Posts Tagged ‘Vivaldi’
“Imagination creates reality”*…
Wagner was and is so controversial before and after his appropriation by the Nazis, before and after 19th-century radical antisemitism led to the Holocaust, because art-making and self-fashioning on the scale on which Wagner worked are terrifying, at once attractive – drug-like, dream-inducing, mesmerising – and repulsive. Few of us are comfortable travelling so near the gravitational field of a man “who had access to parts of his psyche that most nice people hid from themselves” and who created from such a murky source dramas and music of horrible beauty…
A provocative review of a provocative book, Simon Callow’s Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will: “What makes Wagner so controversial?”
See also this fascinating piece on a man often linked with Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche.
* Richard Wagner
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As we grab for The Ring, we might send melodic birthday greetings to Francesco Manfredini; he was born on this date in 1684. A Baroque composer, violinist, and church musician, he was a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. Much of his music is presumed to have been destroyed after his death; only 43 published works and a handful of manuscripts are known. But they are sufficient to have earned him a reputation as an accomplished composer (more in the vein of Vivaldi than Bach).
What technology hath wrought…
Davide Capponi explains:
I have always been in love with photography, but kept my shots for myself and a few people around me.
Then, being the possessor of an iPhone, I was pointed by a friend to Instagram and discovered iPhoneography (or Mobile Photography in a wider sense).
iPhoneography is about shooting and editing your photos only with an iPhone, usually with a Low-Fi sentiment and a creative approach; it is about publishing and sharing your work with other fellow iPhoneographers.
For some reason this made a huge difference to me.
See more of Davide’s work at Rubicorno.
As we limber up our clicking fingers, we might hum an intricately-melodic birthday ditty to Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist Antonio Lucio Vivaldi; “the Red Priest” (so called because of his red hair) was born on this date in 1678.
Click here to hear an excerpt from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons “Winter” in MP3 format; here to access it in OGG.
Loving Godzilla, 17 syllables at a time…
From SamuraiFrog, an arresting (and very amusing) collection of Godzilla Haiku.
“Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, they are not evil by choice; that is their tragedy”
– Ishiro Honda (Kurosawa friend, Toho director, and creator of Godzilla)
Honda on the set of the original Godzilla
As we rethink our attraction to urban centers, we might compose a birthday rhyme for Torquato Tasso, the 16th Century Italian poet; he was born on this date in 1544. Though Tasso was a giant in his own time– he died in 1595, a few days before the Pope was to crown him “King of the Poets”– he had fallen out the core of the Western Canon by the end of the 19th century. Still, he resonates in the poems (Spencer, Milton, Byron), plays (Goethe), madrigals (Monteverdi), operas (Lully, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Rossini, Dvorak) , and art work (Tintoretto, the Carracci, Guercino, Pietro da Cortona, Domenichino, Van Dyck, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Tiepolo, Fragonard, Delacroix) that his life and work inspired.
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