Viennese pastries, and a tavern (complete with severed pig head) with my name on it!


“I returned home and went to work. I sat down at my table and did not leave it for twelve hours continuous – a bottle of Tokay to my right, a box of Seville to my left, in the middle an inkwell. A beautiful girl of sixteen – I should have preferred to love her only as a daughter, but alas! … - was living in the house with her mother…and came to my room at the sound of the bell. To tell the truth I rang the bell rather frequently, especially at moments when I felt my inspiration wanting.”
-Lorenzo da Ponte, memoirs

This was the account that Lorenzo da Ponte wrote about composing the libretto for Don Giovanni while he was writing two other libretti for other operas at the same time. I went to the other Jewish museum today, but before that we went out to a restaurant called Firenze Enoteca. It was recommended in the guide as the best Italian restaurant in Vienna, and the guide said it was “moderately” priced, so we thought we’d go to get in the mood for Mozart’s Italian librettist.

So this restaurant turned out to be the favorite haunt of Pavarotti, Domingo, and Tom Cruise when they come to Vienna; their photos (and photos of many other international celebrities) cover the walls. A bottle of Pellegrino was about 9 dollars. My colleague Karen (we are doing a joint Don Giovanni project, which I think I mentioned) and I both ordered the pasta with tomato and Gorgonzola, a favorite of Pavarotti, and containing about 7 million calories.

The exhibit was fascinating. Da Ponte converted to Catholicism when he was 14, because his mother had died and his father remarried a Catholic woman. His original name had been Emanuele Conegliano, and he was born in a ghetto on the outskirts on Venice. He took the name Lorenzo da Ponte after the bishop who had been kind to him, entered the seminary and became a priest in 1773. However, in 1776 he gave a series of lectures on Rousseau, and also had an affair with a married woman (it wasn’t his first affair, evidently). The combination of political views and wild living (he was a priest, after all) led him to be condemned as having a “mala vita” and being kicked out of Venice.

He ended up in Vienna, the “city of tolerance” in 1781, and met Baron Wetzlar von Plankenstein, who was another Jewish convert, and one of Mozart’s great benefactors (and godfather to his first child). Mozart had been looking, supposedly, at over 100 librettos or plays to get some ideas (this was the opera that turned out to be Figaro) and when he and da Ponte hooked up it was magic.

Da Ponte had some issues with women throughout his life, particularly with a gal who was nicknamed “La Ferrarese,” a sort of mediocre opera singer (for whom the role of Fiordiligi was written in Cosi fan Tutte). Nobody else liked her after a while, and da Ponte got into trouble for his loyalty to her. Finally, right after Joseph II died, he left Vienna for Trieste and met his wife, Nancy, there. She was, interestingly enough, an English Jew, and he married her in some kind of service but nobody knows exactly what kind. There was a letter from one friend of his who claimed that they were actually married in a synagogue, and that was the end of his relationship with the Catholic Church. They had five kids together. Or maybe just four. After that, they emigrated to the US and ended up in New York, where I think I told you he founded the first opera house and also taught Italian literature at Columbia College.

There was a lot more fascinating information at the Jewish museum, and some amazing collections of loot from synagogues in Vienna, rescued the morning after Kristallnacht. They decided not to clean off the charring, in memory of the victims.

That reminds me: there is an amazing project that the Austrian government has funded here in Vienna, in memory of the individual Holocaust victims here. I have posted a link on the lower right; check it out. Da Ponte was an amazing character, and Jewish convert to Catholicism like me. I definitely have enjoyed learning about his life. Mary and I rounded out the day by ordering pizza and watching the World Cup in our room. What a life. Forza Italia! Dai Azzuri!

Tomorrow we are off to Prague for three days. Remember Chris Otto, the HOT architecture professor from Cornell? He's back, and he's taking us around Prague. Remind me to tell you about the martyrdom of St. Peter Nepomuk. And his miraculous tongue.

NEW WAY TO POST COMMENTS! I haven't been getting many comments from people and I realize you may be deterred by having to sign up for your own blog, so I have changed the setting so you can now comment without making your own account. All you have to do is type in a word so they know you are not a spammer. I did get a spam comment so I turned on "word verification" for that purpose. So comment away, folks.



Boy, I made that too small, didn't I? That's the Staatsoper but you can barely see it and now I don't know how to make it bigger.

Here's the inside. Now that looks too big. But it was pretty amazing.

Yes, we did go to Rigoletto at the Staatsoper last night. We “skipped” the instrument museum (there may have been a comment to the effect that Leopold’s violins are as numerous as fragments of the True Cross, and that if you put all of Leopold’s violins together you could build Carnegie Hall but that may have been a figment of my overactive imagination) so we could get in line for the standing room at about 12:45 in the afternoon. It was a good thing we did because the line went around the block. It was a quintessentially Viennese experience to stand in line for close to seven hours then “run” for our places in the parterre standing room. We ended up right in the front and it was a fabulous experience.

Mary, my amazing roommate, went with us. When I went to Venice, she went to Krakow and then to Czestochowa to see the Icon of the “Black Madonna.” She’s from Boston and is the head of the math department at a Jesuit all boys school. That is pretty “hardcore,” as she likes to say in her Boston accent. It’s an adjective that will definitely be added to my vocabulary from now on. Here we are getting ready to run for our standing places.

The production was very traditional, with lovely Renaissance sets and beautiful elaborate costumes. Rigoletto was played by this old Italian guy, Leo Nucci, who was fantastic. Twice during the opera, once after the Gilda scene and once after the main virtuoso “La Ra etc.” scene, he brought the house down with the audience yelling and cheering (yes, we were among them) and broke out of character to acknowledge the Bravos. This drove Pete up the wall, since he said it was just not done any more and he thought it was incredibly cheesy. I, on the other hand, thought it was fabulous to see, just like in the old days of opera. Diana Damrau, who sang Gilda, was also wonderful. Her Caro Nome was absolutely breathtaking.

