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editor
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 Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 4:08 pm Post subject: Österreich Austrian Flutters |
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Republik Österreich Austrian Flutters:
Mozart
Hardcover
By Peter Gay
Our artful look at famous Austriangamblers begins right at the top of the heap, if we may make so bold, with our favorite biography, the best, in our view, in the sublime Penguin LIVES series, of Joannes Christostomos Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, a musical over-achiever born in Salzburg, a busy middle-class mercantile centre Mozart simply loathed select a rude noise.
| Quote: | | For all his active life as a composer and performer, Mozart despised his native city; it was, to him, nothing but a backwater and worse. He lamented what he judged to be his desperate servitude in Salzburg - too angry to appreciate that Colloredo had permitted him and his father to be absent from their posts literally for years. Considering the many leaves he had granted the Mozarts, the archbishop, though given to impetuous anger, must have thought of himself as an indulgent master and of the Mozarts as the embodiment of ingratitude. But Leopold Mozart, like his son, saw only his family's grievances and the fleshpots of courts and capitals abroad. (-- p. 51) |
Even worse, the city suffered from its proximity to an imposing Vienna, another splendid-looking place the composer detested and which, in turn, treated him rather badly, if the truth be told.
| Quote: | Admittedly the Hapsburg establishment did little for him. In November 1787, Mozart was appointed Kammermusicus at the court of Joseph II. He had his foot in the imperial door at last, but the plum was small and sour; it helped less than he had hoped. His duties were minimal - to supply dances for an annual ball at the Redoutensaal - but so was his salary: eight hundred florins a year. "Too much for what I do," he is reported to have said bitterly, "too little for what I could do." He could not help knowing that Gluck, who had held this post until his recent death, had received the munificent salary of two thousand florins. This was another blow to his self-respect, to what he called his "credit."
No wonder that through the years, the Viennese have had to swallow the reproach that their callous indifference to the city's greatest genius allowed him to drop into shameful poverty and to be buried in an anonymous pauper's grave! (emphasis added). (-- p. 87) |
| Quote: | | What had happened to Mozart's state of mind? Apart from a few touching outbursts about his travail, Mozart was not very introspective, at least not on paper. He had no doubt good reasons for sober reflections about his spending habits. His inability to hold on to money was incurable. In March 1785, visiting in Vienna, Leopold Mozart told Nannerl that his son had disposable funds and that his household, as far as food and drink were concerned, was run quite economically. But what the Mozarts saved on groceries, they spent on shoes, servants, and billiard tables. (-- p. 93) |
Mozart: A Life
Hardcover
By Maynard Solomon
| Quote: | | We do not know whether Mozartspent his money in more dramatic ways - on gambling or women, for example. In a challenging article published in 1976, Uwe Kraemer proposed that Mozart was a compulsive gambler, who wasted huge sums at billiards and cards." But the evidence he adduced simply confirmed that Mozart frequently played billiards and cards, not that he gambled heavily; let alone squandered fortunes in the process. It is true that gambling was prevalent in his society at every level, from the aristocracy and brueaucracy to intellectuals and ordinary citizens. "By the end of the century everyone indulges in it freely, the young Romantics even more than the rest," wrote the historian Brunschwig about Prussia; closer to home, at Philipp Jakob Martin's Friday night "Liebhaber" ("music-lover") concerts in the Mehlgrube during the winter of 1781-82, it was announced that 'card tables will be placed in the anterooms, and money for play provided at discretion; the company will also be provided with every kind of refreshment." Lotteries were used by rulers everywhere to balance their budgets and pay their armies. But Johann Pezzl, in his guidebook to Vienna published while Mozart was still alive, wrote that the "passion for gambling" there had subsided somewhat by the later 1780s; punishments for playing games of chance were "meted out with severity" and "the more intelligent members of society" turned to "honorable and intellectual pursuits -- household theater, music recitals, friendly conversation." All in all, it does not seem improbable that Mozart played cards or billiards for money. But his known extravagances in dress, lifestyle, and lodgings, along with occasional unsuccessful financial ventures, more readily account for the disappearance of his earnings. (-- p. 298) |
| Quote: | | In Italy, Mozart greatly profited from his exposure to new musical experiences and took possession of them. The most enduring dividend was the lessons he took in Bologna with the Italian composer and renowned teacher Padre Giovanni Battista Martini in the difficult science of counterpoint, the manipulation of several melodies played together. Martini - the "idol of the Italians," Leopold Mozart called him, and, a little carelessly, "the famous P. Martino" - was in his mid-sixties when the two met, and he immediately took to the fourteen-year-old. Recognizing that he had a genius before him, he defended him against his detractors and, rightly, thought that the best he could do for him was to put him through a thoroughgoing regimen of counterpoint exercises and of that most formal version of counterpoint, the fugue. The benefits of these tutorials were not immediately apparent in Mozart's work, but a decade and a half later he made counterpoint a central device in his last phase. In short, "Wolfgang not standing still with his science, but grows from day to day," wrote Leopold Mozart to his wife in April 1770 from Rome, "so that the greatest connoisseurs cannot find enough words to express theior admiration. Mozart received most of his musical education abroad. (Gay at p. 21) |
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 5:35 pm Post subject: |
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From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to the Opera:
Don Giovanni
DVD
Directed by opera maverick Peter Sellars
We love the '80s Bronx street gang motif used by this innovative director in this five-star production of one of our favorite Mozart operas, which featured singers who were then largely unknown, though we have since heard from the African-American twins, who play the leads. How can we help admiring the Don, a man who preferred to take his chances with Mephistopheles rather than give up his lowdown, hard-livin', bad-lovin', two-timin', no-good ways.
