Following is an excerpt from an email my father wrote to his brothers this morning. I love my dad.
A few days ago Bobbie and I looked at a Live at the Met telecast of Donizetti's opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" starring the fabulous young Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in the title role. The entire cast sang well, and the production was excellent. The music of "Lucia" is of such transcendent beauty that it catches ones heart moment after moment. I found myself thinking, " How could someone write something as glorious as this?" ... What kind of
species are we humans, who can bring forth a Michelangelo, a Charles Dickens, an I.M.Pei ... and also an Adolf Hitler, an Idi Amin? It's an unanswerable question, I suppose.... and, yet, it's something that skips around in my mind from time to time. The beauty of great art, it seems to me, resides in the unity of a work, the sense that all of the elements of any one work, in whatever medium, work together in a unified structure reflective of the unity of structure that, in a way, holds the universe and all that's in it bound together chemically, materially, and even emotionally. Any one element askew makes that particular cohesion fall apart. Somewhere buried in all this is something that I think of as the Truth in art.
species are we humans, who can bring forth a Michelangelo, a Charles Dickens, an I.M.Pei ... and also an Adolf Hitler, an Idi Amin? It's an unanswerable question, I suppose.... and, yet, it's something that skips around in my mind from time to time. The beauty of great art, it seems to me, resides in the unity of a work, the sense that all of the elements of any one work, in whatever medium, work together in a unified structure reflective of the unity of structure that, in a way, holds the universe and all that's in it bound together chemically, materially, and even emotionally. Any one element askew makes that particular cohesion fall apart. Somewhere buried in all this is something that I think of as the Truth in art.
I love it.
It appears your brilliance is at least partially genetic.
Posted by: Matt | April 29, 2009 at 10:51 AM