Afterwards we went out to the Sacher Hotel (where Sacher Torte was invented) and celebrated our evening. (You may notice this happening just about every night at this point.)

On a final Marriage of Figaro note: after studying the finale, I am more convinced than ever that my interpretation is correct. The whole opera is about the power of love through forgiveness. But now on to Don Giovanni, which is about a guy being dragged down to Hell! That’s the one we’re going to see next year in Seattle!

A question I have been asking for many years was addressed tonight by my colleague Evan, who has a doctorate in voice from Peabody. He’s one of those fun, light, bel canto tenors (the guy who played Walter last night would squash him like a bug, in the eternal words of Sonia Gomez) and he went to see the Staatsoper production of Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers twice. He also saw Rigoletto on Sunday and said it was great. I am getting pretty psyched up for tomorrow, let me tell you.

Anyway, I was telling Evan about Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music as an alternate representation of the Will, which is the sort of basic underlying principle of everything in the entire world for Schopenhauer. His great work, The World as Will and Representation says that underneath everything there is this “Will” which is endlessly striving, striving, and everything material like bugs and plants and people are somehow manifestations of higher or lower forms of the Will. Of course, the only way to be happy is to somehow deny or transcend this Will, in a sort of Buddhist way.

Wagner loved Schopenhauer and dedicated the words of the Ring to him. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, thought Wagner was a rotten composer who didn’t know what music was. Wagner’s attempt to represent the material world as well as the human mind in music with his little leitmotifs, as well as his attempt to get across some message of renunciation or self-sacrifice and transcendence in his operas, was called “worthless” by Schopenhauer. His favorite composer was, in fact, Rossini. I had always thought this was strange, since Schopenhauer is some big German curmudgeon and Rossini, I had always thought, was a skipping along “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” sort of guy. When I think of Rossini I think of that scene in the Bugs Bunny where he’s massaging Elmer Fudd’s head and then flowers grow. Do you remember that?

But Evan told me that the most important thing in Rossini is the “Rossini crescendo,” which always has a sense of urgency, or striving. I guess Rossini was THE most popular composer in Vienna in the 1820s, eclipsing even Beethoven. But then he got syphilis and stopped writing music.

This fall, Seattle Opera is doing The Italian Girl in Algiers and I am taking my 12th grade students to see it as part of the unit on comedy. I asked Evan what the comedy is based on and he said a lot of it in this production was about making fun of the “Mustafa” Sultan character, and the clash of the Italian with the Algerian culture. He reminded me that comedy is based on shared values (you can’t really laugh at something unless you understand the person’s preconceptions, right? Which is why some people find certain things funny and others don’t) and often humor has been found in collisions of two sets of these systems. Arthur Koestler (yes, I know he also wrote Darkness at Noon, and did you know he also endowed a chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University? We used to call it the ‘ghostbusters’ chair) came up with a theory of creativity which he called “bisociation” that I am going to teach my 12th graders next year, and which he uses to explain comedy. That Rossini opera fits right in with Koestler’s theory, too. It will be a great opportunity to talk about “demeaning” humor as well, humor at other people’s expense, “black” comedy, and all that. It’s great to have these colleagues who all have different areas of expertise and just pick their brains.
I started outlining my Don Giovanni project today; my colleague Karen, who teaches up in Edmonds (and sometimes bikes to work from Wallingford, where she lives) and is a fabulous cellist (one guess as to who her beloved cello teacher was…) is going to team up with me on the unit. We hope to do a joint Don Giovanni project, and even visit one another’s schools. She’ll focus more on the music and I’ll focus more on the humanities-type issues, like gender, psychology, archetypal themes and characters, and so forth. But that’s after the comedy unit.

Tomorrow before standing in line for Rigoletto we are going on a tour of the instrument museum where they have some of the actual instruments Mozart played, and also Leopold’s violin. The guy who is giving us the tour has made some recordings using those instruments, so I’ll see if I can get a CD to bring back.

MY LATEST MOZART THEORY

Some of my colleagues here have taken to having salons in the afternoons, where they discuss various aspects of Mozart’s music. (As many of you know, les salons were popular discussion forums during the Enlightenment period, and Mozart and Leopold attended some, although they weren't considered to be intellectual heavyweights) I have not yet participated in one, although my colleague Ed and I have had our own, somewhat less erudite, discussions of pressing contemporary issues. Here we are reading our primary text. Subject of today’s salon: is Paul really standing by Heather even thought they are estranged? Are the accusations true about her past life? What are the accusations, anyway?

Since some of you pooh-pooed (spelling?) the last theory I presented on this website (the one about Leopold and the violin), I have another one for you. This comes from my study of the third act of The Marriage of Figaro as well as reading Nicholas Till’s book and what I feel I know about Mozart’s deep religious beliefs. You will notice in the photo of me and Ed that we were actually reading the scores in addition to Hello magazine.

May I just say as a sidenote that everyone should listen to the finale of Act II. In the words of Bill W., (paraphrased) it rockets you into a fourth dimension of existence.

In act three, the Countess sings her second poignant aria, “Dove Sono?” asking, “Where are they? Where are the beautiful feelings and expressions of love that the Count once had for me?” He is really rude to her, as well as being unfaithful, but she sings of her continued love for him, and her “constancy.” It’s a heart-wrenching song for those of us who have been in that position, wondering what happened to our beloved’s feelings, which had seemed so strong and yet nonetheless have disappeared. Anyway, the weird thing about it is that Mozart recycled the melody from a previous work, K. 317, the “Coronation Mass.” Now our professor showed us a little sketch Mozart had done, a rough draft, of another melody he had originally written for this aria, and then discarded and never used again. I thought it was a really pretty tune (what tune of Mozart’s isn’t pretty, of course). Dr. Benedum's theory was that Mozart struggled with this a lot, because he cared about the Countess’ feelings. But it was so rare for Mozart to recycle a tune that I didn’t think his explanation was satisfactory.