Another equally innovative take:
Don Giovanni Unmasked
DVD
PBS Version featuring - prrrr! -
Russian hearthrob Dmitri Hvorostovsky
A more traditional, lavish approach:
Don Giovanni
DVD
Featuring an all-star cast, including Josee
Van Damme and Kiri Te Kanawa
Sublime sets and costumes and Kiri Te Kanawa sings like an angel. See this one on the big screen.
| Quote: | Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By Sir Jack Falstaff Mortimer, Q.C.
| Quote: | If you feel stuck in any kind of a rut you might contemplate the chameleon life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jew who became a Catholic priest, the librettist of the three greatest operas ever written, the friend of Casanova, Mozzart (as he always spelled the composer's name) and two successive Austrian emperors, who married an English wife and ended up living in New York, owning an opera house and teaching Americans about Italian poetry.
In that great period of history which included the Age of Reason and the French Revolution, the world of Rousseau and Napoleon, Byron, Wellington, Shelley and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Da Ponte appears in flashes of light, enjoying extraordinarily different lives in various disguises. Even his name wasn't his. The child of a Jewish family which had converted to Catholicism because, in the province of Venice, Jews were not allowed to marry, the future librettist was given the name of the bishop who baptized him.
We get a glimpse of Da Ponte in the priests' seminary at Cenada, where, in six months, he learned most of Dante's Inferno by heart, as well as the best sonnets and songs of Petrarch and 'the most beautiful works of Tasso.' He was fluent in Latin and became a brilliant teacher. Now we see him taking holy orders, followed by a succession of unpriestly love affairs. An anonymous denunciation accused him of an 'evil life.' Someone had seen a woman put her hand in his breeches. He fled from Venice to avoid his trial by the Inquisition and was sentenced, in his absence, to seven years in a prison cell without light.
After a tender love affair with the wife of an innkeeper, and having renamed himself for a short while with the eccentric pseudonym of 'Lesbonico Pegasio,' he appears again in Vienna as 'poet' to the Burg theatre, and the favourite of Emperor Joseph II. So we find him writing libretti for three operas, one by Mozart, one by Salieri and one by Martini, feeling as he writes that 'I am reading the Inferno for Mozart, Tasso for Salieri and Petrarch for Martini.' He is working twelve hours at a stretch, assisted by a bottle of Tokay on his right, his inkwell in front of him and a box of Seville snuff on his left, with a beautiful young girl, the housekeeper's daughter, to bring him a biscuit, a cup of coffee or merely her smiling face.
Da Ponte's lasting fame rests on his writing the wrods for Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte. He was convinced, in these works, as in his life, that quick and complete changes of mood are essential. So, in Don Giovanni, scenes of farce (the changing of clothes between the Don and Leporello) are followed by moments of high comedy, tragedy and, finally, the refusal to repent, which has made Don Giovanni into an existentialist hero as he is dragged down to hell.
... We can't resist a look at Da Ponte in a country house party just before the first night of Don Giovani. The house was on the outskirts of Prague and the October weather was still warm and beautiful. 'People lingered happily in the open air, with the feeling that days like this were a blessing,' one of the guests wrote. It was at this party that Mozart was lured into an upstairs woom and the door was locked until he finished the yet unwritten overture. Da Ponte appears at this party with an aged librarian from the Castle of Dux. This was a man who may have been a model for the sensual Don, and who also had a rascally servant. 'Signor Casanova seems to be a worthy old man,' one of the guests is reported to have said to Da Pone, who replied, 'There you are making a terrible mistake. He's an adventurer who has spent his days playing cards, brewing elixirs and telling fortunes.'
... He travelled to England and then turned up unexpectedly in Boston, after a terrible crossing of the Atlantic without a mattress or regular meals, to teach and sell Italian books. And then he was in New York, opening his new opera house.
