Articles by R.J. Stove

Late on the night of May 11, 1916, in a Leipzig hotel bedroom, a guest who had recently been visiting the Netherlands suffered a fatal heart attack. He was only 43 years of age, but […]

This article aims to serve as a follow-up to the Lenten playlist which Catholic World Report ran last month. The same general criteria for selecting works apply here as applied there: no instances of pure […]

Compiling a survey—however inadequate—of Lenten compositions confirms the fact that we should show more gratitude than we routinely do for YouTube’s very existence. Before YouTube arrived, providing musical illustrations to a magazine’s editor needed to […]

Is The Bridge of San Luis Rey, with which in 1927 Thornton Wilder obtained his first—almost his only—huge success as novelist, still read widely? It deserves to be. If a book can survive having its […]

Given that for even the best-educated music-lovers so much valuable Christmas repertoire slumbers largely undisturbed by any hint of modern revivals, it is hardly surprising that most Advent repertoire tends to be even less known. […]

Editor’s note: This is an abridged and otherwise edited version of a lecture given at the Caroline Chisholm (Catholic) Library, Melbourne, on July 7, 2015. +++ At the very start, I want to explain that […]

Perhaps the most pernicious single delusion to have afflicted musical thought over the last two centuries is what might be called, for want of a comelier description, The Myth of Artistic Inevitability. The central teaching […]

On the morning of August 25, 1954, New York Times readers found much of Page One devoted to the news that Brazil’s president Getúlio Vargas – who had dominated his nation’s politics for a quarter […]