The Organ

[RA1]

On 8/21/2018 at 12:47 AM, MsGuy said:

Me, if I had any say so over the matter, I'd have the Welfares check out the kid for abuse, look for scars, healed bone breaks and the like. It takes a world of beatings to get a 3 year old to practice his violin 10 hours a day.

As for the Flensburg bunch, their actions don't seem substantially more delusional than ole Jeff Davis, Marse Robert and that lot in the closing days of the American War Between the States. Remember Lee was fleeing to the mountains to carry on the war and only stopped when he was surrounded by 3 Union armies any one of which was capable of smashing what was left of his starving army. God knows how many men of the Army of Northern Virginia were killed in furtherance of his pointless,  absolutely senseless efforts to escape after the fall of Richmond.  And Davis had this truly daft notion  of rallying folks to the cause from some redoubt in Alabama.

People who have long persisted in some  monumentally stupid error that totally and irretrievably fucks up EVERYTHING for EVERYBODY often find it difficult to face reality.

What do you mean by the closing days of the war?

The war of yankee aggression is not settled yet.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

RA1, just maybe you skipped reading my last sentence.

Bless your heart, no doubt it's my fault for posting that distracting pigeon cartoon.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

 

[lookin]

52 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

 

[RA1]

On 8/26/2018 at 5:49 PM, MsGuy said:

RA1, just maybe you skipped reading my last sentence.

Bless your heart, no doubt it's my fault for posting that distracting pigeon cartoon.

I know you live in the Magnolia State so whether in agreement or not, you certainly know about what I am talking.  OTOH, pigeons are abundant hereabout and likely I have been exposed to histoplasmosis. 

PS- My heart has been blessed so many times I fear it will live forever (AS - you can try this also).

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

4 hours ago, RA1 said:

PS- My heart has been blessed so many times I fear it will live forever

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

 

 

[lookin]

An older piece perhaps?  I hear the bloom is off the rose.  

[AdamSmith]

4 hours ago, lookin said:

An older piece perhaps?  I hear the bloom is off the rose.  

This is closer to the version of him that I had to study under, there in 1980. (But close enough!)

Nowhere near the beneficent grandfather figure shown in my vids here of him in his late 80s.

Thank Yahweh!

[AdamSmith]

Just now, AdamSmith said:

This is closer to the version of him that I had to study under, there in 1980.

Nowhere near the beneficent grandfather figure shown in my vids here of him in his late 80s.(But close enough!)

Thank Yahweh!

 

[AdamSmith]

18 hours ago, lookin said:

An older piece perhaps?  I hear the bloom is off the rose.  

LMAO

Occurs one could say the same thing this way...

The rose is off the bloom.

[AdamSmith]

Our current national situation is 'deadly, but not serious,' as they say.

Nor particularly new.

A RATIONAL ANTHEM
by Ambrose Bierce

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of felony,

        Of thee I sing--
 

Land where my fathers fried

Young witches and applied

Whips to the Quaker's hide

        And made him spring.

 

My knavish country, thee,

Land where the thief is free,

        Thy laws I love;
 

I love they thieving bills

That tap the people's tills;

I love thy mob whose will's

        All laws above.

Let Federal employees

And rings rob all they please,

        The whole year long.
 

Let office-holders make

Their piles and judges rake

Our coin. For Jesus' sake

        Let's all go wrong!

http://www.longwood.edu/staff/lynchrl/Fall2005/Bierce2.htm

[AdamSmith]

Saving Hart Crane

AUGUST 31, 2011 |  BY DAVID DUDLEY

On our second meeting, I tell John Irwin that I’ve been busy reading his favorite poet, Hart Crane. Like most civilians in the provinces outside university literature programs, I’d had scant experience with Crane, an American poet of huge ambition and unsteady temperament who died in 1932 at the age of 32. He left behind a small, knotty body of work that is invariably described as “difficult.” That’s enough to scare off most casual readers. Some people passionately love Hart Crane. Others consider his work either grandly flawed or completely terrible. And a great many in-betweens vaguely recognize the man’s name, wonder if he’s related to Stephen Crane (he’s not), but have never actually read his poems.

