BOOK BARN

#262: GETTING TO NŌ. “The Japanese nō theatre,” Royall Tyler writes, “is one of the great achievements of civilization. No art is more sophisticated than this intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, nor does any uphold higher ideals. Nō plays, like those of other theatres, were written to be performed, but some can stand as literature beside any play ever put between the covers of a book. The aim of Japanese Nō Dramas is to demonstrate that this is

#261: THE ONCE AND PRESENT EMPEROR. Charles Allan’s Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (Abacus Books, 2012) is a good book on a great subject. Reading even causally in the history of Buddhism, one encounters the story of Ashoka, who in the third century BCE became India’s first avowedly Buddhist emperor. He promoted Buddhism throughout the subcontinent primarily by carving the precepts and exhortations into rocks and onto standing pillars, a number of which are

#260. MAGIC. Is there any noise anywhere in the world, any sounds and sweet airs so lyric-glorious, as those of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte--The Magic Flute ? In Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a fad going for “magic” operas, so Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, raided fairy tales, Egyptian mythology, and a frame of Masonic numerology and moral adages to come up with the opera’s moonstruck and kitchen-sink storyline. Richard Wagner compl