So in what part of the Mass (which Mozart had written in Salzburg some years earlier) do we find the Countess’ melody? This is where my theory comes in. It is the Agnus Dei, in a different key but otherwise pretty much exactly the same, even with the oboe part. And what is the Agnus Dei about? Asking for God’s forgiveness, mercy, and peace, right? Well, in my idea the Countess, who is the most important character in the opera (in my opinion) because she holds the key to forgiveness and grants forgiveness to the Count at the end, is being compared in a religious sense to God, who is always constant and faithful no matter how far His people may stray from him. This makes “Dove Sono” like one of those Old Testament prophets’ laments about how God’s people are like an unfaithful spouse, but how God is always ready to offer compassion and forgiveness if people ask for it.

Because of the rarity of Mozart lifting a tune from one place to another (although he does it for the “Prague” Symphony with something from Figaro) I believe it was a deliberate gesture on his part. To celebrate my hypothesis (which many of my colleagues thought was plausible and compelling) we're going out to the Hungarian restaurant down the street.

Okay, so it's not actually to celebrate my hypothesis; it's because the proprietor (see left) and his wife are going on vacation to Hungary at the end of the week and this is our last chance to go out there. Tomorrow night is Rigoletto at the Staatsoper. Standing room, but who cares? I convinced my roommate, Mary, to come with me by telling her the entire plot the other night and singing the part about "Si, Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!" She will be in one of my blogs soon because she is AWESOME!

Wagner Hangover!

(but first, another photo of Venice. That's St. Mark's Square - you can just see the domes - from some boat I was on.)

The performance of Die Meistersinger at the Volksoper (or “People’s Opera House”) last night was incredible. You know how it is with Wagner; you think you aren’t going to be able to stand a third act that lasts about two and a half hours, and by the end you are saying, “Over already? Play it again!” That’s the way it was with this production. The male voices were magnificent. I wanted to marry Hans Sachs (both the character and the singer who played him). Admittedly, there were some bizarre and disturbing moments in this particular production (which had a sort of Norman Rockwell look, believe it or not), smacking a bit of S & M, or at least bondage. People kept grabbing Eva and yanking her around the stage, and then at the end when she’s being “offered” as the bride to the winner of the singing contest, she was sort of tied up briefly (I am not joking). The worst part was during the Bacchanalian revel scene at the end of act two, where David is beating the crap out of Beckmesser and then the next time you see him he (David) is getting it on (to put it mildly) with Magdalene, and I mean REALLY gross stuff was going on. Like worse than I have ever seen on an opera stage. It was sick. Of course, what is Wagner about if not excess (and people saying "Heil," particularly in large crowds)?

That's the Volksoper building.

Fortunately, of course, Wagner’s music is so transcendent and miraculous that none of those little peccadilloes (did I spell that right?) mattered in the least, and by the end I was weeping, along with the large Austrian man in the seat next to me, who had sat through much of the opera with his fists clenched with the intensity of the emotion he was feeling. It was about 90 degrees plus in the theater – no air conditioning for either the audience or the singers or the orchestra – and the singers were sweating so much their costumes were completely soaked. The only person I didn’t see sweat at all was the conductor. He was unbelievably composed throughout, and conducted in what I thought was a very Wagnerian style, which is to say he presented us with a “solid wall of sound” (as our professor described it this morning) or I might say a dense and undifferentiated luscious liquid of sound in which we were immersed for five and a half hours. What a sensation! When we came out of the theater there was another one of those incredible Austrian thunderstorms. We ducked into a charming café where a pianist was playing Strauss waltzes. When we got home, we were all still keyed up and sat up on the rooftop patio until 1 am, watching the lightning, drinking wine, and toasting the great Richard Wagner.

My "artsy" Venice photo. I wish I had been able to really figure out my camera so I could have taken more photos like this, but I mostly did just point 'n' shoot. I did take a couple of short movies where there were panoramic views; that was kind of fun. This is looking out from the loggia at the Ca D'Oro onto the Grand Canal with the blazing afternoon sun coming in through the archways.

I didn't take this second photo; it's Cafe Central, one of Vienna's most famous coffee houses, where Trotsky supposedly planned the Russian Revolution and where I had lunch today. My colleague Ed is going to his first Wagner opera tonight so we had to plan our nutrition carefully. It's Die Meistersinger (I know some of you who are groaning at this moment) which is about five hours long, maybe a little longer. What a thrill!

I added two new links below, and took off that dice game link, which didn't seem to work. The first link I added is called the Mozart Forum, and seems to be a really comprehensive collection of things. The second is from Cornell, so you know Neal what's-his-name probably had something to do with it. It's all about Mozart's keyboard stuff but I guess has quite a few other resources. Have fun surfing around those!

We spent all morning studying The Marriage of Figaro, which was a lot of fun. There's not much to report, though, that our readers wouldn't already know. I am hoping tomorrow to go see the da Ponte exhibit. The more I read his lyrics the more I laugh. I like it when Susanna calls Marcellina a "Sibilla decrepita" or something like that. This is kind of naughty, but do you think that when Cherubino says that he is always singing love songs and if nobody else is around he is "singing to himself" that he is talking about masturbation? I was going to ask our teacher but decided not to.

We are going to Prague on Saturday and I am particularly excited to start studying Don Giovanni since that's what I am going to do my project on and take the students to see at Seattle Opera in January. I have so many ideas already I don't even know where to start: the archetype, the mythology, Byron's Don Juan, gender roles, psychoanalysis (some professor for Dayton is coming over next week to give us a lecture about Freud and Don G), and that great Johnny Depp movie, Don Juan de Marco.

Mozart and the Jews

It is about 85 degrees here, with 95 percent humidity, and the air conditioning in the room was broken last night. I have decided to focus my work this week on Mozart's Jewish connection. To your left here is Lorenzo da Ponte, the brilliant librettist for both The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. I just read the libretto of the former while I was in Venice (I have been trying to upload some photos but it's having problems) and realize what a genius he was in his own right. He ended up leaving Vienna after Mozart's death and moved to New York, where he was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. He also helped to finance and build the first opera house in the U.S. when he was a very old man. What a cool guy. He was a Jew, but had converted to Christianity like many famous and successful Jews (such as Mahler) in Vienna.

