OSHER AT THE CARNEGIE: TUESDAY MORNINGS, FEBRUARY 24 TO MAY 12, 2026

ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS    
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]    [12]

 
Popularity… and then?

The picture shows Franz Liszt playing for a group of close admirers. Liszt was one of the first superstars, whose audiences included crowned heads and the cream of European artistic society. He was also one of those relatively few who were able to extend that early popularity into a distinguished career as a composer. We will be hearing more about him in Class 5, but he makes as good a starting point as any to introduce our exploration into the phenomenon of Popularity in general. Why did some artists become popular and others not? What did they have to sacrifice to achieve or maintain that status? And after popularity, what then?

We shall find a few who, like Liszt, were able to continue in the limelight doing much the same thing. We shall find a few who turned to something quite different, or gave it up of their own accord. We shall find some who were eclipsed by less well-known contemporaries whose true talent was apparent only to later generations. And unfortunately we shall find many who simply burned out. But we live now in an age of research and re-evaluation, and most of these once-popular artists have been dug from obscurity and brought back into the light, often deservedly so. Yet nobody wants to attend a course consisting mainly of has-beens and second bananas, so I am determined in each class to pull some magical rabbits out of the hat: works that are first-rate by any standard, or artists whose lives are fascinating in their own right. But most of all, I want to look at the phenomenon of Popularity itself, and the often arbitrary forces nudging the hand of fate.

Since this course is a shared exploration and by no means a finished product, the details below may change. There is more to the subject than I can possibly tackle, but the first few classes will give us a sense of where the focus should be. The class titles below all suggest questions to be asked, rather than their answers, and the images do not necessarily depict the actual items to be discussed—which will have a musical bias as you see, but will include art and poetry also. Anyway bookmark this page, and expect things to change. One by one, I will add RESOURCES for each session, at which point the current GREY LINKS will be activated and turn GOLD. Roger Brunyate.

	February 24
Marlowe, Field, Clare, McGonagall, Landseer, and Smyth	RESOURCES

1. A Bunch of Brits

Six artists chosen almost at random to preview various aspects of the course to follow; all were born in the British Isles. While they may not have totally disappeared into the clouds of oblivion, none of them are as highly regarded as they once were. The playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) had the misfortune to be writing at the same time as Shakespeare, and then to get himself killed in a tavern brawl before he could establish himself as a serious rival. The Irish pianist and composer John Field (1782–1837) was the originator of the piano Nocturne, and a great influence on Chopin; although Field had a fine career in Russia, the name associated with the Nocturne now is Chopin's, not his. Poet John Clare (1793–1864) became famous for pastoral verse based on his life as a working shepherd, but then went mad. The Scot William McGonagall (1825–1902) used to give tours reciting his verse, which may have been the worst ever written. Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73) painted animals and Scottish scenes, making him a favorite of Queen Victoria, but the taste for his subjects more or less died with her. Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was equally well-known as a composer and a suffragist, a combination which may have sabotaged her career.

	March 3
Cavalli's La Calisto at Aix-en-Provence, 2025	RESOURCES

2. Restoration

Many once-famous composers fell from the repertoire for reasons that have nothing to do with their talent. Concert life moved on, and we no longer had the expertise to play older music as it was intended. But over the past half-century, the Authentic Performance movement has developed scholarship, instrumentation, and performance techniques that have restored many earlier composers to the esteem that they deserve. In baroque opera alone, the movement has revived interest in Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), Pier Francesco Cavalli (1602–76), and even George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) as someone other than the composer of the Messiah, but its benefits extend back to the Middle Ages and forward into the Romantic era.

	March 10
Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri in Amadeus	RESOURCES

3. Some Brighter Sun

The lethal rivalry between Mozart and Salieri potrayed in the movie Amadeus is now thought to be mostly a fiction concocted by Alexander Pushkin and Peter Shaffer to propel their respective plays. But there is no need to posit an actual rivalry to explain why a once-famous artist should fall into oblivion. When we look through the telescope of hindsight, it is sufficient that there should be a star in the same firmament—a Mozart, Monet, or Frans Hals—of such a brightness as to put all others into shadow. And in the early 19th century especially, there are astronomical trajectories to do not need a neighboring star to explain them: people whose careers lit up the skies like a comet but who died young or faded early, and others who shone brightly for their entire careers then were fast forgotten. All are overdue for a fresh assessment.

	March 17
Gérome: Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes	RESOURCES

4. The Epic Quest

The detail above is from a painting commissioned by Napoleon to honor both the soldiers who had died for him and the author of his favorite epic, the Celtic bard Ossian. Though Ossian was proved to be a forgery, the whole-cloth invention of the 18th-century poet James Macpherson (1736–96), numerous other poets have attempted epics to claim a place at the high table with Homer at its head. Some examples are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) with Hiawatha and Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92) with Idylls of the King. In music, you get The Trojans of Hector Berlioz (1803–69) and Wagner's Ring, and there are examples in the visual arts as well. But scale does not always equate to enduring fame, and in the age of the sound-bite it may even be a disadvantage.

	March 24
Niccolò Paganini	RESOURCES

5. Virtuosi

Although there has been performing prodigies before (Mozart and Beethoven, for example), Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) was the first to attain superstar status comparable to that of a modern pop singer. His playing was so extraordinary that he was said to have made a pact with the Devil—a rumor that he himself encouraged, but which came back to bite him when he was denied a Christian burial. Taking him as an example, together with other composer-performers such as Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) and Franz Liszt (1811–86), and at least one singer and dancer as well, we look into star quality generally, and what happens to these stars after they quit the stage.

