New York Times “Fashion wasn’t anything I wanted to be involved with,” she says. Yet the visually arresting images in “Wonderland,” her new book and collection, may be her strongest work. Annie Leibovitz would like to make one thing clear upfront: She is not a fashion...
New York Times By the time Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony, he hadn’t presented any major new work in a decade. He was by that point almost completely deaf, and many thought him crazy. The Viennese had become obsessed with Italian opera, and the 53-year-old...
New York Times In the past, we’ve asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque...
Air Mail With his nasty temper and squalid lifestyle, Beethoven was not an easy genius. Writing from the perspective of his lover, an author explores the appeal I swore off difficult men after writing Robert Mapplethorpe’s biography. When my book was published 25...
New York Times Nannette Streicher has been marginalized by history, but she was one of Europe’s finest keyboard manufacturers. The Morgan Library & Museum owns part of an original sketch of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata. In the margin, the British...
American Classical Orchestra In Celebration of Beethoven’s 250th Birthday We asked two friends of ACO—pianist Petra Somlai and author Patricia Morrisroe —to collaborate on a video performance-and-writing project around Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14 in C# minor, better...
To the well-honed investigative skills on display in her acclaimed biography of the Dionysian Robert Mapplethorpe, Patricia Morrisroe now adds the art of intuitive invention. Her first novel gives us the intractable genius of Ludwig (or as his Francophile contemporaries preferred, Louis) van Beethoven through the eyes of Countess Julie (or, as he preferred, Giulietta) Guicciardi, the dedicatee of his Piano Sonata No. 14, popularly as the “Moonlight” Sonata. The supporting cast listed at the outs… Read more