On a side note, Otto Preminger, another Viennese Jew, was offered the directorship of the National Theater here on the condition that he convert, but he refused and ended up, as you know, moving to America. How did I find this out? I went on the "Jewish Vienna" tour today, and visited one of two Jewish museums here.

"We were looking for a nicer place to live," writes Mozart to his Dad in 1783, "and we found one at the Judenplatz." This is the site of one of the two Jewish museums, and the Holocaust memorial which was built in 1999. Mozart lived there for a short time, and his oldest son (who died when he was about 2 months old) was born there. Underneath the Judenplatz in 1995, archaeologists found the remains of the medieval synagogue, which was probably built in the 13th century but which was destroyed in the great pogrom of 1421. It was amazing to go underground and see it today; it's directly underneath the Holocaust memorial.

Jews, especially Jewish musicians, have a huge history here, and in honor of my Dad and Lorenzo da Ponte and Korngold (who wrote the score to my favorite movie) I have decided to dedicate much of my research this week to Jewish history here. Some of my colleagues and I have also planned a visit to Mauthausen on the last weekend we are here. That's the main concentration camp outside Vienna, where 50,000 people died. I will let you know more as events unfold but it is a fascinating and moving history to learn.

A day in Venice....
Once again, check these posts for photos added later. Just to give you all an idea of what my day was like today:
1) I spent 2 hours in the Accademia. I was the first person there at 8:15 and was pretty much alone for about 45 minutes. Imagine being alone with all those paintings. The Mantegna St. Sebastian was gone, for reasons that will be divulged later.
2) I took the Vaporetto over a few stops, sailed under the Rialto bridge, and spent some time shopping for glass baubles in the narrow streets.
3) I stopped in at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari to see the Titan Assumption, probably the most famous Venetian Renaissance painting, and a bunch of others. Every other street here seems to have a fabulous church that's like a museum as far as the paintings there.
4) San Rocco, the scuola and the church, to see what is known as Tintoretto's Sistine Chapel. This is where I fell in love with Tintoretto and decided he was my favorite painter of all time. His crucifixion left john Ruskin speechless, and me too. Vasari said something about how he had the most terrible mind of any painter. I think he was talking about Terribilta in a Leonardine sense.
5) After a delicious lunch I decided to make a pilgrimage to Madonna dell'Orto, where Tintoretto is buried. He and his kids painted a bunch of stuff in the church, too.
6) I went to the Franchetti gallery, mainly to see the other Mantegna St. Sebastian since I couldn't see the one at the Accademia. This is where I began to suspect a Mantega conspiracy, because that painting was gone, too, being restored. I asked the guy at the counter what was up, and he told me because of the celebration of Mantegna's 500th birthday this year, they were restoring that painting and taking all the Mantegnas from everywhere and putting together a huge exhibition later this year. I told him I was studying in Vienna and at least had gotten to see the other St. Sebastian painting there. (Mantegna was somewhat obsessed with painting St. Sebastian, if you hadn't figured that out by now) He said, "A Vienna c'e la vista di Mantegna scenografica, ma noi abbiamo la Mantegna spirituale."
7) I stopped off at St. John Chrysostom and St. Maria dei Miracoli (both incredible but the latter was like a little jewel of the Renaissance) before running up north for a quick visit to the Jesuit church then a long vaporetto ride home.

That's all for now, folks! I have to go home tomorrow but not until the afternoon. I might try to go to the airport by way of Murano if I can. Of course, in the morning I am going to go to Mass in the Rosary church, which is right down the street.

O MIA PATRIA, SI BELLA E PERDUTA!

I can't post any photos at the moment because I decided not to schlep my laptop to Venice - an excellent choice. I will add some when I get back to Vienna so watch this post.

I had completely forgotten what this country is like, and even if I hadn't, nothing, nothing in my life could have prepared me for Venice - yet at the same time I feel as if everything in my life has prepared me for being here. Every second is amazing. Someday you and I, dear reader, will return here and rent an apartment for a month or two. I am not sure which reader I am addressing but it could be any number of wonderful people. Of course, there is also something so precious about being here alone, going wherever I want, seeing exactly what I want to see, taking as much time as I need in front of the Bellinis in the Museo Correr (there is no way to understand from seeing a picture of the pieta that is here, no way to explain its magnificence in person), going to Mass in front of the Madonna Nicopeia in St. Mark's, seeing the view from the top of the campanile at St. Giorgio Maggiore, finding Titian's hidden fresco of St. Christopher in a little back stairway at the Doge's palace.

I had always heard it's easy to get lost in Venice, but the opposite is true. There is no way to get lost because everywhere you are is exactly where you are supposed to be. There are no wrong turns, no missed vaporetto stops, no bad restaurants, nothing wasted or lost ever. If I could learn to live my life this way, knowing that there are no mistakes, knowing that whatever happens is right...

“Pierre Augustin Caron, better known as Beaumarchais, is famous as the creator of the plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. He managed to send enough arms, ammunition, and equipment to keep 25,000 men in the field – material one biographer credits with being decisive in carrying out the campaign that resulted in the world-changing victory at Saratoga. The cost of the shipments has been estimated as five million livres (or about a million dollars), much of the money coming out of Beaumarchais’ pocket…” Allen Barra, American Heritage Magazine May/June 2000.

Today we began our study of The Marriage of Figaro and I found this information to be amazing. We also had a long lecture on the history of Freemasons, and Masonic philosophy, practices, symbolism, and so on which was very interesting even though I had to tell him who Fu was.

According to this guy, all the founding fathers were Masons except for one. Does anyone know if that’s true, and if so which one was not a Mason? Was it Jefferson? You’d think he’d be a Mason since he was such a big deist and also an architect. Freemasonry kind of disgusts me because it has been so exclusive of women, and seems like a bunch of guys dressing up in aprons doing stupid rites. But hey, many might say the same about the Catholic Church, right?

