An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world Two titans of Victorian/Edwardian England share this June 2nd birthday: Thomas Hardy and Edward Elgar We also acknowledge poets from Denmark and Austria and a Japanese painter of the late 17th century along with Johnny Weissmuller and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts The great Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) gets only a single anniversary stamp Historically Great Britain has been singularly reticent in honoring its great artists on stamps: nothing for Byron Marlowe and Ben Jonson and the other Elizabethans (except Shakespeare That tendency has begun to reverse itself in recent years and in 1990 (which to me is recent) the sesquicentennial of Hardy’s birth was recognized with this stamp Readers who know Hardy only through his magnificent novels may be surprised to learn that he regarded himself as a poet first and a novelist second Benjamin Britten’s song cycle Winter Words puts Hardy to music beautifully which is merely one of a set of four representing popular British orchestral works on nature themes the UK has never* issued one honoring Sir Edward Elgar (1857 – 23 February 1934) The other items of this 1985 set are Handel’s Water Music and Delius’s tone poem On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and for Elgar his song cycle Sea Pictures was chosen It’s one of my favorite Elgar compositions a set of five songs for voice and orchestra that I think is among the finest and most beautiful of Elgar’s works The consensus is that Janet Baker’s recording with John Barbirolli [Addendum: Unbeknownst to me when I wrote this item Arts Fuse contributor Jonathan Blumhofer’s latest piece in his series  Rethinking the Repertoire just happens to be about the Sea Pictures!] I might add that after having had a copy of James Hamilton-Paterson’s novel Gerontius on my shelves for many years I finally read it last year It’s a reimagination of Elgar’s little known journey to Brazil in 1923 I find it a work of great eloquence and reflective beauty Danish poet and novelist Karl Gjellerup (2 June 1857 – 13 October 1919) appears on both his stamps together with his compatriot Henrik Pontoppidan because the two men shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1917 As a young firebrand Gjellerup wrote novels about atheism and free love Subsequently he broke with naturalism and embraced romanticism and in later years he became fascinated with Buddhism and Asian culture generally His novel The Pilgrim Kamanita (1906) was so well received in Thailand that a translation was used in school textbooks was a comic allegory about life after death for members of the animal kingdom and is thought of by many Danes as more of a German than a Danish writer Norbert Hanrieder (2 June 1842 – 14 October 1913) was an Austrian priest and poet who wrote in dialect He was one of the founders of a Catholic weekly and began his writing career with the publication of Pictures of Folk Life in the Mühl Region (Bilder aus dem Volksleben des Mühlviertels and today is the birthday of the group’s drummer (since 1963) Charlie Watts (born 2 June 1941) whose stamp comes from the same Austrian block of four (We’ll see Mick and Keith in due time.) Not only have Wood and Watts worked together as musicians and Watts designed a number of the Rolling Stones album covers Alban Berg died before completing the third act of his opera Lulu but he had prepared a suite of music from the opera that was performed in 1934 in Berlin under Erich Kleiber (The preparation of the suite was due in part to the impossibility of putting the opera before the public under a Nazi administration Even the performance of the Suite alone compelled Kleiber’s resignation and later departure from Germany.) The last two movements of the Lulu Suite are drawn from the incomplete Act Three so when the opera was finally premièred by the Zürich Opera on this date in 1937 those two movements were presented as an epilogue In this form the opera was presented for the next four decades until a new completion by Friedrich Cerha was published in 1979 under the late Pierre Boulez with Teresa Stratas in the title role The stamp comes from a set issued by the Yemen Arab Republic in 1971 in anticipation of the Munich Olympics; the set shows scenes from operas staged at Munich’s Cuvilliés Theatre As a sort of appendix I include a proposed design for a British Elgar stamp And what if the designer of the produced set had used the “Enigma Variations” instead of “Sea Pictures” as an inspiration *Addendum: Since posting this piece I have learned of the existence of another Elgar stamp, one issued by the Isle of Man in 2006. You can see a copy here A graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a B.A Doug Briscoe worked in Boston classical music radio He has the curious distinction of having succeeded Robert J first as host of WGBH’s weekday morning classical music program in 1993 then as host of the weekend program when Robert J.’s health failed in 2000 Doug also wrote liner notes for several of the late Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings releases as well as program notes for the Boston Classical Orchestra For the past few years he’s been posting a Facebook “blog” of classical music on stamps of the world which has now been expanded to encompass all the arts for The Arts Fuse Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732) BY JONATHAN SWIFT Five hours (and who can do it less in?) By haughty Celia… but this Littlefield review has convinced me to make the purchase your comments reek