Toward "The Creation, H. XXI:2"

“In 1985 the German literati made light of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit's editor Fritz J. Raddatz, who had mentioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the Frankfurt train station in the same …

The orchestral introduction 'Representation of Chaos,' which Haydn arranged in only 59 bars, was too much for many of its early audiences. There was much speculation about how Haydn would give shape to the shapeless—composer Siegfried Ochs described it as a "total muddle" as late as 1926, while Georg Feder called it a "deformed sonata movement" with "misguided modulation." Perhaps most fascinating about this superbly refined, harmonious work—the traces of which can still be heard in Richard Wagner's Tristan…”

Source: Sublime, Witty, Enlightened: Thoughts on Haydn's Creation by Jürgen Hartmann (Translation by Christina Connelly)

© Jürgen Hartmann 2009. Copyright controlled.

Via the Website of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.

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Moving Perspectives: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba/Fiona Tan
March 14–July 5, 2009
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Washington, D.C.

The lush landscape of Laos is the setting for a series of performances by art students from Luang Prabang in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2007), a single-channel video by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. The work culminates in a dramatic moment that captures the younger generation's struggle to reconcile a rich cultural and religious heritage with the rapid currents of global economic and social change.

Header image credits: (c) Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba "Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II" (video) (2003) and "The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree" (video) (2007). Both images copyright controlled. All rights reserved. Via Artnet.com and Gallery Lehmann Maupin, New York City.

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More than 9,000 images from the Collections of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, of Washington, D.C., are now available on-line.