I bought a ticket for Meistersinger next Tuesday because I didn’t feel like standing up for five hours. Meanwhile, I am on my way to Venice, reading a strange historical novel about Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s Librettist. I hope to learn more about him over the next week as we dive into Figaro. He did an amazing job cutting down Beaumarchais’ lines while preserving the essence.

I have put a link to the pensione I'll be at in Venice so you can imagine yourself there with me.

A FABULOUS NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Last night I went to see Idomeneo at the Theater am Wien. It was a Staatsoper production but performed at this other little theater where Beethoven’s Fidelio had its premiere. The production was super, with a very stark set shaped like a Greek amphitheater. The costumes were sort of archetypal mythic, except for the chorus who, when they had the plague at the beginning, looked like Star Trek characters with pasty white faces and bald heads. The high priest ended up looking sort of like a whey-faced Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. It was actually very effective. The singing was great, especially the gal who played Idamante. This is in contrast to Mozart’s original Idamante, a castrato named Vincezo dal Prato; Mozart writes to his father that in the rehearsals he (Mozart) had to sing the entire part along with him because Vincenzo was completely hopeless.

Here are some photos of us enjoying ourselves. We went out beforehand to a fabulous restaurant called the Berg Café! The waiters all had tight t-shirts with "Berg" written in a bold red scrawl (it was sort of the Vienna equivalent of Café Septieme). After the opera, we went to the Imperial Hotel for smart cocktails. (see below) Richard Wagner stayed here with his family for a couple of months, and probably left without paying.

So I learned a bit more from Pete about Mozart’s violin playing and have been reading about Leopold’s own childhood. I don’t really have time to go to the Freud museum today, and all my colleagues want to wait and go on Sunday when there are some erotic Andy Warhol films playing there. Pete really appreciated the Haydn book title, by the way. He is going down to visit Santa Fe Opera later on in July, even though he is not playing in the orchestra this summer, and is going to see John Fiore conduct Salome!




Of course Pete and I had to pay homage to the greatest maestro the world has ever known (see left).


On a visit Wolfgang made to Salzburg in 1783, the family sang the quartet from Idomeneo, in which Idamante has to agree to exile himself from Crete (his home) in order to escape being sacrificed by his father. According to Constanze, Wolfgang was “so overcome that he burst into tears and quit the chamber.” Hadn’t Mozart himself escaped from Salzburg in order to escape being “sacrificed” by his own father?

In 1775 Mozart wrote his fifth and last violin concerto. He wrote a letter to his father saying how well it went but Leopold replied with something to the effect, “well, if you practiced more you’d be as good as those Italians.” At this, Mozart quit playing the violin and never wrote another violin concerto. Pete says that as a violinist he wishes he could go back in time and tell Leopold to lay off so his son would have written more violin concertos. Of course, Leopold himself had a bad relationship with his own mother, who didn’t want him to leave Augsburg for Salzburg, and never approved of his marriage to Mozart’s mother. Leopold had “let the family” down by dropping out of University (well, being kicked out, actually) and becoming a musician. His father died but he had to get away from the demands of his mother that he “sacrifice” himself.

I don’t know how this all really relates to Idomeneo except that we had a fabulous time! And now I’m off to Venice! Can you believe it?

Just so you don’t think it’s all work and no play here, I will throw in a couple of pictures from our outing to the heurige, way up in the hills, with a lovely view of the vineyards, where a bunch of us went last night. Heurigen are rustic wine taverns that make their own wine from grapes they grow right there. In 1784 Joseph II decreed that each vintner in the suburbs of Vienna could sell his own wine right on his doorstep to paying guests. Whew! What an enlightened despot! Most of the heurigen are in a district called Grinzing, which is where Beethoven lived, and is conveniently to the north of Vienna, right where our hotel is.

Oh, I found this on the internet, on a Masonic history page:

"In pre-Christian China, one also found the Demiurge, Fu Hsih, and his female counterpart, N Kua, displaying the compass and square as symbols of their male and female creative powers."

So my instinct was correct. Fu is an ancient Chinese god.

There are so many cultural events, so many lectures, so much I learn every day, so many activities that it’s hard to keep them straight and impossible to report them all to you, my dear readers. Bush is here today and a bunch of my colleagues are going down to protest. The city is crawling with cops and you have to bring your passport with you everywhere in case you are stopped and frisked. I was planning to join the protest; we all have Mozart masks and were going to wear them and carry signs with sayings like “It’s sonata just war” (I made that one up) but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go see Idomeneo tonight. One of my colleagues, Pete the teacher from Atlanta who also plays violin at the Santa Fe Opera (and worked with Stewart Kershaw once) had an extra ticket and although it is somewhat expensive he promised to tell me all about Leopold’s letters to Mozart and why Mozart didn’t write any violin concertos after 1775. This will be interesting for me because I have been reading some of the letters from the early 1780s where Mozart is telling his father about his bad relationship with the Archbishop, and his father is clearly admonishing him, although we don’t have the actual letters from Leopold, just Mozart’s responses to them. I am going to the Freud museum tomorrow, and will attempt a little study of the father-son relationship from that perspective, although it has been done a million times. I have a slightly new angle, I think, which I will share with you later (this will keep you coming back to my blog). I might even "write" Leopold's letter from May 1781.

I told Pete I would talk to him more about the subject of this morning’s lecture, which was a blast from the past for me, let me tell you: Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. This was given by a German professor from the states, I think just as an excuse to come over here, since Mozart certainly would not have been familiar with either Kant or Schiller. (Although I suppose if we are studying the Enlightenment milieu anything goes, right?) But it was fun to hear him ask questions about the purpose and “end” of art, the same questions which I addressed in that famous piece of work, “Creativity and the End of Art.” Heh heh. So today anyway I was somewhat of an “expert” on the topic and can hold forth in an impressive way later to Pete, whose musical expertise leaves me breathless with intimidation at times. But that’s what’s so great about this seminar; it gives us all a chance to learn about one another’s areas of expertise and fill in the gaps in our own education. And of course Mozart relates to everything!

