It is a mistake to assume that concrete rural scenes like those in the small Romanesque parishes Mr. Mora rightly celebrates, lead to appreciating life whereas, contrastingly, Gothic abstraction leads to a sort of world-weary sickness. This judgement assumes only two realities, body and mind, and pits these against each other.

The author starts from the principle that the study of the Habsburg Monarchy has for too long suffered from an analytical bias: scholars have regularly considered the Empire as something external to the nationalities that suffered under its oppression. This perspective presumes that the weaker forces, compelled to develop defensive measures, became stronger, jeopardizing the Empire’s stronghold.

Scheduled for only six performances (September 28-October 17, 2021), the Met chose, as a cost-cutting measure, to present Mussorgsky’s original seven-scene 1869 version of the opera. European houses and scholarly purists favor this original score, which is currently found in repertoires in London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.

It is almost as if Don Simon Jubani was prepared to be a political prisoner. His collaborators and admirers describe him as “a nut with a hard shell,” “tough,” “passionate for the truth,” “uncompromising,” “provocative and justice-seeking,” and “highly intelligent though impatient.” He was an athletic priest (a former soccer star) who ministered to five mountainous rural parishes in the Mirdita region before he was arrested in 1963. The toughness comes across in print.

A major retrospective of the work of the Russian painter Ilya Repin (1844-1930) is being held for the first time in Paris at the Petit Palais from October 2021 to the end of January 2022.

The judicial designation of abortion as a right leads to inevitable consequences in other legal spheres. “Failure to protect human life in one area of law will lead to failure elsewhere. Life must either be protected everywhere, or it is at risk everywhere.”

Early in his tenure, Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink had led one of the staples of the company’s ballet repertoire, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, set to a score by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It was therefore fitting that a recent performance of this revival was dedicated to his memory.

Canadian-Lebanese writer Nader Moumneh’s 2018 book fills a useful niche in that it is a sympathetic and detailed overview of the main Lebanese Christian military-political formation born during the Lebanese Civil War, a formation that became a leading Lebanese nationalist political party after the war ended.

Unlike other ‘Bannon-watchers’—many of who seem unable to resist casting him as a Rasputin-like figure, while being simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by his insistence on speaking in symbolic and often apocalyptic terms—Teitelbaum approaches his subject from an unlikely angle.