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From the Archive: Riviera Road Trip
À la recherche de Picasso, Matisse et al.

April 15, 2014

Travel writing as such was never my genre, but when an editor at one of the top travel books asked me to scout the haunts of Picasso and other modern masters on the Riviera, I didn't say no. I remember the trip as equal parts boondoggle and serious grind. The expense account was lavish, but between pilgrimage sites, deluxe hideaways, and hot restaurants, there was just too much ground to cover. Of course, I kept that view to myself, painting the picture in the glowing colors I knew it deserved. My editors liked it: they paid me promptly. Hardly had I received the check, however, than a new editor-in-chief took over. Her first order of business? She killed the inventory. Way of the world. Heigh ho. (Merde.)

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review of Rienzi

April 2014  •  Opera News

"Allmächt'ger Vater, blick herab…." The grave radiance of the hero's prayer from the twenty-seven-year-old Wagner's Rienzi, Last of the Tribuneshas found superstar champions from Lauritz Melchior to Jonas Kaufmann. For listeners who wish to seek no further, two excuses will serve: Wagner disowned the opera, and Hitler adored it. Then again, these might be reasons to take a hard look.

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A 3-D View of the Cosmos From Hawaii

March 27, 2014  •  Wall Street Journal

Hilo, Hawaii.

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review of Die Entführung aus dem Serail

March 2014  •  Opera News

Roles of saints, demons, and craggy souls grappling with last things came naturally to Finnish basso Martti Talvela. His timbre seemed primeval, his aura of another world. Not so incidentally, he stood a towering six foot seven inches tall. He was dancing at his daughter's wedding a quarter century ago when death struck him down at age fifty-four, an end his beloved Dostoy­evsky could not have staged more cruelly.

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What Will Happen to Brooklyn's Shrine to Enrico Caruso?

February 4, 2014  •  Wall Street Journal

Brooklyn, N.Y.

A torrential raconteur, Aldo Mancusi traces what he calls his magnificent obsession to his father, Everisto, who in 1920 emigrated from Campania, Italy, to this, New York's most populous borough, while still in his teens. "He had about 70 Caruso records that he would crank up when I was 4, 3, 2, 1," Aldo said one recent morning. As curator and founder of the shrine grandiloquently styled the Enrico Caruso Museum of America, he was about to turn back the clock, flourishing a shellac disc dating to November 1902, the year the peerless Neapolitan tenor began recording.

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Books by Matthew Gurewitsch