That’s where I was, but now I’d just spent a week with Crane’s verse. It’s, well, it’s something—ornate, overstuffed, as rich and dense as a flourless chocolate cake. “Did you like it?” Irwin asks. There’s eagerness in his voice.

Hart Crane is John Irwin’s enduring literary love. In the late 1960s, he wrote his dissertation at Rice University on Crane’s “logic of metaphor,” the poet’s own term for his screwball technique of rendering lines such as these:

While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide . . .

Since 1970, when he arrived at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in the Department of English, Irwin has taught a graduate seminar on the poetry of Crane, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. And this fall, he’ll publish a book of criticism, Hart Crane’s Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press), that focuses largely on Crane’s maybe-masterwork, The Bridge. By Irwin’s reckoning, it’s the first new book of criticism on Crane’s poetry to be published in decades. Irwin has been working on it, off and on, for 41 years.

Its central argument is straightforward enough: The Bridge, a 1,254-line ode to the Brooklyn Bridge that took Crane more than seven years to write and was received with mixed to hostile reviews, is the best 20th-century long poem written in the English language—“and not by a little,” Irwin declares. “By a lot.”

That’s a claim bold enough to stir the hearts of Hart Crane aficionados worldwide, even as it bucks a critical consensus that has long consigned The Bridge to the close-but-no-cigar shelf. At stake is Crane’s literary reputation, and maybe a chunk of Irwin’s, too. But its author seems like he would be happy just to rally a few more readers to Hart Crane’s side.

I quickly assure Irwin that I did indeed like The Bridge. And I wasn’t lying, exactly. But the full truth, as it often is with Hart Crane, is a little more complicated.

HOW DO YOU take 41 years to write a book?

“I write very slowly,” says Irwin. “And I got sidetracked.”

The longer answer is that Irwin established himself with dual appointments in the Department of English and the Writing Seminars, where he has alternated between writing and teaching literary criticism and producing his own poetry under his pen name/alter ego John Bricuth. For 19 years Irwin served as chairman of the Writing Seminars, stepping down in 1996 to return to full-time teaching. His literary criticism has covered William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jorge Luis Borges. But through it all has been Hart Crane.

Irwin first found Crane as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. “I was under the thrall of T.S. Eliot then—he was the arbiter of all things good in poetry,” he says. “But he wasn’t quite American enough. Like Pound, he was a faux European.” Irwin, Texas-raised and still disarmingly plainspoken (a favorite expression: “Golly!”), heard something familiar in Crane’s words. “I thought, ‘This is what American poetry sounds like.’ You fall in love with the sound of his language.”

That’s often how it is with Crane fans. Harold Bloom, the Yale critic who is among Crane’s most outspoken defenders, has long said that his life as a reader of poetry began with the preadolescent discovery of these (mystifying) words in the Bronx library:

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return . . .

In a Paris Review interview, Bloom enthused that “[Crane] writes each lyric in such a way that you literally feel he’s going to die if he can’t bring it off.”

Which, of course, is more or less what happened. Crane’s short life was a train wreck—a teenage suicide attempt, followed by bitter estrangements from his mother, a Christian Scientist, and his father, a well-to-do Cleveland candy maker who disapproved of his son’s habits. Living as a semi-closeted gay man on the fringes of the cultural limelight in New York and Europe, Crane had affairs with sailors, drank too much, got in fights, and couldn’t hold a job. “Crane thought that if he couldn’t live exclusively as a poet, then he didn’t want to live,” Irwin says. “He was given to it completely, wanting almost to maintain an ancient sense of the role of the poet—that it was the highest calling in a culture, and if the culture couldn’t support somebody like that, then they didn’t deserve to have poets.”

Armed with a high school education and a fevered sense of his own abilities, Crane stormed the literary world with his first collection of poems, White Buildings, which was hailed as a promising, if somewhat undisciplined, exercise in Whitmanesque lyrical abandon. For its follow-up, he doubled down on the lyricism and added an epic theme. He conceived The Bridge in sweeping terms—a response to Eliot’s The Waste Land that would meet that poet’s doomy modernity with all-American pluck. He chose as its central image the heroic structure outside his apartment window, and he invested it with a heavy symbolic burden. The bridge of The Bridge was to span time and space—Crane celebrated the technological achievements of the 20th century, marveling at elevators and zeppelins and subways, while simultaneously invoking a vanished pre-European world. Jostling for attention amid the book’s 15 component poems is a cast of characters that includes Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas, and the Wright brothers. Crane promised in a 1923 letter that this yet-unwritten work would be nothing less than a “mystical synthesis of ‘America.’” He then wrapped this enormous collection of ideas in a purplish mash-up of Elizabethan and Jazz Age language.

. . . Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.

By most accounts, he failed—spectacularly. Crane’s friend and literary supporter, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, called The Bridge “a public catastrophe” in a prominent magazine review. “Fragmentary, ejaculatory, and overexcited.” Winters dismissed one short poem in the book, “Indiana,” as “probably one of the worst poems in modern literature.”

His confidence shattered, two years later Crane jumped off a ship.

In Irwin’s view, the suicide served only to validate those critics’ view of Crane’s life and work—as a “magnificent failure” by an overmatched writer. Langdon Hammer, a Yale scholar who edited the Library of America’s recent collection of Crane’s complete work, hears echoes of that judgment today when critics debate the bona fides of The Bridge. In 2007, poet William Logan reviewed the collected Crane in the New York Times, a rollicking hatchet job (“Reading The Bridge is like being stuck in a mawkish medley from Show Boatand Oklahoma!—you’d buy the Brooklyn Bridge to make it stop”) that infuriated Crane partisans. “That view that Logan repeats has been around since the 1930s: ‘He’s a great lyric poet, but he made a huge mistake in trying to write an epic,’” Hammer says. To Hammer, the mere fact that people are still having this argument, 80 years later, means that the guy was onto something: “Crane still provokes people in important ways.”

And, as much as some fans might balk at the notion, Crane’s ability to make poetry will forever be judged by the ways he failed to conduct his life. “It’s poetry bound up in a life that was dedicated to poetry in a way that very few lives have been,” Hammer says. “Crane’s life and the legend of his life are part of the work. You can’t view him in this disinterested light. That’s why he goes on haunting people. There’s a great deal at stake in his poetry. It resists ordinary critical analysis.”

TO IRWIN, THE problem was simple: The critics didn’t get it. Sometimes he didn’t get it, either. “There are poems that I love, but I can’t tell you what they mean,” he admits.

But, over the years—and then decades—he applied himself to the task of seeing the world from Hart Crane’s eyes. He not only read the writer’s correspondence, he tracked down books Crane mentions in his letters, from sailing histories to Greek mythology. The aim was to study the world as Crane, a first-order autodidact, studied it.

One of Irwin’s key arguments, for example, is that Crane borrowed heavily from art and architecture, modeling the poem’s structure on paintings by El Greco and Michelangelo’s frescoes for the Sistine Chapel. Poring through letters, he detects the influence on The Bridge of historian Oswald Spengler’s account of the development of Renaissance painting in the 1918 book The Decline of the West, then much discussed in cultural circles, and speculates that Crane was further inspired by a 1925 story in the New York Times about the discovery of Michelangelo’s self-portrait amid the tortured figures in The Last Judgment. In short, Irwin reassembles the emotional universe that created The Bridge, putting the pieces of Crane’s unruly life back together and showing us how this person created that poem. Hammer calls it “a work of imaginative scholarship.”

It also shows a new side of the artist; instead of an unhinged wild man, Irwin’s Crane is a fastidious builder. “Crane is simply not credited with being a deep and systematic thinker. That’s what John’s done,” says Hammer. “He’s written a book from Crane’s point of view that supports the view Crane himself had. It’s the counterargument that Crane would have made.”

Placing the reader inside the poet’s head does more than just shed light on some of his more impenetrable passages. It makes you a party to his cause. You see how the bad reviews must have stung the poor guy. Some of the critics who turned their knives on Crane once raved about his gift. Where’d it go? What happened? And what writer hasn’t known the secret terror that one day no one will like, or get, what you’re trying to do?

And that’s when Hart Crane becomes less an insufferable gasbag and more a tragic hero, the kind of mythic personality that filled his poetry. And the poetry itself sounds better, too. Once-overripe lines sing with purpose; logic emerges from the verbiage. Crane isn’t always more readable after one absorbs Irwin’s book, but he seems more important, more human.

