I don't care about Romneycare, Bain, his Mormon beliefs or the fact that he pulled a girl's pigtails when he was nine years old. He's intelligent and sincere, has a sound understanding of how the economy works (and the role of the private sector therein), he's got a boatload of charisma, he upholds traditional values and most importantly, he LOVES HIS COUNTRY. He has clearly emerged as the strongest contender. He may not be the perfect candidate. But he's by a very wide margin the best on offer.
May this man cast back the nonentity scoundrel who shamed, ruined and stained America.
First, Georg Friedrich Händel with the wonderful Sarabande.
I've written on these pages before that I am quite fond of baroque music. That's why Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 – 1759), a monumental German Baroque composer, famous for his operas, anthems, organ concertos and oratorios. After 'honing his craft' in Halle, Hamburg and Italy he settled in London in 1712 and effectively became British by naturalization in 1727 (and changed his name to George Frideric Handel). He could count Queen Anne among his patrons. By the time he died he had composed over forty operas.
Haendel's Sarabande is, as its name implies, a dance, and one in triple metre. In a sarabande measure the second and third beats are often tied, typically giving the dance a rhythm of alternating quarter notes and eighth notes (more or less symbolizing a 'real' dance's dragging steps). Check it out, it's quite obvious. This particular sarabande, from Haendel's Cembalo-Suite nr. 4 in d-moll (HWV 437, for Haendel Werke Verzeichnis 437) was used several times in a movie score - most famously of course in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Barry Lyndon (with Ryan O'Neal as the protagonist).
Dmitry Shostakovich with Romance.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (Russian: Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович; 1906 – 1975) was a monumental Soviet Russian composer and pianist who more or less came unscathed through the hell that was the USSR - and this despite his being friends with Mikhail Tuchachevsky, Trotsky's famous Chief of Staff who was executed in 1937 during Stalin's purges. He was influenced by Stravinsky and Mahler. His orchestral repertoire encompasses amongst others 15 symphonies and six concerti, but apart from that there's also a very substantial oeuvre in chamber and piano music, operas and film scores. This particular piece 'Romance' (Shostakovich' Opus 97) was used in the 1955 Soviet movie drama The Gadfly, directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer and based on the 1897 novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich (of Irish stock and the daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole).