Posts Tagged ‘Mozart’
“Common sense is not so common”*…
The Enlightenment is under attack by the Left and the Right. It can only be “saved,” Eliane Glaser argues, through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique. And then there’s AI. After summarizing the critiques from both sides, she continues…
In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.
I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument. We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name. As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian,the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.
The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans, and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.
My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?…
And so she does. Do read on: “Flickering Enlightenment,” from @elianeglaser.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Voltaire
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As we reclaim reason, we might spare a thought for a glorious product of the Enlightenment, Joseph Haydn; he died on this date in 1809. A composer of the Classical period, he was pivotal in the evolution of chamber music forms like the string quartet and piano trio, and is known as the “Father” of both the symphony and sonata forms. Haydn was a friend and mentor of Mozart, and a teacher of Beethoven; indeed, the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven trio are sometimes referred to as the “First Viennese School.”
Schonberg wrote that Haydn “was the Classic performer par excellence, and in his long life, from 1732 to 1809, he grew up with the new musical ideas and, more than any one man, shaped them.”
“A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing”*…
And now there’s more of that extraordinary phenomenon to appreciate. Sonja Anderson, with big news…
A 12-minute piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been discovered in a library in Germany. Researchers think the composer wrote the previously unknown piece—called Serenade in C—when he was a young teenager.
The composition was hidden in the holdings of Germany’s Leipzig Municipal Libraries—some 280 miles north of Salzburg, Austria, where Mozart was born in 1756. By the age of 5, he was a child prodigy who toured Europe performing for royals and aristocrats. As a teenager, he built a reputation as a composer, spending a few years in Salzburg and Vienna before moving to Italy in 1769.
Mozart probably wrote the recently discovered composition in the mid- to late-1760s, according to a statement from the Leipzig Municipal Libraries. Library researchers were compiling an edition of the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of Mozart’s work, when they stumbled across a mysterious bound manuscript containing a handwritten composition in brown ink [pictured above].
The composition is attributed to “Wo[l]fgang Mozart.” The handwriting, however, is not Mozart’s, suggesting that the manuscript is a copy of the original composition. Researchers think it was made around 1780.
Serenade in C consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio (two violins and a bass), according to a statement from the International Mozarteum Foundation, a Salzburg-based nonprofit dedicated to Mozart’s life and work. The attribution to “Wo[l]fgang Mozart” indicates that the piece is from the composer’s youth, as he started regularly adding “Amadeo” to his name around 1769…
… In his early years… Mozart wrote many chamber works like Serenade in C, which his father recorded on a list of his son’s compositions. Many of these works were thought to have been lost to history, as Leisinger says in the statement. Fortunately, this particular piece was saved—thanks to the composer’s sister.
“It looks as if—thanks to a series of favorable circumstances—a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”…
… The newly discovered Serenade in C has been renamed Ganz kleine Nachtmusik in the Köchel catalog (presumably in reference to Mozart’s famous serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik)…
More than 250 years after a teenage Mozart wrote “Serenade in C,” a copy of the piece has surfaced: “This Lost Mozart Composition Hasn’t Been Heard for Centuries. Now, You Can Listen to It,” from @SmithsonianMag.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As we listen, we might spare a thought for Miles Davis; he died on this date in 1991. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.” Over a five-decade career (which began when he dropped out of Juilliard), Davis played bebop with Charlie Parker, paved the way for cool jazz with Birth of the Cool, pioneered hard bop, assembled a quintet (that included saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers) and yielded ‘Round About Midnight, led a jazz orchestra (that recorded Kind of Blue among other albums), worked with bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Tony Williams, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter to create the post-bop genre, and created jazz fusion with Bitches Brew.
In discussing Birth of the Cool, jazz great Azar Lawrence said of Davis what countless others have said of Davis and his other contributions: “It was such a phenomenal expression of artistry. It was like something created by Picasso or Bach or Mozart, or somebody of that stature of expression. It’s a foundational work and a musical landmark.”
“The bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s”*…
Elena Passerello on Mozart’s feathered collaborator…
… So what kind of murmur began that spring day in Vienna when a twenty-eight-year-old Mozart, jaunty in his garnet coat and gold-rimmed cap, strolled into a shop to whistle at a starling in a cage? That bird must have zeroed in on Mozart’s mouth, drinking-in the whistled seventeen-note opening phrase from his recent piano concerto:
Mozart’s melody riffs in G on a simple line heard in many a volkslied, so the starling might have been hearing similar tunes from other shoppers that whole month. Or perhaps Mozart himself had been in a few times and had whistled his line enough for the bird to imprint it. No matter how the starling learned the song, on May 27, 1784, it spat that tune right back at the tunesmith—but not without taking some liberties first.
