Reason Not To've Died Yet, And To Go On Living....

Listening as I "write" (type) to an Opera Lyrica d'Antonio Vivaldi--Giustino: "L'Ultimo Opera composta dal maestro veneziano per i teatri romani....Il principale interprete (nel ruolo di Ariana) fu il celebre castrato del tempo Francesco Fontana, detto il Farfallino, che si era specializzato nei ruoli femminili.

""L'Opera rappresenta una transizione fra la prima produzione operistica di Vivaldi e le opere della maturità, rappresenta la fase in cui il Vivaldi operistica comincia ad essere apprezzato anche fuori da Venezia. Come molte opere vivaldiane, c'è una preminenza di voci femminili (5 soprani e 2 contralti) che si esibiscono in splendide arie, mentre l'azione drammatica procede attraverso il recitativo (numerosi nell'opera quelli accompagnati)."

And gloriously beautiful it is. More beautiful even than we could have guessed in the 1950's when, as an early, teen-age Vivaldi enthusiast, I had to wonder why Vivaldi's operas--whereof we knew he wrote so many-- were "simply unperformable." Ah, Criticism! Ah, the Informed Opinion of Received Authority!

Well, nowadays Vivaldi's operas are performed--a lot--and we are privileged to observe that as a composer for the (well trained) voice, Vivaldi has few equals (Mozart comes to mind) and no superiors. Endless ravishing tunes! Excellent musical structures (harmony, counterpoint, etc.)!

Faultless psychological characterization! Vivaldi is, in a word, every bit as good a musical technician as Bach--and infinitely better than Bach as a writer of voice-friendly vocal music. I've had to wait fifty years to find this out for sure, but it's been worth the wait....

Actually, having this sublimely beautiful never-heard-before music as a background is pertinent to the astonishing recent literary revelations that have burst upon me, which prompt me to log this day's weblog in the first place. I've been hitting the library hard lately--I have, at present, twenty books on widely diverse topics checked out--everything from Science Fiction, and the second (widely despised, but in my opinion, no less masterly) book by my idol and secret crush (we're the same age, if he's still alive), Charles Nelson, Panthers in the Skins of Men; through a couple of significant lucubrations by Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, and The Jargon of Authenticity. Adorno is The Enemy, of course--pupil of Berg's, Freudian, utterly pedantic, head-up-his-ass ass. But he's not always entirely wrong (except that there's no indication that he really feels, or likes, music--or that he's capable of understanding any music written before 1800); but, still, 'tis delicious to have him pronouncing, with thunderous fulmination, on the utter ugly, trivial, obnoxious idiocy and worthlessness of My Fair Lady. My sediments exactly. He may have been incapable of feeling music, but he knew enough about it to be hurt by it. So that's fun.

But the aforementioned earth-shaking, heaven-storming astonish'd surprise that is the purpose of today's blog:

Doing some catch-up reading of Christopher Marlowe--Tamburlaine the Great and The Jew of Malta--and reading a wonderful new biography of him by one Park Honan, wherein lay a passing reference to something call'd The Affectionate Shepherd by one Richard Barnfield, "friend of both Shakespeare and Marlowe." Hmmm (quoth I): so I looked it up on the Net and Lo! So I discovered the first--and so far the only--great versifier of male homosexual passion in English. Not "queer." Gay male. Who wrote exquisite Spenserian sonnets--twenty that I've read so far--of perfect-perfect technical form and versification--about being a gay male in a totally clueless heterosexual world. A genius and a martyr. Still misunderstood. Still a martyr. No sooner had rumor of Barnfield been heard in the late 1990's than he was seized upon by the harpies of Postmodernist "Queer Theory" who bore him away and have yet, quite, to relinquish him--though it goes without saying that his pure gay male intelligence is utterly incomprehensible to them.