Tea at Trianon: Mozart’s Least-Loved Opera

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Mozart’s Least-Loved Opera

From The New York Times:

Mozart wrote “Clemenza” on commission in 1791 for the coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia. In the opera, a Roman emperor forgives his friend, who had been compelled by love to conspire against him. The 1734 libretto, by Pietro Metastasio, already felt sclerotic by Mozart’s theatrical standards; he tweaked it to create ensemble numbers amid the sequence of dry recitatives and pomp-and-firework arias that made up a traditional opera seria. Even so, an Austrian nobleman who attended the premiere called it “most boring” in his diary. The new queen, Maria Luisa, struggled to stay awake. Reports that she called the opera “una porcheria tedesca” — German pigswill — may be apocryphal. Or perhaps she bristled at the work’s political message, which presented clemency and tolerance as a ruler’s supreme virtues just weeks after Marie Antoinette had been arrested midflight and forcibly returned to Paris amid jeering crowds. After all, the production Leopold and Maria Luisa watched in Prague was in contemporary dress. (Read more.)