Pete is also interested in the way classical forms of rhetoric may be reflected in the Sonata form, and also in the music of Bach. I guess he was working with a conductor named Kenneth Montgomery (of whom he spoke highly) who said something to the effect that if you could understand classical rhetoric as taught in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries you would be able to gain a fuller understanding of the structure of Bach and Mozart. Bach took the musica poetica and fashioned the equivalent in sound, but evidently in some of his oratorios he follows the classical form of an “argument” in his music exactly. I don’t know too much about this topic except that there are the five canons of rhetoric, which I will attempt to make correspond to music in a kind of tenuous and schlock way as follows:

1) Invention, or topic (which would correspond to the musical theme or melody)
2) Arrangement (which would be the way the theme is introduced then elaborated, modulated, and repeated)
3) Style (which would presumably be the choice of instruments)
4) Memorization (which might not apply unless I guess you were memorizing a piece of music, or perhaps might be somehow applied to the way the theme is repeated later, although I realize I said this was part of invention)
5) Delivery (which would be like how fast or loud or whatever you would play the piece)

That's just off the top of my head. Of course I don't really know what that conductor was talking about. I love to make things up and sound smart.

But now for something completely different. How about playing a little game? Mozart, in his KV 516, make up a little Musicalisches Wurfelspiel, or musical dice game. He had something like 176 different possible musical measures in a hat, and would have someone pull them out for him at random, then write them down. There is a website where you can do the same thing, although not with Mozart’s actual music. Click on the new link to play the game and write your own minuet. Since there are 176 choices and 16 measures there are literally billions of possible combinations. You can even print it out and play it! I haven't tried it myself so let me know if you are successful.

I asked this morning’s lecturer, who is an expert on Freemasonry, who or what “FU” is, and he looked at me like I had gone nuts. He didn’t even know what I was referring to. Imagine not knowing about the great Fu! One of my colleagues (a brilliant math and German teacher named Barb, the one who told me about the Wurfelspiel website) said she saw the name FU on a Masonic apron they had on display at the Mozart exhibit in the Albertina museum (which I haven’t been to yet). She said maybe it was just a Masonic name from the German root Fu (should be an umlaut but I don't know how to make one), which is where the word “Fuhrer” comes from, to guide. So a sort of deist concept of an all-seeing, all-guiding God. That’s one guess. My guess was that it has something to do with a Chinese god. Mahlon? Can you help us out?

Well, guys and gals, I finally made it to the Kunsthistorisches today and guess what? The entire wing with the sculpture is closed for renovation for years. What’s the point of getting back the saltcellar when you aren’t going to let people see it? It was okay, though, because I spent about three hours with those paintings, mostly the Italians. I know many of you will wonder why I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the Breugels and Lucas Cranach and all those guys, especially since I am going to Venice in a few days. Let me put it this way. The first painting I saw when I went into the Italian wing (they have one wing for the Italians and one for the Northern people) was a lovely little portrait of Isabella D’Este, painted by Titian. She looked so sweet, intelligent, rich, and fun I wanted to invite her to a dinner party. There was also a portrait of her by Reubens later which frankly made her look really fat. I don’t think she was really like that; maybe he thought he was doing her a favor. Anyway, I didn’t like it. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about with the Italians versus the Germans. The first painting I saw when I went into the Northern wing was this disgusting martyrdom of some saint where they were pulling out his intestines and wrapping them around and around a pole. It was nauseating. If you want a comparison of the Italians and the Northern artists, just compare those two Isabella D’Este portraits sometime.

Here’s a picture of me in front of the museum, taken by an unsuspecting tourist. Unfortunately you can’t see the museum very well, nor can you see the statue I was trying to get in, underneath a big statue of Maria Theresa sitting there looking all regal. Can you guess who it is from yesterday’s discussion? It’s Mozart’s old friend and imperial librarian, Baron von Swieten. He was a real mensch. Here are some excerpts from Mozart’s letters:

20 April 1782 (to his father)
“Baron von Swieten, to whom I go every Sunday, gave me all the works of Handel and Sebastian Bach to take home with me…”

12 July 1789 (to Michael Puchberg, pathetically begging for money as usual)
“A fortnight ago I sent round a list for subscribers and so far the only name on it is that of Baron von Swieten!”

So, you ask, what were some of my highlights? Well, Orazio Gentileschi was a good painter. There’s a sexy Mary Magdalene (my patron saint) here, and also a wonderful Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Joseph sleeping in a really sacked out upside down way and Mary breastfeeding Jesus, who is staring right at you. I did like the Durer altarpiece of the Trinity, a big Perugino altarpiece, Crespi’s Dream of Joseph, and of course the Caravaggios. My absolute favorite (which I got a poster of) was one of two paintings Correggio did for the Duke of Mantua (of Rigoletto fame). The other painting was sort of gay, with Ganymede being taken away by Zeus' big eagle, but the one I got was Jupiter and Io. I will put a picture of it here. She’s making out with a cloud.


Okay, maybe more than just making out is going on.
Next week I’ll go to the Gemaldegalerie derAkademie der Bildenden and report on Hieronymous Bosch’s Last Judgment! Now that’s a northern guy you can’t help but love.

I have a new link, to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, down below.

So here's the interior of the Musikvarein where I went last night to hear Rudolf Buchbinder play not one, not two, but THREE Mozart piano concertos in a row. The most amazing thing (well, how do you rate what is more or less amazing than anything else) was that the previous night he had played another three completely different ones. Anyway, to see and hear the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart, and to see and hear this fun, lively, playful, energetic, brilliant pianist who was born in Vienna was pretty unbelievable.