of what is wrong in today's society and also if entitlement About Us Advertising/Underwriting Syndication Media Resources Editors and Contributors © 2025 The Arts Fuse. All Rights Reserved. Site by AuthorBytes Three Nobel Prizes have already been announced this week, and Thomson Reuters, which has "accurately forecast 35 winners since 2002," failed to predict any of the new laureates The well-respected firm "mines scientific research citations to identify the most influential researchers in the fields of chemistry and economics." Next week's announcement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of the prize in Economics offers a chance for Thomson Reuters to save face with a significant financial stake in the accuracy of its forecasts dares not predict the winners of the prizes in literature and peace The Nobel Prize in Literature has a deservedly sketchy reputation among journalists whose Nobel triumph has thrilled book lovers and theater-goers whose shocking literary deification has left readers puzzling over an unfamiliar name and wondering whether it's time to once again change the prescription of their reading glasses No doubt the regional and linguistic biases of the Swedish Royal Academy committee that select the annual winner explain a parochial impatience among Anglophone readers with obscure Nordic winners instant literary celebrities with far too many syllables and diacritical marks in their names to generate veneration for their as-yet un-translated works A Peruvian novelist possessed of precocious and extraordinary talents Vargas Llosa was not considered a likely winner by journalists and literature professors His controversial reputation as one of Latin America's leading champions of "neo-liberal" economic and political reform his very public criticism of fundamentalist Islam and his unstinting denunciation of the authoritarian government of Fidel Castro and his brother appeared to disqualify him as a serious candidate for the Nobel laureate is it so terrible that the committee members who select the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature annually exercise such predictably fickle it's been some time since any serious mind publicly claimed that literary criticism was a science Since the rise of "aesthetic philosophy" in late 18th-century and earl 19th-century Europe formidable attempts have been made by the likes of Immanuel Kant as well their Scottish and English counterparts—Adam Smith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—to articulate an objective theory of literary value and artistic taste But their theories fell under the skeptical gaze of later philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche who dismissed the notion of scientifically and objectively verifiable literary value Rendered silent in 1889 by a debilitating stroke brought on by self-prescribed medicines to treat his stomach ailments Nietzsche never saw the immense influence of his aesthetic and moral critique of objective ethical and aesthetic values He never learned before his death in 1900 of the "marginal revolution" in economics begun in England and Switzerland in the 1860s and 70s by William Stanley Jevons We can only speculate on what he might have thought of this epochal shift in our understanding of economics a seismic event that the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises recast as a more general "subjective theory of value" in the early 20th-century mainstream literary criticism (leaving aside the vexed matter of whether the reading of novels and poetry these days can in any way be called "mainstream") and at least one increasingly influential but still immensely controversial strand of economic science agree that our tastes are a matter of individual and constantly changing judgment a co-winner in 1971 of the Nobel Prize in Economics pointed out the power of a government to centrally plan an economy is fatally compromised by its inability to know and account for the innumerable personal tastes of hundreds of millions of people whose ever-changing needs signal to producers what they provide if those desires are to be most efficiently met The subjective and unpredictable character of literary taste which is deeply personal and subject to sudden and unpredictable changes in cultural fashions is a conspicuous and exemplary instance of the subjective theory of value and the glorious marginal revolution We have returned to an insight of the ancients who did not presume to offer a universal and objective theory of taste or otherwise: De gusitbus non est disputandum "In matters of taste there can be no disputing." So who will be this year's Nobel laureate in literature Maybe the data-freaks and computer-modelers at Thomson Reuters will hazard a prediction based on their much prized and highly advanced scientific methodologies and protocols especially given their track record this week not to mention for the economic and political health of world culture Get a daily brief of the most important stories and trends every weekday morning when you subscribe to Reason Roundup Michael Valdez Moses is a contributing editor at Reason Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value" The film, written and directed by Niels Arden Oplev, begins with a beautiful scene depicting the character of Inger, played by Sofie Gråbøl, combing her hair. This moment evokes Marina Abramović’s Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful this apparently innocuous gesture was used by the performance artist as a tool to question conventions of beauty uses the mundane in a similar way to