... Finally the opera house burnt down, but Da Ponte lived on until his ninetieth year, respected, grey-haired, still handsome and smiling through all life's changes. When he died, he had an elaborately theatrical funeral at the Roman Catholic Cathedral on 11th Street. His grave was, like Mozart's, unmarked, the cemetery has been built over and no trace of this extraordinary consumer of life exists except on the stage. (From Changing Your Life - and 'The Man in Sneakers,' pgs. 7-10) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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The Coming of the Third Reich
Hardcover
By Richard J. Evans
| Quote: | | ... A widespread cynicism began to make itself apparent in Weimar culture, from films like Dr Mabuse the Gambler to Thomas Mann's The Confessions of the Swindler Felix Krull (written in 1922 though put aside and not completed until more than 30 years later). It was not least as a consequence of the inflation that Weimar culture developed its fascination with criminals, embezzlers, gamblers, manipulators, thieves and crooks of all kinds. Life seemed to be a game of chance, survival a matter of the arbitrary impact of incomprehensible economic forces. In such an atmosphere, conspiracy theories began to abound. Gambling, whether at the card table or on the Stock Exchange, became a metaphor for life. Much of the cynicism that gave Weimar culture its edge in the mid-1920s and made many people eventually long for the return of idealism, self-sacrifice and patriotic dedication, derived from the disorienting effects of the hyperinflation. Hyperinflation became a trauma whose influence affected the behaviour of Germans of all classes long afterwards. It added to the feeling in the more conservative sections of the population of a world turned upside down, first by defeat, then by revolution, and now by economics. It destroyed faith in the neutrality of the law as a social regulator, between debtors and creditors, rich and poor, and undermined notions of the fairness and equity that the law was supposed to maintain. It debased the language of politics, already driven to hyperbolic overemphasis by the events of 1918-19. It lent new power to stock fantasy-images of evil, not just the criminal and the gambler, but also the speculator and, fatefully, the financially manipulative Jew. (copious footnotes omitted) (From The Failure of Democracy, pgs. 111-112) |
Dr. Mabuse - The Gambler
VHS
Directed by Fritz Lang
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology
of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods --
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house --, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, --
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian. 1875-1926
(-- p. 51, adjacent to Origin of the Greek Vase. Auguste
Rodin. French. 1840-1917. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil.) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:56 pm Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Sonnets to Orpheus
Hardcover
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow
Bilingual Edition
| Quote: | 6
Is he native to this realm? No,
his wde nature grew out of both worlds.
They more adeptly bend the willow's branches
who have experience of the willow's roots.
When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead --.
But may he, this quiet conjurer, may be
beneath the mildness of the eyelid
mix their bright traces into every seen thing;
and may the magic of earthsmoke and rue
be as real for him as the clearest connection.
Nothing can mar for him the authentic image;
whether he wanders through houses or graves,
let him praise signet ring, gold necklace, jar.
Ist er ein Hiesiger? Nein, aus beiden
Reichen erwuchs seine weite Natur.
Kundiger boge die Zweige der Weiden,
wer die Wurzeln der Weiden erfuhr.
Geht ihr zu Bette, so laBt auf dem Tische
Brot nicht und Milch nicht; die Toten ziehts --.
Aber er, des Beschworende, mische
unter der Milde des Augenlids
ihre Erscheinung in alles Geschaute;
under der Zauber von erdrauch and Raute
sei ihm so wahr wie der klarste Bezug.
Nichts kann das gultige Bild ihm verschlimmern;
sei es aus Grabern, sei es aus Zimmern,
ruhme er Fingerring, Spange und Krug.
(From First Part, pgs. 16-17) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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From Garden Gambles:
Sonnets to Orpheus
Hardcover
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Edward Snow
Bilingual Edition
| Quote: | 21
Spring has come again. The earth
is like a child who knows poems by heart;
many, so many! ... For the work
of such long learning, she wins the prize.
Her teacher was demanding. We'd grown fond
of the white in the old man's beard.
Now when we ask what the green and the blue are:
she can tell us, she knows, she knows!
Earth, lucky earth, on holiday play
with the children now. We want to catch you,
happy earth. And the luckiest will.
What her teacher taught her! So many things,
and what's imprinted in the roots and on the long
difficult stems: she sings it, she sings!
Fruhling is t wiedergekommen. Die Erde
ist wie ein Kind, das Gedichte weiB;
viele, o viele...Fur die Beschwerde
langen Lernens bekommt sie den Preis.
Streng war ihr Lehrer. Wir mochten das WeiBe
an dem Barte des alten Manns.
Nun, wie das Grune, das Blaue heiBe,
durfen wir fragen: sie kanns, sie kanns!
Erde, die frei hat, du gluckliche, spiele
nun mit den Kindern. Wir wollen dich fangen,
frohliche Erde. Dem Frohsten gelingts.
O, was der Lehrer sie lehrte, das Viele,
und was gedruckt steht in Wurzeln und langen
schwierigen Stammen: sie singts, sie singts!
(From First Part, pgs. 46-47) |
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