For those of you who know these pieces (and I know at least one lucky reader who is sure to be interested) I will list the ones I heard: G major KV 453, then E flat KV 271, then B major KV 595. I don't know the actual numbers of the concertos but that should be enough information for you. The previous night he had played KV 414, 537, and 467. We were in the standing room and it was about 90 degrees and you had to stand up through the entire thing, but it didn't really matter because it was so awesome. Wednesday night I am either going to do the standing room at the Staatsoper for "The Italian Gal in Algiers" (a funny ha ha Rossini opera that Seattle is doing in October) or I am trying to get tickets to Idomeneo which is at the Volksoper.

Yesterday morning I went to mass at the Jesuit church again and heard Schubert's Mass in D major, which was fantastic. The beer-can homilist Jesuit was giving the sermon again but I couldn't understand anything this time.

This morning we had a lecture on women and the Enlightenment, and there was not much new information for me, although I did learn that evidently in Prussia during the Enlightenment many salons were run by Jewish women, which gave Jews and Christians some rare opportunities for interaction. I am going to try to follow up and learn more about this. Did you know that Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte was Jewish? There is a big exhibition going on here at the Jewish museum all about him. I should have gone there today but schlepped out to the Kunsthistoriche (which has been calling to me like a big siren ever since I arrived here but which I should have known would be closed Mondays) in 90 degree heat and now I have wilted.

NUMEN VEL DISSITA JUNGIT. They don't make archbishops like they used to.

This is the Latin motto of the wild and crazy prince archbishop Markus Sittikus, who reigned from 1612-1619 and then died at the age of 45. We went down to see the palace he built, the Hellbrun, just a few miles south of Salzburg, this morning. Wow! It was fun!

The archbishop was a big joker and he made this outdoor dining piazza, much like you would see at the Sparler/Schouten residence, but do you see those holes in the seats? While the guests were eating, looking at the lovely palace there in the background, drinking wine that had been cooled in the special water place right in the center of the table, one of the archbishop's servants would flip a switch and fountains of water would come up those holes right up the guests' butts! They wouldn't be able to stand up because you couldn't stand up before the archbishop stood up, according to the rules of court etiquette.

Markus Sittikus also had a small little palace built up on a hill on the grounds called the Monatsschlossl, or "month palace." Our little electronic guide said that was because it was built in only a month, but that's not true. It was actually where Markus' gal pal would go every month while she was having her period and was indisposed. How'd you like to have a fancy palace, girls, where you could go during that time of the month?

Boy, that archbishop. I could tell you some other stories I heard. His motto, numen vel dissita jungit, means something like "the divine also unites opposites." This was supposedly because his two heraldic animals, the lion and the goat, were opposite zodiac signs which he had united, but I have a different interpretation after visiting his house today. He was uniting the sacred and the profane. If you had seen the statue he had made of St. George killing the dragon, and the way that maiden was tied up...I can't even post it on this site because it would be x-rated.

So that was Hellbrun, full of trick fountains that would spray you without warning. Jack would have loved it. I guess I prefer Archbishops Alex and good old Raymond Hunthausen to that naughty Baroque bishop (boy, and you wonder why they had the Reformation!) but Markus Sittikus was sure a lot of fun, even 400 years after he lived.

The Weirdest Church I have ever seen.

The HOT sizzling 75 degree day in Salzburg was only surpassed by the HOTNESS of our architecture professor, Dr. Christian Otto.

Here he is. Woo! I dutifully followed him around to three more Fischer von Erlach designed Baroque churches yesterday. I probably would have followed him anyway.

The weirdest one (I know I spell that word wrong, by the way, but I always have and always will) was the Franciscan church, which had been build sometime in the 14th century (maybe earlier) but was strangely altered lated at the end of the 17th century. Those Baroque people just couldn't leave things alone.

Now up there is a lovely Romanesque capital from one of the columns, for example. the whole church until you got up to the choir part was simple, white, with high Gothic type arches and these lovely Romanesque columns, but then when you got up to the altar, POW!

There in the middle of this plain and simple church they plastered these Baroque chapels and this fancy ornate altar. this picture doesn't really do it justice. It was the most strangely juxtaposed pair of styles I have ever seen. Chris said it was "delightful" and laughed at it.

We also went to the main Cathedral which has a slightly earlier Baroque style of some crazy ornate stucco fruits and leaves and things all over it. He described this as looking like fungus growing all over the interior and once I looked at it I realized he was right. I asked if this was an architectural term but he said he just called it that. I guess it's like the way I call the pantokrator the "big scary Jesus" or the primordial substance "some kinda slime." These things aren't real terms but they take on a life of their own. From now on Baroque Fungus will be in my teaching vocabulary. I told him if he ever got a student at Cornell who used that term he would know where they came from.

Here is the interior of the cupola. Can you see the fungus? Those are lovely paintings of the four evangelists in the corners, by the way. Very lovely. The whole thing was very beautiful; don't get me wrong. You know how much I love these churches.

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN!! FORD EVERY STREAM! You have no choice. You cannot escape The Sound of Music. I didn't go on the official "Sound of Music Tour" which costs about 40 bucks, but let's face it: when you go to Salzburg, you ARE on the "Sound of Music" Tour. It is everywhere, in every view. Songs go through your head ALL the time no matter what. You are IN the Sound of Music. You see the magnificent abbeys and churches and you think, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" You see the view from the fortress, or the fountain (above right) and you think, "Do, a Deer, a Female Deer..." Then you go to the Hellbrun garden and see the gazebo where she made out with Christopher Plummer and you think, "You are Sixteen Going on Seventeen." You can't stop it. Every song is in your head all the time, drowning out Mozart. Salzburg may be Mozart's hometown, but even he, the greatest musical genius who ever lived, is completely obscured by the von Trapps, eidelweiss, goat marionettes, the countess, dirndls, bicycles, nuns sabotaging Nazi cars, and on and on. I finally just surrendered to it. We began to re-enact scenes, discuss our favorite characters, and sing all the songs. Just be warned if you ever go to Salzburg: if it can happen to me it can happen to you.