Making the case that a willfully difficult artist is worth reading, says Hammer, can do more than just burnish one obscure poet’s faded star. “Hart Crane’s career raises all kinds of questions about what poetry can do, and about what poetry is,” he says. “Is poetry an experience, or a reflection of an experience? Does it deal with the future or the past? Can private perception become public communication? Is poetry something to be lived? Can it make a world, or does it just mirror one?”

Somewhere amid all those existential mysteries lie far simpler questions: Is it any good? Did you like it?

Irwin hopes so. And all the lit crit tools he deploys in his renovation of The Bridge shouldn’t distract from that goal. “I gauge a work of art,” he says, “by its ability to break my heart.”

David Dudley, A&S ’90, a graduate of the Writing Seminars, is a writer and editor based in Baltimore.

https://magazine.jhu.edu/2011/08/31/saving-hart-crane/

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

From Figaro To Don Giovanni

In spite of his success as a pianist and composer, Mozart had serious financial worries, and they worsened as the famously fickle Viennese found other idols. One may calculate his likely income during his last five years, 1786–91, as being far larger than that of most musicians though much below that of the section of society with which he wanted to be associated; Leopold’s early advice to be aloof (“like an Englishman”) with his fellow musicians but friendly with the aristocracy had its price. His sense of being as good a man as any privileged nobleman led him and his wife into tastes that for his actual station in life, and his income, were extravagant. He saw a court appointment as a possible source of salvation but knew that the Italian musical influence at court, under the Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, was powerful and exclusive—even if he and Salieri were never on less than friendly terms personally.

 

Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)Cherubino's aria “Voi che sapete” in Act II of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro(The Marriage of Figaro), K 492; from a 1950 recording featuring soprano Sena Jurinac and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan.© Cefidom/Encyclopædia Universalis

Success in the court opera house was all-important. Joseph II had now reverted to Italian opera, and since 1783 Mozart had been seeking suitable librettos (he had even started work on two but broke off when he came to realize their feebleness for his purpose). He had become acquainted with Lorenzo Da Ponte, an Italian abbé-adventurer of Jewish descent who was a talented poet and librettist to the court theatre. At Mozart’s suggestion he wrote a libretto, Le nozze di Figaro, based on Beaumarchais’s revolutionary comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro, but with most of the political sting removed. Nonetheless, the music of Figaro makes the social distinctions clear. Figaro, as well as the later opera Don Giovanni, treats the traditional figure of the licentious nobleman, but the earlier work does so on a more directly comic plane even though the undercurrents of social tension run stronger. Perhaps the central achievement of Figaro lies in its ensembles with their close link between music and dramatic meaning. The Act 3 Letter Duet, for instance, has a realistic representation of dictation with the reading back as a condensed recapitulation. The act finales, above all, show a broad, symphonic organization with each section worked out as a unit; for example, in the B-flat section of the Act 2 finale the tension of the count’s examination of Figaro is paralleled in the tonal scheme, with its return to the tonic only when the final question is resolved: a telling conjunction of music and drama. These features, coupled with the elaborate commentary on character and action that is embodied in the orchestral writing, add depth to the situations and seriousness to their resolution and set the work apart from the generality of Italian opere buffe.

Illustration (c. 1914) of a scene from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (1787), in which Don Giovanni attempts to seduce Zerlina.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages

Figaro reached the stage on May 1, 1786, and was warmly received. There were nine performances in 1786 and a further 26 when it was revived in 1789–90—a success, but a modest one compared with certain operas of Martín y Soler and Giovanni Paisiello (to whose Il barbiere di Siviglia it was a sequel, and planned in direct competition). The opera did, however, enjoy outstanding popularity in Prague, and at the end of the year Mozart was invited to go to the Bohemian capital; he went in January 1787 and gave a new symphony there, the Prague (K 504), a demanding work that reflects his admiration for the capabilities of that city’s musicians. After accepting a further operatic commission for Prague, he returned to Vienna in February 1787.