make us ponder upon the perception of mental illness and the way society responds to it The story unrolls over the course of a week when Ellen (Lene Maria Christensen) decides to take her schizophrenic sister Inger (Sofie Gråbøl) to Paris and is supported by her husband Vagn (Anders W The mentally ill woman is temporarily discharged from the facility where she resides even though her mother Gudrun (Karen-Lise Mynster) disapproves Ellen is however convinced that this adventure will benefit her disabled sister The trip occurs on a bus with other Danish people traveling from their home country The group is planning to visit the D–Day Museum in Arromanches the Musée d’Orsay and Napoleon’s gravesite known as Dôme des Invalides All the travellers embody a different type of sensitivity towards mental health disorders But Christian’s father — Margit’s husband — Andreas (Søren Malling) is on defensive mode he feels threatened by Inger’s schizophrenia He is accepting only in the moments in which Inger displays lucidity and turns events in favour of the entire group tries to accommodate the desires of all the travellers and displays an understanding towards Inger The cast is extraordinary in the portrayal of each of the characters Sofie Gråbøl sublimely depicts the multifaceted complexity of mental illness There is demure poetry in Inger’s perturbed soul that touches all those who interact with her She alternates moments of sanity with instants in which she speaks without filters — she even describes to Christian her sexual encounters with Jacques (Jean-Pierre Lorit) the man she loved that she claims made her lose her mind “When he left I was much more alone than before I met him,” she says with dismay will take Inger back to where Jacques once lived: 13 Rue Malebranche Rose brings to the screen a story that is very personal to the Danish filmmaker since it’s inspired by his two sisters and his brother-in-law and a trip they took in 1997 has been looked after by her sibling Kirsten This is when she returned  to Denmark after spending a year in France working on a farm and a restaurant She was changed: the young woman had started talking to people who were not there and kept hearing voices This occurred forty years before Niels Arden Oplev started working on the film Rose and his intention was to portray how the diagnosis often becomes a barrier between the patient and the so-called normal people Throughout the film we witness how this mentally afflicted woman is very accomplished: she speaks French The bus ride is a narrative device to show how people are obliged to be in proximity with someone suffering from a mental illness It was also the stage of Princess Diana’s death and we are shown how certain tourists This puts a magnifying glass on the social phenomenon of the spectacularisation of death but also serves as a plot twist that provides a potential explanation of the film’s title In Rose schizophrenia is confronted with compassion and humour Through it all Inger is very aware about her condition and warns people around her but at the same time feels she has to fight the stigma at one point she blurts out: “I am not contagious.” Whenever Inger speaks When she feels affection for someone she says she has the urge to strangle them But Inger also teaches those around her to be tenderhearted through meaningful actions rather than mellifluous words She gives proof of great humanity when she cannot stand the sight of a dead hedgehog abandoned on the road because “it’s not dignified to leave it lying there.” What follows is utterly inspiriting Rose shatters the prejudice surrounding mental illness and shows how it can be an enriching experience to interact with someone who has a different mindset Check out more of Chiara’s articles The Franco-Algerian actress and filmmaker Maïwenn brings to the silver screen — as director and leading actress — the story of Jeanne Bécu the last maîtresse-en-titre of King Louis XV of France Jeanne du Barry was presented Out of Competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and has portentously completed the picture… The 28th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema — brought to audiences by Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center — newly celebrates the vitality of contemporary French filmmaking The 2023 line-up features the latest work by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi that was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival cinema lovers of the Big Apple found their Mecca in St Mark’s Place in the treasure trove of rare motion pictures known as Kim’s Video but in 2008 with the advent of the digital era people no longer rented videos and the destiny of this venerable… Check out more of Serena’s video review at the Cannes Film Festival  Serena Davanzo graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with a BA in Journalism and a BA in Theatre in December 2022 She currently works full time as a weekend anchor/producer and MMJ’s weekdays She aspires to be an entertainment based… and website in this browser for the next time I comment @Courtesy of Peacock Poker face :Starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale the casino worker with an uncanny ability to spot liars the show follows her escapades as she evades the dangerous casino head of security Cliff LeGrand (portrayed by Benjamin Bratt) and uncovers various killers Charlie’s back on the lam after a new twist of… ©Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics  Director Gareth Evans has hinted that he may indeed be making a third installment in The Raid series