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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Anti-Disgrace"

7 Comments -

1 – 7 of 7
Anonymous robert61 said...

Actually, I think it was the 1994 Tim Allen movie that "codified the American Santa Clause".

10/1/09, 3:16 AM

Anonymous dearieme said...

V droll - like an Opera, really.

10/1/09, 3:35 AM

Blogger Dutch Boy said...

Coincidentally, I was just reading a biography of John von Neumann, the brilliant Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who also was a deathbed convert to Catholicism (to the shock of his friends). To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the imminent prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.

10/1/09, 8:08 AM

Blogger albertosaurus said...

Yes, yes. My other favorite web columnist Mark Steyn writes that opera, unlike his beloved Broadway Musical, only recognizes the musician not the librettist. Or as the title to Salieri's opera says Prima la musica poi le parole.

That's not so. Mozart had five hits and three of them were from the pen of Da Ponte. Da Ponte also wrote the libretto for Martin y Soler's Una Cosa Rara which ran Le Nozze off the boards in Vienna. That work is largely unknown today - that means it's not on YouTube - but I've been trying to get someone to mount a local production.

Why were the Da Ponte operas so popular? One reason is that they they were sexy. Another is that they had rich and colorful characters and situations - unlike most of Mozart's earlier works.

Malcolm Gladwell claims that Mozart wasn't a prodigy. He says Mozart never wrote anything of any originality until he was into his twenties. He couldn't be more wrong. Mozart wrote Mitridate, Re di Ponto when he was just fourteeen. He didn't just crank it out. He adjusted it to the singers he had available. d'Ettore - the lead tenor - made him rewrite one aria five times. The music he wrote at fouteen is genius but it is not popular.

Mozart needed Da Ponte. Mitridate was written for castrati. Today sometimes they use countertenors but usually just female sopranos. This means that the opera has essentially one tenor and four sopranos. No baritones, no basses, no contraltos. There are also no comic characters, no choruses, and no ensembles (duets or trios). It is just a succession of solos sung by high voices. One other thing, uncut Mitridate is six hours long.

Da Ponte gave Mozart the libretti that made him an immortal.

10/1/09, 8:41 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Off-topic, but many thanks to whichever iSteve reader pointed us towards Second City Cop - that site might be even more addictive than iSteve.

Those guys are on the front lines of the demographics war [which we are in the process of losing, and losing badly] - and wow, to a man, they are some of the most straightforward, forthright, brutally cynical SOBs that I have ever read in my life [and that's even after their Komment Kontrol has censored out the best -er- the "worst" of them].

10/1/09, 12:59 PM

Blogger Grumpy Old Man said...

A true picaresque novel.

Made my day.

10/1/09, 2:15 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Malcolm Gladwell claims that Mozart wasn't a prodigy. He says Mozart never wrote anything of any originality until he was into his twenties"

Good God there goes my plan to read anything that fool ever wrote.

Of course the vast majority of Mozart's production was not particularly original, before or after his twenties. What bearing does that have on whether or not he was a prodigy? All composition consists primarily in copying one's predecessors. The only consistently original of the great composers was Haydn, though perhaps Beethoven too, to a lesser degree.

Besides which, Mozart was I believe nineteen when he wrote the Turkish violin concerto, are we supposed to believe that one is "unoriginal"?

10/2/09, 1:49 AM

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