United States or Zimbabwe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Mozart wrote the opera in Prague, and completed it, except the overture, Oct. 28, 1787, about six weeks after he arrived in the city. The first performance took place the next evening. The overture was written during the night, the copyist received the score at seven o'clock in the morning, and it was played at eight in the evening.
But Sir Francis, truth to tell, shared his sister's lamentable taste, and if, as he sat silent and pensive, beneath the shaded lamp on the round centre table, while the girl at the piano went through her simple repertoire, his heart was filled with memories of his lost wife, he certainly was not lamenting the works of Mozart and Beethoven which she had so skilfully rendered.
By C. E. BOURNE Mendelssohn's lot in life was strikingly different from that of all the musicians of whom I have hitherto written; he never knew, like Schubert, what grinding poverty was, or suffered the long worries that Mozart had to endure for lack of money.
When the great player improvised for Rossini, the latter says: "It is music that flows from the fountain-head. There is reservoir water and spring water. The former only runs when you turn the cock, and is always redolent of the vase; the latter always gushes forth fresh and limpid. Nowadays people confound the simple and the trivial; a motif of Mozart they would call trivial, if they dared."
Nothing could be more delightful than their interpretations together of the main works of Beethoven Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Weber, and other masters.
Felix Mottl, worried to exasperation by stale laments for Mozart's premature death, once lifted up his voice and thanked God for Mozart, the Heaven-sent man. In the same spirit we may be thankful for Purcell.
All the rest of the journey to Vienna, Wolfgang was the life of the party, eager to know the name and history of everything they met. At the custom-house on the frontier, he made friends with the officials by playing for them on his violin, and thus secured an easy pass for the party. Arrived at Vienna, Leopold Mozart found the fame of the children's playing had preceded them.
This thought is striking in an episode in the life of Don Juan, which was known neither to Moliere nor to Mozart, but which is revealed in an English legend, a knowledge of which I owe to my friend James Russell Lowell of London. One learns from it that the great seducer lost his time with three women.
The forms of style employed in this opera according to circumstances are so varied, that now we seem to hear Gluck, now Traetta, now Sacchini, now Mozart, now Handel; for the gravity, the learning, the naturalness, the suavity of their conceptions, live and blossom again in 'Zelmira. The transitions are learned, and inspired more by considerations of poetry and sense than by caprice and a mania for innovation.
But if she looks him out in a cyclopA|dia and forgets him, and looks out Mercadante and forgets him, and finally mixes up Mozart and Mercadante and Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, because all four of these names begin with M, why, she will be where a great many very nice boys and girls are who go to concerts, but where as sensible a girl as Ella does not want to be, and where I hope none of you want to be for whom I am writing.
Word Of The Day