following up on the original release in 2011 and its 2014 sequel The Raid 2.The filmmaker was quoted in Entertainment Weekly as saying,… Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning‘s underwater scenes were filmed by Tom Cruise and film crew members The upcoming film stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt ©Courtesy of Rolling Pictures Fighting against any obstacle in order to report the news without fear of death or reprisal is an admirable sign of the world’s most courageous journalists is a prime example of such an innovative writer Her story is chronicled in the new biographical movie,… Y"},"category":false,"taxonomy":{"active":false,"name":"category"}},"markup":{"custom_html":true,"wpp-start":"","wpp-end":"<\/ul>","title-start":"","title-end":"<\/h2>","post-html":"{thumb} {title} {stats}<\/span><\/li>"},"theme":{"name":""}} The harrowing true story of a young Danish photographer kidnapped by sadistic ISIS forces in Syria is recounted in Daniel a new feature from directors Niels Arden Oprev and Anders W Berthelsen now playing with English subtitles at Prague’s Edison Cinema Esben Smed (A Fortunate Man) gives a captivating performance as Daniel Rye who finds himself looking for a new future after his gymnastics career is cut short following a brutal injury in the film’s opening scene.  After leaving his childhood home and moving in with girlfriend Signe (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen) Rye finds work in another passion: as a photojournalist a freelance job that brings him to Ethiopia before he takes the initiative to travel to Syria on his own to document scenes of everyday life during wartime.  Rye plans to visit only safe areas in the war-torn country and travels by day with the support of locals across the Turkish border Daniel discovers the safe zones are not so safe as he is detained by paramilitary forces and accused of being a CIA spy.  About two-thirds of Daniel recounts Rye’s experience in captivity for more than a year Daniel is eventually imprisoned alongside others that include high-profile captive American James Foley (Toby Kebbel) and held by a British-born ISIS cell nicknamed ‘The Beatles’ by the hostages because of their English accents.  Smed gives a captivating performance in the lead and carries Daniel through its darkest scenes The character’s adjustment to life in captivity under some of the worst conditions imaginable is heartening and small moments between him and other prisoners give the film some unexpected moments of levity Daniel uses his gymnastics background to teach his fellow captives yoga and slowly develops a bond with Foley.  A significant portion of the film is also dedicated to Daniel’s family including parents Kjeld and Susanne (played by Jens Jørn Spottag and Christiane Gjellerup Koch) and sisters (Sophie Torp and Andrea Heick Gadeberg) whose captivity is used towards political ends the terrorists are more than willing to release Rye for a fee But the Danish government refuses to negotiate with terrorists Berthelsen) warns that any publicity will make the negotiations more difficult; for this working-class family raising the funds needed to save the life of their son and brother seems like an impossible task.  gives a commanding performance as the driving force behind the fund-raising and negotiations as some of the other family members seem to resign themselves to the inevitable; Koch also has a memorable last-resort scene with a Danish businessman.  Co-directed by Niels Arden Oplev (Flatliners and the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and actor Berthelsen who also plays the key role of the hostage negotiator Daniel is an engaging and emotional experience that poignantly captures this true-life story from multiple angles and provides some real insight into the procedure surrounding the negotiation with terrorists Daniel was nominated for 15 Robert Awards (the Danish equivalent of the Academy Awards) last year and Adapted Screenplay (Anders Thomas Jensen) About | Contact | Terms | Privacy Karl Adolph Gjellerup (2 June 1857 – 11 October 1919) was a Danish writer Karl Adolph Gjellerup was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature He was born on 2 June 1857 He received his education at the Sorø Academy a renowned Danish boarding school known for its emphasis on the humanities and sciences he pursued a degree in law at the University of Copenhagen his true passion lay in literature and writing He began his literary career during his university years contributing to various magazines and publishing his first collection of poems in 1878 he did eventually complete his legal studies and obtained a law degree in 1880 He drew inspiration from German and Scandinavian literature and his works often delved into philosophical and spiritual themes Gjellerup’s writing style combined elements of romanticism and symbolism showcasing his lyrical and introspective approach to storytelling Gjellerup’s works gained recognition both in Denmark and internationally His notable works include “The Pilgrim Kamanita,” a novel that explores themes of Eastern spirituality and “The Awakening of Spring,” a play that addresses themes of youth and sexual awakening In 1917, Karl Adolph Gjellerup was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, sharing it with Henrik Pontoppidan His contributions to Danish literature and his exploration of profound themes continue to be appreciated and studied by literary enthusiasts and scholars Subscribe to our mailing list to get the new updates Subscribe to our mailing list to get the new updates!