The characters Susanna (left) and Cherubino in a scene from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro.Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images

Mozart’s concert activities in Vienna were now on a modest scale. No Viennese appearances at all are recorded for 1787. In April he heard that his father was gravely ill. Mozart wrote him a letter of consolation putting forward a view of death (“this best and truest friend of mankind”) based on the teachings of Freemasonry, which he had embraced at the end of 1784. Leopold died in May 1787.

Mozart’s music from this time includes the two string quintets K 515–516, arguably his supreme chamber works. Clearly this genre, with the opportunities it offered for richness of sonority and patterns of symmetry, had a particular appeal for him. The quintet in C Major (K 515) is the most expansive and most richly developed of all his chamber works, while the G Minor (K 516) has always been recognized for its depth of feeling, which in the circumstances it is tempting to regard as elegiac. From this period come a number of short but appealing lieder and three instrumental works of note: the Musikalischer Spass (Musical Joke), a good-humoured parody of bad music, in a vein Leopold would have liked (it was thought to have been provoked by his death until it was found that it was begun much earlier); Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the exquisite and much-loved serenade, probably intended for solo strings and written for a purpose that remains unknown (though it has been speculated that it was performed during the musical gatherings hosted by Gottfried von Jacquin); and a fine piano and violin sonata, K 526.

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  Mozart, W.A.: Don GiovanniRecitativo “Orsù, spicciati presto” (“Come on now, hurry up”) from Act I, scene 4, of Mozart's Don Giovanni; from a 2001 recording by the Hungarian Radio Chorus and Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia, conducted by Michael Halász and featuring Bo Skovhus as Don Giovanni and Renato Girolami as Leporello.Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.
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  Mozart, W.A.: Don GiovanniThe aria “Madamina, il catalogo e questo” (“My dear lady, this is a list”); from Act I, scene 5, of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787); from a 2001 studio recording by the Hungarian Radio Chorus and the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia, conducted by Michael Halász, featuring Renato Girolami as Leporello.Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.

But Mozart’s chief occupation during 1787 was the composition of Don Giovanni, commissioned for production in Prague; it was given on October 29 and warmly received. Don Giovanniwas Mozart’s second opera based on a libretto by Da Ponte, who used as his model a libretto by Giovanni Bertati, set by Giuseppe Gazzaniga for Venice earlier in 1787. Da Ponte rewrote the libretto, inserting new episodes into the one-act original, which explains certain structural features. A difference in Mozart’s approach to the work—a dramma giocoso in the tradition of Carlo Goldoni that, because of its more serious treatment of character, had a greater expressive potential than an opera buffa—is seen in the extended spans of the score, with set-piece numbers often running into one another. As in Figaro, the two act finales are again remarkable: the first for the three stage bands that play dances for different social segments—a suggested social compatibility that is shattered by the Don’s attempted rape of the peasant Zerlina—the second for the supper scene in which the commendatore’s statue consigns Giovanni to damnation, with trombones to suggest the supernatural and with hieratic dotted rhythms, extreme chromaticism, and wildly lurching harmony as Giovanni is overcome. But it remains a comic opera, as is made clear through the figure of Leporello, who from under a table offers the common man’s wry or facetious observations; and at the end the surviving characters draw the moral in a cheerful sextet that has seemed jarring to later sensibilities more ready to identify with the rebellious Giovanni than with the restoration of social order that the sextet celebrates. The “demonic” character of the opera has caused it to exercise a special fascination for audiences, and it has given rise to a large critical, interpretative, and sometimes purely fanciful literature.

 

The Last Travels

On his return from Prague in mid-November 1787, Mozart was at last appointed to a court post, as Kammermusicus, in place of Gluck, who had died. It was largely a sinecure, the only requirement being that he should supply dance music for court balls, which he did, in abundance and with some distinction, over his remaining years. The salary of 800 gulden seems to have done little to relieve the Mozarts’ chronic financial troubles. Their debts, however, were never large, and they were always able to continue employing servants and owning a carriage; their anxieties were more a matter of whether they could live as they wished than whether they would starve. In 1788 a series of letters begging loans from a fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg, began; Puchberg usually obliged, and Mozart seems generally to have repaid him promptly. He was deeply depressed during the summer, writing of “black thoughts”; it has been suggested that he may have had a cyclothymic personality, linked with manic-depressive tendencies, which could explain not only his depression but also other aspects of his behaviour, including his spells of hectic creativity.

