Saturday Links
Rachmaninoff’s enduring appeal, a Gustav Klimt portrait reappears, Cervantes’s Catholicism, the Good Kipling, in praise of George Gissing, and more.
Good morning! A Gustav Klimt portrait that was believed to be lost for nearly 100 years has been listed for sale in Vienna: “Portrait of Fraulein Lieser once belonged to a Jewish family in Austria and was last seen in public in 1925. Its fate after that is unclear but the family of the current owners have had the painting since the 1960s.”
Rachmaninoff lived the second half of his life in exile and was dismissed as passé by critics, a mere “confectioner of the C-sharp minor Prelude and Second Concerto,” as Joseph Horowitz writes in The American Scholar in a review of Fiona Maddocks’s Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile. But his music has endured: “A curt entry in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 11 years after his death, marked an absurd nadir: ‘His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. The enormous popular success some few of [his] works had in his lifetime is not likely to last and musicians never regarded it with much favour.’ With the waning of modernism, Rachmaninoff’s stock began to rise; for the first time, he became an object of serious scholarly inquiry. Today, he ranks with Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Serge Prokofiev as one of four great Russian composers populating the interwar period and after.”
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