The little songbird un-slurred the quarter notes and added a dramatic fermata at the end of the first full measure; we can only guess how long it held that first warbly G. In the next bar, it lengthened Mozart’s staccato attack and replaced his effete grace notes with two pairs of bold crotchets. And the starling had the audacity to sharp the two Gs of the second measure, when any Viennese composer worth his wig would keep them natural and in line with the key. Those bird-born G-sharps take the steady folk tune into a more harmonically complex place, ignoring the fermata-ed natural G that comes just two notes earlier and pushing toward the next note in the phrase—an A—creating a lifted E-major chord. Mozart apparently loved this edit, because he bought that bird on sight.
For good measure, he drew a little treble staff in his expense book and scored the starling’s tweaks under the note of purchase:
And under the last measure, an acclamation—“Das war schön!” (“That was wonderful!”)—scribbled in the maestro’s quick hand.
There is no other live-animal purchase in Mozart’s expense book, and no more handwritten melodies; no additional transactions were praised as schön! This is one of the very few things we even know about his purchasing habits. He’d only begun tracking his spending that year, and by late summer, Mozart had abandoned the practice and only used that notebook to steal random phrases of English. So this note of sale is special among the extant scraps from his life.
The purchase of this bird, Mozart’s “Vogel Staar,” marks a critical point for the classical period. At the end the of eighteenth century, tunes were never more sparkling or more kept, their composers obsessive over the rhetoric of sonata form: first establishing a theme, then creating tension through a new theme and key, then stretching it into a dizzying search for resolution, and finally finding the resolve in a rollicking coda. The formal understanding of this four-part structure permeated classical symphony, sonata, and concerto. By 1784, sonata form had imprinted itself on the listening culture enough to feel like instinct; Vienna audiences could rest comfortably in the run of classical forms as familiar—and thus enjoyable—narratives. And nobody played this cagey game more giddily than Mozart.
Of all the things Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart brought to human sound, the most important might be his sense of surprise…
The full– fascinating– story: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Vogel Staar,” from @elenavox in @VQR.
Pair with “Masterpieces Galore: When Mozart Met the Enlightenment” (gift article)
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we whistle along, we might send sonorous birthday greetings to Henri-Étienne Dérivis; he was born on this date in 1780. A leading bass in the Paris Opera Company for 25 years, he made his debut as Sarastro in Les Mystères d’lsis (the French version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute) in 1803.
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money”*…
Further to yesterday’s post (about the relevance of Edith Wharton’s observations of her Gilded Age to ours), Dorinda Evans takes a look at rough contemporary of Wharton’s, and at his (similarly relevant) work…
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks [are nowconsidered] unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time…
The fascinating story of Victor Dubreuil’s cryptic currencies and the questions they raise about value and values: “Illusory Wealth,” in @PublicDomainRev.
For an illuminating look at Dubreuil’s spiritual successor, see Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful Boggs: A Comedy of Values.
For a loosely analogous artist: “Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for… what the hell are they? What do they do? How do they do it?”
And for an appreciation of trompe l’oeil (and its influence on Cubism), see “Feinting Spells.”
* H.L. Mencken
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As we contemplate currency, we might pour a cup of birthday tea for English mathematician, logician, photographer, and Anglican cleric, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson– better known as the author Lewis Carroll– born on this date in 1832.
“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Alice in Wonderland (nee “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” then “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”)
Oh, and… Happy Mozart’s Birthday!
“The method preferred by most balding men for making themselves look silly is called the comb over”*…
Balding has been the constant scourge of man since the beginning of time, and for millennia, our best solution was the comb-over. Brian VanHooker tells the story of how its once-ubiquitous popularity thinned, receded, and then got pushed to the side…
For decades now, having a comb-over to cover one’s baldness has been generally seen as unacceptable. There may be exceptions, but men with prominent, noticeable comb-overs are often regarded as desperate — instead of aging gracefully, they’re seen as hopelessly clinging to a time when they had a full head of hair. Worst of all, for people with advanced hair loss, the comb-over is entirely ineffective. Instead of disguising a man’s baldness, it only accentuates it, thus laying bare their lack of hair and, even worse, their insecurity.
This wasn’t always the case. For at least a couple thousand years, comb-overs were perfectly acceptable and worn by the most powerful men in the world. It was only during the latter half of the 20th century that it all came crashing (flopping?) down…
From Julius Caesar to Donald Trump, a tonsorial trip through time: “The Rise, Flop, and Fall of the Comb-Over,” from @TrivialHistory in @WeAreMel.
* Dave Barry
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As we resist the urge, we might send scandalous birthday greetings to Giacomo Casanova; he was born on this date in 1725. A Venetian adventurer and author, he is best remembered– as a product both of his memoir and of other contemporary accounts– as a libertine, a womanizer who carried on complicated and elaborate affairs with numerous women.
At the same time, he associated with European royalty, popes, and cardinals, along with intellectual and artistic figures like Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart. His memoir (written toward the end of his life, while he served as librarian to Count Waldstein) is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.
Casanova preferred a wig to a comb-over.
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