Log24

Go Leonards

Yesterday's entry may be viewed as honoring Saint Leonard Eugene Dickson, who died on January 17, 1954.  Dickson was the author of the three-volume classic

History of the Theory of Numbers.

Yesterday's entry was also prompted by a property of the number 17, and therefore may serve to illustrate a recurring theme… "The eternal in the temporal," an apt phrase uttered by Father Egan on page 373 of Robert Stone's religious classic,

A Flag for Sunrise.

Click on the above link for an appreciation of the Stone novel by Reynolds Price, one of the few Christians whose opinion I respect.

See also some remarks by Price from the feast day, Nov. 6, of the official Saint Leonard.

For a different Saint Leonard, see the entry of Oct. 14, 2003, which contains remarks by Leonard Bernstein on Mahler.

For a musical event that may be regarded as the fruition of Bernstein's remarks, see

Pope in peace concert

Vatican invites rabbis, Muslim clerics
for concert featuring
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

By Dennis B. Roddy,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
Sunday, January 18, 2004

Saint Leonard’s Day

From a review of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Norton lectures at Harvard:

The truly emblematic twentieth-century composer is Mahler, whose attempts to relinquish tonality are reluctant and incomplete, and whose nostalgia for past practice is overt and tragic. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, his “last will and testament,” shows “that ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical prophet.” That is the “real reason” Mahler’s music suffered posthumous neglect–it was, Bernstein says, “telling something too dreadful to hear.” The Ninth Symphony embodies three kinds of death–Mahler’s own, which he knew was imminent; the death of tonality, “which for him meant the death of music itself”; and “the death of society, of our Faustian culture.” And yet this music, like all great art, paradoxically reanimates us.

— Joseph Horowitz, New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993