Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

The Clap of the End or The End-Clap

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/the-clap-of-the-end-or-the-end-clap-0a4805344c99

Josef Mysliveček was from Prag, and he went to Venice and Italy to learn about opera, THE opera that was being born in  Italy, the country of Bel Canto. Though you have all sorts of Soprani and Countertenors in the few scenes on opera stages, and the voice of Philippe Jaroussky for these Castrati of the time, the composer is so narrowly promiscuous with women, to the point of considering he has to love them physically to make them sing, even once with a slap across the face, that he ruined the best soprano he had under his conductor’s baton who ended up in a convent and died in the bed of her Mother Superior. When did he even consider that she was a lesbian? And the absence of real references to the Castrati is also surprising on the Italian opera stage, notwithstanding the rivalry on the stage between the soprani and the castrati.

That’s the short coming of the film that is announced as a biopic of the composer. Much is missing about what was that opera being delivered in Italy and that was going to be transformed into what it has been since by Handel, a German Composer in England, and Mozart an Austria composer who supposedly admired our Josef Mysliveček. The scene with Mozart, age 12 or so, with his gout-ridden father slumped in an armchair with his gouty leg on a tea table, is not exploited as it should have been. Mozart asks the Maestro for a small piece. The Maestro obliges and performs on the harpsichord a small, pleasant piece, though rather simple if not maybe cold. Then Mozart captures the harpsichord and improvises a variation on this piece he has only heard once, and this time it is quite longer, lighter, fiery even, with of course too many notes, but brilliantly so. The Maestro simply thanks Mozart instead of entering the game and pushing it further.

But the production is brilliant, colorful and the end is miserable and so pitiful. Syphilis was a real epidemic in those days, always lethal and highly contagious. Great creators were not very careful about their “promiscuity” and they ended up in the cemetery not to play some death march, Masonic or not, but to go down or rather be lowered down into their graves. We do remember AIDS.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Baroque Music,  *  Syphilis,  *  Realism,  *  Venice,  *  opera

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:58 PM