me as much as a new play by Harold Pinter. When we found a new Grove Press copy of the latest Pinter play, we would gather on the steps of the theater building, randomly assign roles, and begin a reading. The […]