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  Mozart, Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K 543Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K 543; from a 1936 recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. This concert, which took place in Ludwigshafen, Ger., was the occasion of the first tape recording of an orchestra.Courtesy of Shirley, Lady Beecham
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  Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K 551 (Jupiter)Excerpt from the first movement, “Allegro vivace,” of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K 551 (Jupiter); from a 1953 recording by the Dresden Staatskapelle conducted by Franz Konwitschny.© Cefidom/Encyclopædia Universalis

During the time of this depression Mozart was working on a series of three symphonies, in E-flat Major (K 543), G Minor (K 550), and C Major (the Jupiter, K 551), usually numbered 39, 40, and 41; these, with the work written for Prague (K 504), represent the summa of his orchestral output. It is not known why they were composed; possibly Mozart had a summer concert season in mind. The Prague work was a climax to his long series of brilliant D Major orchestral pieces, but the closely worked, even motivic form gives it a new power and unity, adding particular force to its frequently dark tone. The E-flat Major work, scored with clarinets and more lyrical in temper, makes fewer departures, except in the intensity of its slow movement, where Mozart used a new palette of darker orchestral colours, and the epigrammatic wit of its finale. In the G Minor work the tone of passion and perhaps of pathos, in its constant falling figures, is still more pronounced. The Jupiter(the name dates from the early 19th century) summarized the series of C Major symphonies, with their atmosphere of military pomp and ceremony, but it went far beyond them in its assimilation of opera buffa style, profundity of expression (in its andante), and richness of working—especially in the finale, which incorporates fugal procedures and ends with a grand apotheosis in five-voice fugal counterpoint.

Early in 1789 Mozart accepted an invitation to travel to Berlin with Prince Karl Lichnowsky; they paused in Prague, Dresden(where he played at court), and Leipzig (where he improvised on the Thomaskirche organ). He appeared at the Prussian court and probably was invited to compose piano sonatas for the princess and string quartets with a prominent cello part for King Friedrich Wilhelm II. He did in fact write three quartets, in parts of which he allowed the individual instruments (including the royal cello) special prominence, and there is one sonata (his last, K 576) that may have been intended for the Prussian princess. But it is unlikely that Mozart ever sent this music or was paid for it.

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  Mozart, W.A.: Così fan tutteThe recitativo “Sorella, cosa dici?” (“Sister, what do you say?”), from Act II, scene 1, of Mozart's Così fan tutte (1790); from a 1990 recording featuring the Capella Istropolitana and the Slovak Philharmonic Chorus, conducted by Johannes Wildner and featuring Joanna Borowska as Fiordiligi and Rohangiz Yachmi as Dorabella.Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.
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  Mozart, W.A.: Così fan tutteThe aria “Donne mie la fate a tanti a tanti” (“Dear ladies, you treat so many thus”), from Act II, scene 2, of Mozart's Così fan tutte; from a 1990 recording featuring the Capella Istropolitana and the Slovak Philharmonic Chorus, conducted by Johannes Wildner and featuring Andrea Martin as Guglielmo.Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.

The summer saw the composition of the clarinet quintet, in which a true chamber style is warmly and gracefully reconciledwith the solo writing. Thereafter Mozart concentrated on completing his next opera commission, the third of his Da Ponte operas, Così fan tutte, which was given on January 26, 1790; its run was interrupted after five performances when theatres closed because of the death of Joseph II, but a further five were given in the summer. This opera, the subtlest, most consistent, and most symmetrical of the three, was long reviled (from Beethoven onward) on account of its subject, female fickleness; but a more careful reading of it, especially in light of the emotional texture of the music, which gains complexity as the plot progresses, makes it clear that it is no frivolous piece but a penetrating essay on human feelings and their mature recognition. The music of Act 1 is essentially conventional in expression, and conventional feeling is tellingly parodied in certain of the arias; but the arias of Act 2 are on a deeper and more personal level. Features of the music of Così fan tutte—serenity, restraint, poise, irony—may be noted as markers of Mozart’s late style, which had developed since 1787 and may be linked with his personal development and the circumstances of his life, including his Masonic associations, his professional and financial situation, and his marriage.

