Michael Haas has written a fascinating post on Eugenie Schwarzwald, founder of a school that educated Anna Freud, Helene Weigl, Vicki Baum and hundreds more young women who were liberated from patriarchal tyranny. She was also an important patron of modernism, employing Arnold Schoenberg as a music teacher and Oskar Kokoschka for art.

Click here to read more.

Sports class for the girls of the Schwarzwald school on the roof of the Herrenhof Café

We have given you time to recover from Dudley Moore’s ‘two European composers’.

Here’s his less-known set, equally brilliant, on a familiar wartime theme.

Do not let your organist try this.

In my essay in the new issue of Standpoint magazine, I reflect upon the plight of music critics, faced with falling pay and status and finding themselves at the centre of unsought storms.

Sample par:

No one had a kind word to say for the music critics, who were perceived to be misogynist, sadistic, collusive, sensation-seeking and altogether blinder than a Fifa referee at an England football match. Most, if not all, of these perceptions are false. The critics I have known are generally idealists who wish the world were better than it is and labour unsocial hours for low pay in a vain effort to elevate its condition. They are not, on the whole, random wreckers of young careers.

Read the full essay here.

Download my complete Standpoint essays, Conduct Unbecoming, here.

UPDATE:  Correction to the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: Today, hardly any US city outside New York has a full-time staff music critic.