Reviews for La musica en las catedrales espanolas del Siglo de Oro/ The Music of the Spanish Cathedrals ...

The average rating for La musica en las catedrales espanolas del Siglo de Oro/ The Music of the Spanish Cathedrals ... based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-23 00:00:00 Robert Cortez 5 -- CASANOVA'S CHINESE RESTAURANT This fifth period is a bit different. So far, all the volumes were consecutive in time, sometimes with a few years gap between one and the next. While at the beginning of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant we jump back in time a few years and the Narrator introduces a different set of dancers. After the initial flashback however, the story continues and we find ourselves in the second half of 1936, when the Civil War in Spain has begun (and where I encounter the best sentence I have read so far on that war I think both sides are odious), and the time of the abdication of Edward VIII. The new group of dancers in the fifth volume are, appropriately, a coterie of musicians. If painters and painting make a striking visual presence in the Dance from the beginning, and writers have been running with the narrative all along--for the Narrator is after all a writer-- in this volume the society he observes is of the musicians: the most abstract of all artists. We are made to feel that musicians stand apart .. … thinking of the curious special humour of musicians, and also of the manner in which they write; ideas, words and phrases gushing out like water from a fountain, so unlike the stiff formality of painters’ prose. And the attraction of music is precisely its abstraction, the lack of identifiable narrative, which leads Powell’s dialoguing characters to criticise the new painting ('the literary content of some Picassos makes The Long Engagement or A Hopeless Dawn seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction) and the new literature (You might as well argue that Ulysses has more ‘story’ than Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Rosary) when it claims, unsuccessfully, to shun narratives - precisely what music has always done. So, a whole symphony of composers is evoked, and one wants to put on the CDs as Liszt, Brahms, Shostakovich (with Communism as its accompaniment), Sibelius and Les Six, Debussy (offering the entry into the Spain of the war through his Iberia), resound through the novel. Another striking element is that for the first time the reader is made aware that the Narrator may be not entirely reliable. In one scene his wife corrects his account, when he says she was present at a particular dinner: ‘No, I wasn’t’. This particular dinner party had been treated in a previous volume and the wife is right. The reader can now doubt other accounts, and can also infer something about the personality or sentiments of this constantly elusive narrator. After all, he does sometimes take his wife for granted. The Dance is taking now a new ‘gravitas’ – not just because it contains a tragic element – but because of its soberer tone. Deaths have been encountered before but now the tragic is presented in the context of the complexities that humans have to face through our destinies. One of the effects of Time passing.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-30 00:00:00 Thomas Savignano The Spanish Civil War and the Abdication Crisis, music and fine arts, bohemians and socialites: all is interwoven into a complicated and admirable ornament. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is as exotic and spicy as Chinese cuisine. In Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant Anthony Powell occupies himself by comparing the ways and styles of married life of the different personages. …in the end you discover that all this ill humour is nothing to do with yourself at all. In fact your wife is hardly aware that she is living in the same house with you. It was something that somebody said about her to someone who gossiped to somebody she knew when that somebody was having her hair done. Neither less nor more than that. All the same, it is you, her husband, who has to bear the brunt of those ill-chosen remarks by somebody about something. We literally pass through a gallery of odd human types and strange behavioural patterns. ‘Hullo, Little Bo-Peep,’ he said. ‘What have you done with your shepherdess’s crook? You will never find your sheep at this rate. Don’t look so cross and pout at me like that, or I shall ruffle up all those dainty little frills of yours – and then where will you be?’ A human being seems to be an eccentric creature when observed from afar… “They say the onlooker sees most of the game” though.