	March 31
Richard Wagner with a scene from Meyebeer's Le prophète	RESOURCES

6. An Operatic Assassination

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) was unquestionably the leading opera composer in Paris in the second quarter of the 19th century, at a time when Paris itself was the capital of the operatic world. Though his first venture to Paris (with Tannhäuser in 1861) was an abject failure, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was by the end of the century a force that—love him or hate him—you couldn't ignore, while performances of Meyerbeer had dropped off almost completely. And there was a lot in Wagner to hate: Meyerbeer was by all accounts a generous and loyal man, while Wagner was a personally loathsome individual, whose Anti-Semitic diatribe Jewishness in Music was an attack on Meyerbeer and other Jewish composers whose work he considered meretricious. Meyerbeer has now begun to return occasionally to the major stages of the world, while Wagner has never left them. Is this fair? I felt the paradox of the two men was worth a class all on its own. rb.

	April 7
William Holman Hunt: The Awakening Conscience (1853, detail)	RESOURCES

7. The Moral View

Often once-popular artists fall into oblivion through no fault of their own, simply because the field they had mastered no longer fits current fashion. While the appetite for religious arts—for centuries the source of profitable commmissions—never entirely disappeared, the fad for its secular equivalent—social morality—came and went with the Victorian era. Pre-Raphaelites such as William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) have never dropped entirely from view, but they are honored for their technical mastery and freshness of color rather than for their moral subject-matter. There was a huge appetite for such work in the second half of the century, and a consequent rise in the number of painters, poets, songwriters, and playwrights eager to fill it. We will take this as cue for an examination of the roles of moral conscience (at best) and sentiment (at worst) in assuring popularity.

	April 14
Scenes from Cavalleria Rusticana (top), I pagliacci, and La bohème	RESOURCES

8. Outlasting the Movement

Apologies for the lack of clarity in these three images, but the effect of getting an entire population onstage is much of the point. When Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) wrote Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890 and Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857–1919) wrote I pagliacci in 1892, they were at the vanguard of the verismo movement that combined raw passion with a meticulous depiction of everyday life. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) entered the opera scene at around the same time, and his La bohème (1896) and Il tabarro (begun in 1910) are later manifestations of the same movement. Yet Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and most other verismo composers faded after one success, while Puccini remained popular to the end of his life—how come?

	April 21
The Tempest and Death in Venice	RESOURCES

9. Closing Acts

The artists in this class all found early popularity and all continued in high esteem to the end of their lives. But all used their fame and financial security to experiment with something they were doing for themselves and not necessarily to please the public. So Wiliam Shakespeare (1564–1616) ended with the philosophical fantasy The Tempest; Benjamin Britten (1913–76) rang down the curtain with Death in Venice, an opera with only two leading characters that reveals intimate aspects of his own psyche. In the visual arts, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) ended with visions from a nightmare, Claude Monet (1840–1926) with distillations of the water lillies in his garden, and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) with brilliant designs made from cut paper. We could also add composers like Bach and Beethoven or poets like Hopkins and Heaney. The subject is vast, but it deals with works that are very special indeed.

	April 28
Clockwise from top left: TS Eliot, Francis Bacon, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Henry Moore	RESOURCES

10. Yesterday's Modernists

Popularity does not necessarily mean a large following among the general public. The four artists shown here—TS Eliot (1888–1965), Francis Bacon (1909–92), Henry Moore (1898–1986), and a little later Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016)—were all famous among the artistic community in mid-century Britain as representing the vanguard of their respective arts. All died with high reputations pretty much intact. Yet taste has moved on, and we are no longer surprised by the same things. Whether the class remains tied to British artists such as those here, or extends to the European modernists from the earlier 20th century, the subject of Modernism and the trajectory of its earliest exponents should make an interesting study.

	May 5
Norman Rockwell and Bob Dylan	RESOURCES

11. Masters of a Lesser Medium

For five decades, Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) painted covers for The Saturday Evening Post, earning him a special place as an acute observer of American life and values. Although magazine illustration is seldom considered one of the so-called fine arts, Rockwell stands up well to evaluation as an artist pure and simple. Much the same could be said of the Wyeth family (NC, Andrew, and Jamie), who were also more than mere illustrators. Over his long career, Bob Dylan (1941– ) would have been classified as a popular folk musician and singer of protest songs that gave voice to the counterculture of his time. Yet in 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. There are probably many more examples of popular artists refusing to be confined to the perceived bounds of their "lesser" medium, but these will do for starters.

	May 12
Marquees on Broadway	RESOURCES

12. Beyond the Marquee

This title and photograph are frankly placeholders for the final class in the course. Of all the artists we have considered, none is so subject to the rocket ascent to popular stardom as the writers and performers of popular music, whether heard on the airwaves or seen on a Broadway stage. It is also a field in which stardom can be quite long-lasting, although there are also cases of people who have struggled or simply retired. I don't know yet whether I will focus on performers, or writers, or both. But I do know there will be interesting lessons to be drawn from the past, and amusing speculation as we try to predict the immediate future. So stay tuned! rb.

 
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