The year 1790 was difficult and unproductive: besides Così fan tutte, Mozart completed two of the “Prussian” quartets, arranged works by Handel for performance at van Swieten’s house (he had similarly arranged Messiah in 1789), and wrote the first of his two fantasy-like pieces, in a variety of prelude-and-fugue form, for a mechanical organ (this imposing work, in F Minor [K 594], is now generally played on a normal organ). In the autumn, anxious to be noticed in court circles, he went to Frankfurt for the imperial coronation of Leopold II, but as an individual rather than a court musician. His concert, which included two piano concertos and possibly one of the new symphonies, was ill timed, poorly attended, and a financial failure. Anxieties about money were a recurrent theme in his letters home.

 

The Last Year

But 1791 promised to be a better year. Music was flowing again: for a concert in March Mozart completed a piano concerto (K 595) begun some years before, reeled off numerous dances for the Redoutensaal, and wrote two new string quintets, the one in D (K 593) being a work of particular refinement and subtlety. In April he applied successfully for the role of unpaid assistant to the elderly Kapellmeister of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Leopold Hofmann (with the expectation of being duly appointed his successor, but Hofmann was to live until 1793).

 

Mozart, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute)Queen of the Night's aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” in Act II of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K 620; from a 1950 recording featuring soprano Wilma Lipp and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.© Cefidom/Encyclopædia Universalis

An old friend of Mozart’s, Emanuel Schikaneder, had in 1789 set up a company to perform singspiels in a suburban theatre, and in 1791 he engaged Mozart to compose a score to his Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute); Mozart worked on it during the spring and early summer. Then he received another commission, anonymously delivered, for a requiem, to be composed under conditions of secrecy. In addition he was invited, probably in July, to write the opera to be given during Leopold II’s coronation festivities in September. Constanze was away taking a cure at Baden during much of the summer and autumn; in July she gave birth to their sixth child, one of the two to survive (Carl Thomas, 1784–1858, and Franz Xaver Wolfgang, 1791–1844, a composer and pianist). Mozart’s letters to her show that he worked first on Die Zauberflöte, although he must have written some of the Prague opera, La clemenza di Tito (“The Clemency of Titus”), before he left for the Bohemian capital near the end of August. Pressure of work, however, was such that he took with him to Prague, along with Constanze, his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who almost certainly composed the plain recitatives for the new opera. The work itself, to an old libretto by Pietro Metastasio, condensed and supplemented by the Dresden court poet Caterino Mazzolà, was long dismissed as a product of haste and a commission unwillingly undertaken; but in fact the spare scoring, the short arias, and the generally restrained style are better understood in terms of Mozart’s reaction to the neoclassical thinking of the time and the known preferences of Leopold II. The opera was indifferently received by the court but quickly won over the Prague audiences and went on to become one of Mozart’s most admired works over the ensuing decades.

 

Mozart, Concerto for Clarinet in A Major, K 622Second movement, “Adagio,” of Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet in A Major, K 622; from a 1953 recording featuring clarinetist Leopold Wlach and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski.© Cefidom/Encyclopædia Universalis

Mozart was back in Vienna by the middle of September; his clarinet concerto was finished by September 29, and the next day Die Zauberflöte had its premiere. Again, early reactions were cautious, but soon the opera became the most loved of all of Mozart’s works for the stage. Schikaneder took its plot from a collection of fairy tales by Christoph Martin Wieland but drew too on other literary sources and on current thinking about Freemasonry—all viewed in the context of Viennese popular theatre. Musically it is distinguished from contemporary singspiels not merely by the quality of its music but also by the serious ideas that lie below what may seem to be merely childish pantomime or low comedy, welding together the stylistically diverse elements.

 

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Requiem in D Minor, K 626“Dies Irae” from Mozart's Requiem in D Minor, K 626; from a 1953 recording by the Chamber Chorus of the Vienna Academy of Music conducted by Hermann Scherchen.© Cefidom/Encyclopædia Universalis

Mozart had been ill during the weeks in Prague, but to judge by his letters to Constanze in October he was in good spirits and, with some cause, more optimistic about the future. He wrote a Masonic cantata for his lodge and directed a performance of it on November 18. He was also working steadily on the commissioned requiem. Later in November he was ill and confined to bed; some apparent improvement on December 3 was not sustained, and on December 5 he died. “Severe miliary fever” was the certified cause; later, “rheumatic inflammatory fever” was named. Other diagnoses, taking account of Mozart’s medical history, have been put forward, including Schönlein–Henoch syndrome. There is no evidence to support the tale that he was poisoned by Salieri (a colleague and friend, hardly a real rival) or anyone else. He was buried in a multiple grave, standard at the time in Vienna for a person of his social and financial situation; a small group of friends attended the funeral.

