Continual astonishing Discovery....¡Tunes Radio

Una Cosa Rara, un' opera lirica composta da Vicente Martín y Soler (1754 - 1806), libretto di Lorenzo da Ponte, which, in 1786, introduced the waltz to Vienna. "Often compared favorably with Mozart as a composer of opera buffa in his lifetime," says the Wikipedia biography. And, in my opinion, not unjustly. The comparisons to be made are many: harmonic sophistication, rhythmic flexibility, state-of-the-art richness of orchestration, subtlety of counterpoint, melodic invention (sic!), deftness and originality of ensemble writing. When you are told that Paisiello and Hummel were Mozart's chief rivals--and you actually hear the music composed by those worthies, you wonder who's kidding whom: Such dull, wooden, leaden, primitive hurdy-gurdy stuff sounds like Mozart to whom? Mozart's contemporaries?--maybe some of them. One suspects, however, that the real resemblance lies in the mutilated sensibilities of those who, to this day, couldn't tell the difference between Paisiello and Martín y Soler if it bit them on their dodecaphonic asses: "Schusterflecke" seems to be what you hear after you have brutalized your inner ear into not being able to distinguish between the scientific, acoustic realities of concord and dissonance.

Up be-Pepys, of a fair, breezy Morning

And, once shaved, walked half a block down to the espresso shop, where did buy a 4-druple Grande, ye-which I am now savouring with matitudinal alacrity, while I muse on the morning-dream sent me by my Guardian Sylphs: I was living on the Big Island (even as I actually think in a couple of years I may do), in a charming bungalow o'erlooking Kona Bay, behind which stretched a bit of Tropical Forest Primeval--ideal, my Sylphs were saying, for a chicken run. And as I woke, I was wondering aloud, in the bantering tone I often take with my Sylphs, if I really want to get into the grim business of chicken butchering, just to cut down on grocery expenses. And I bethought me of my maternal grandparents who, like so many of their generation, did just that, and prosecuted many other arduous, supposedly economical, farm-type enterprises as well, long after they had any real need to do so, and a good ten years after my grandmother's failing health--obesity, strokes, and diabetes--made it impossible for her to keep up with her share of the nuptial bargain. I happened to have been staying with my grandparents in the early spring of my eighth year when, for the last time, like any good, working farm couple, they "harvested" the year's growth of chickens: I helped corner the chickens, which my grandfather, using an old tree stump for a chopping block, beheaded with single, ferocious blows of a hatchet, and, when they had done running around and exsanguinating themselves, brought them into the kitchen, where my grandmother, with the help of her oldest son's wife, did the rest. The feathered dinosaur corpses were plunged neck-first, by their feet, into buckets of boiling water to loosen the feathers, then plucked, then singed, then eviscerated and washed, then wrapped in butcher paper and carried downstairs (mostly by me) to the vast freezer chest in the basement. In this, my grandmother's last hurrah as a working farmwife, the feathers were discarded along with the offal--buried by my grandfather in a corner of the chickenyard--but in years past, as many and many a pillow and feather-quilt laid up in the closets of upstairs bedrooms bore witness to, the feathers, or at least the downier portion of them, would have been saved, cleaned, and stuffed into pillowcase sacks (of which one or two were still extant in one of those upstairs bedroom's amazingly deep closets), awaiting the quilting and sewing industry, never more to be resumed, of long winter nights.

¡Tunes offering us one of the more raffiniert and exquisite treasures of the operatic repertory, is doing J.C. Bach's Amadis des Gaules: A wonder in itself, but something rather more, in that, it proves, and proves amply, that Mozart 's and Gainsborough's (whose portrait of the Master this is) and my sense, that J.C. could, when he wanted, write music of stunning originality, depth, and beauty--and, what is more, music which is perfectly adapted for the human voice. Which his father, notably, in all charity, really did not have the knack of. If only this were being sung in its original French, not German, as these singers [of the Stuttgart Bach Collegium, directed by Helmuth Rilling] might so easily have done--I know a (brilliant, witty) woman from Stuttgart, who when she sees me immediately starts talking French to me. I asked her why; she said "Educated Germans prefer to talk French when they can." Alors, à propos des bottes:

Eva Gollinger: "The rise of Barrack Obama neutralized a growing sentiment for profound change inside the U.S."

Up betimes...

Listening to a harp concerto by the little thought-of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760 - 1812)--in his day something of a superstar. Can't say as I much care for the genteel insipidity of his music, but I'm fascinated reading about the man (in his youth admired for his stunning personal beauty), the innovative composer and inventor (he invented the Broadwood grand piano, an example of which was sent to Beethoven, who cherished it)--and who was, as shines through the cracks of bare historical narrative, an irresistibly attractive personality. Evidently, to know him him was to love him, even when he grew enormously fat, as he did once his youth was past. But as a twenty-something he ignited passions in the royalest and most imperial of "bosoms" (a polite way of saying "cooch" when referring to the locus amoris of Catherine II of Russia)--and the story of the fair Bohemian's having to flee Russia just ahead of Catherine's secret police, is amusing enough, knowing what we [apparently do] know about her insatiable lubricity, but hilarious when we imagine how Casanova would have told it.

That's a portrait of Dussek looking Heavenward, at the bottom near the text, and above it are the people known to have loved, or at least extremely liked him, from Catherine the Lascivious, through Marie Antoinette (who, notably being a harpist, probably appreciated him as a composer for that instrument), John Broadwood (whose portrait appears twice because I have not yet mastered the knack of removing pictures once I've posted them) and Prince von Metternich, who really appears to have had a Henry V/Falstaff bromance with him. The tiny little picture you almost can't see is Beethoven.

Sunday morning opera--Handel's Deidamia

¡Tunes Classical Radio is certainly delivering the goods this morning: Deidamia, the Master's last Italian opera in London, performed by Alan Curtis's Complesso Barocco, with singers Handel would have killed for. And, par surcroît, while just poking among the available criticism and background information on the Net, suddenly there popped up--ardently wished for, but all unbidden--the libretto to read along with it. So I'm in clover. Ma se ne avessi la partitura! O se ne potessi guardare una produzione teatricale ottocentista--con le alte piume ondeggianti sulle teste dei personaggi eroici....When I die perhaps, and go to Heaven.

But anyway, thinking that after all the copyright would have lapsed...just a little more Googling led me in fact to the very score--and I was able to read the words and music to the whole last act. Mirabile dictu! My god, the wonders of the age of the personal computer and the Internet!