Constanze Mozart was anxious to have the requiem completed, as a fee was due; it had been commissioned, in memory of his wife, by Count von Walsegg-Stuppach to pass off as his own. She handed it first to Joseph Eybler, who supplied some orchestration but was reluctant to do more, and then to Süssmayr, who produced a complete version, writing several movements himself though possibly basing them on Mozart’s sketches or instructions. Subject to criticism for its egregioustechnical and expressive weaknesses (particularly glaring in the “Sanctus/Benedictus”), this has nevertheless remained the standard version of the work, if only because of its familiarity. The sombre grandeur of the work, with its restrained instrumental colouring and its noble choral writing, hints at what might have been had Mozart lived to take on the Kapellmeistership of St. Stephen’s.

 

Mozart’s Place

At the time of his death Mozart was widely regarded not only as the greatest composer of the time but also as a bold and “difficult” one; Don Giovanni especially was seen as complex and dissonant, and his chamber music as calling for outstanding skill in its interpreters. His surviving manuscripts, which included many unpublished works, were mostly sold by Constanze to the firm of André in Offenbach, which issued editions during the 19th century. But Mozart’s reputation was such that even before the end of the 18th century two firms had embarked on substantial collected editions of his music. Important biographies appeared in 1798 and 1828, the latter by Constanze’s second husband; the first scholarly biography, by Otto Jahn, was issued on Mozart’s centenary in 1856. The first edition of the Köchel catalog followed six years later, and the first complete edition of his music began in 1877.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages

The works most secure in the repertory during the 19th century were the three operas least susceptible to changes in public taste—Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte—and the orchestral works closest in spirit to the Romantic era—the minor-key piano concertos (Beethoven wrote a set of cadenzas for the one in D Minor) and the last three symphonies. It was only in the 20th century that Mozart’s music began to be reexamined more broadly. Although up to the middle of the century Mozart was still widely regarded as having been surpassed in most respects by Beethoven, with the increased historical perspective of the later 20th century he came to be seen as an artist of a formidable, indeed perhaps unequaled, expressive range. The traditional image of the child prodigy turned refined drawing-room composer, who could miraculously conceive an entire work in his head before setting pen to paper (always a distortion of the truth), gave way to the image of the serious and painstaking creative artist with acutehuman insight, whose complex psychology demanded exploration by writers, historians, and scholars. The 1980 play Amadeus (written by Peter Shaffer) and especially its film version of 1984 (directed by Miloš Forman), although they did much to promote interest in Mozart, reinforced certain myths—i.e., that even as an adult Mozart remained an inappropriately childish vessel for divinely inspired music and that his premature death was brought about by Salieri. Yet even in this indulgent appropriation of Mozart’s legacy, his full-blooded humanity at times emerges with haunting vividness.

Stanley SadieThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart

[kjun12]

Please excuse me and I'm not trying to be smart.  What is the reason/purpose of these posts?

[AdamSmith]

9 minutes ago, kjun12 said:

Please excuse me and I'm not trying to be smart.  What is the reason/purpose of these posts?

The topic/content is interering to me, so I wanted to share it here with others who may enjoy it.

If it is not to your liking, do pass it by.

[Tartegogo]

Well at least Adam keeps everything under 1 thread.

It suits me better than Avalon on M4M who creates a new thread for each topic of interest to him. That is easily 10 new threads per day. 

[AdamSmith]

On 8/29/2018 at 8:41 PM, AdamSmith said:

Our current national situation is 'deadly, but not serious,' as they say.

Nor particularly new.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/09/05/woodward-book-trump-dons-take-ctn-vpx.cnn

[AdamSmith]

'Jonathan Frid - Father Figure'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiM8H-PV4WM

[AdamSmith]