But on to Mozart. There he is on the right. We started the day in Salzburg with the Viva! Mozart tour, which turned out to be very sparse and disappointing. They seemed to be grasping at straws with items like Mozart's clothesbrush. The guide told us nothing we didn't already know (Daniel would have said, "She means well.")and, indeed, got into an argument almost immediately with our professor over the original KV1 manuscript, which was pretty exciting to see in person. It was pretty much the best (and only worthwhile) thing in the entire exhibit. Anyway, so she said that Wolfgang had actually written it himself, at age 6 or 8 or whatever. Dick just kept shaking his head, and said Leopold wrote it down for him, obviously. Then everyone started making comments about whether it was Mozart or his Dad, and looking at the handwriting. The guide kept pointing out how the handwriting was really "childlike" and comparing it to later Mozart music writing. Someone suggested it might have been Nannerl who wrote it down; she would have been about 12 or so. Her liqueur is being sold all over town, by the way, in cute little bottles shaped like violins. I'll try to bring some back to show you all. At the end of the tour, they had a dark room where you just sat and listened to the E flat quintet. That was the second best part, and made me cry a little bit (for reasons which known only to a few readers).

We saw three more Baroque churches, which I will comment on separately in my next post.

Via St. Peter's cemetery (where the ever-present von Trapps hid out from the Nazis until Christopher Plummer said, "You'll never be one of them" and Rolf started blowing his whistle) we then went out to dinner at the oldest restaurant in Europe, the Stiftskeller St. Peter, in business since 803! Glen came to mind, of course, because Charlemagne ate here!

Can you believe it? Here I am sitting in a restaurant where Charlemagne ate! That gal is called Heather, and she teaches elementary music at a little school in North Carolina. It was Charlemagne who made Salzburg into an archbishopric, appointing the first prince archbishop as one of his vassi dominici. The guy was called Arno and maybe they ate right at this table! They probably did!

Salzburg was an independent principate all the way up to Mozart's time, but was not a member of the group that actually elected the Holy Roman Emperor (as you know, Glen).

Finally, at the end of the day, we took a funicular up the side of the mountain to the fortress, where the sun was setting over Salzburg, there was a thunderstorm brewing with flashes of lighting, and the Hills were truly Alive.

Congratulations to our lucky winner and only entrant, for correctly naming St. Benedict in the "one of these church fathers is not like the others" contest. Your prize, a St. Josemaria Escriva holy card, will be delivered to you upon my return.

To the left here is a 19th century painting of the building which contains our classroom, the Schottenkirche and Benedictine monastery.

This morning we had the chance to see the Corpus Christi procession through the streets and then attend Mass at the Jesuit Kirche. The priest was very charismatic, although I could understand very little of his homily. He said something about going on the train to Salzburg and drinking a large can of beer, and then somehow related that incident to becoming a Jesuit and hearing this choir from Salzburg perform Mozart's Missa Brevis in D major, which we heard this morning as part of the service.

I have added a new link down in the lower right, which ought to take you to the British Library monline Mozart catalogue. Let me know if it works.

Tomorrow I am off to Salzburg for two days. I will not take the "Sound of Music" guided tour.

The most incredible experience of the day today (so far; who knows what might be in store later) was visiting the Karlskirche, also designed by von Erlach for Charles VI. The church is ostensibly named for St. Charles Borromeo, but Charles VI was also obviously calling attention to himself (as if he needed more attention after his apotheosis in the library) as the culmination of all the Holy Roman Charleses from Charlemagne on. They are just finishing up a huge restoration project of the frescoes inside the dome and we got to ride an elevator and then climb some stairs up the scaffolding to the very top, about 65 meters high. It was like ascending with the angels. Von Erlach had seen drawings of the Hagia Sophia and definitely designed this church with that in mind. My favorite part of the fresco was this picture on the left, where we see Martin Luther being thrown down to the pit of hell (no doubt as one of those folks who goes around seeking the ruin of souls and has to deal with Michael the Archangel) and his books being burned up.

Around the altar are the four Latin church fathers. Quiz for you avid readers: which one of the following was NOT one of them?
Augustine, Aquinas, Jerome, Gregory, Benedict
Prize for the first correct answer posted as a comment on this blog!

Did I say I was in Baroque Counter-Reformation post 30-years'-war land yesterday?? That was just the beginning! Yesterday morning I told you I was weak-kneed and overwhelmed at the Peterskirche, where I returned this afternoon to hear a little organ recital by Mrs. Nagy. Bach's "Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier" was the first thing on the programme, played not so impressively, as well as Christian Erbach's "Canzon a 4. del quatro (sic. that's the way Mrs. Nagy spelled it on the flyer) tono" and some sort of modern thing by a guy named Alain.

Of course, yesterday morning was before I visited the Jesuit Church (see above), with its strange trompe l'oeil dome painted by the amazing Andrea Pozzo around 1703. Pozzo wrote a treatise on this illusion and I can't describe the sensation of looking up and KNOWING it's a barrel vault and yet SEEING a high cupola dome with God peeping through at the very top. I guess my oeil was tromped.

We also went to the National Bibliothek which looks like a Baroque church, but lined with 20,000 books. The architect, Fischer von Erlach, designed it as a glorification of Charles VI, whose "apotheosis" we see painted on the dome. This "secular" churchlike building demonstrates Charles' great power through all sorts of knowledge.

Charles was NOT an "enlightened despot" of course but rather a real "absolute monarch" yet learning about Charles has made me think about how often our treatment of the Enlightenment and Baroque eras at NW school is somewhat simplistic.

I know it's necessary to simplify material for students but the Baroque era was full of that optimism and sense of limitless potential for discovery that we normally associate with the "Enlightenment." On the other hand, I get the sense that during the 17th and earlly 18th centuries we were humbler, and felt ourselves in more of a "partnership" with God, where we could discover some of the mysteries of creation, but that the real end (in a teleological sense) of our endeavors was in the hands of God. Later on, once deism reared its ugly head, I have a sense of humanity walking away from God, who might have started the whole mechanistic universe, but who has left the rest up to us.

Of course, when I call deism "ugly," it is partially because I am sitting at the moment in front of a large portrait of the founder of opus dei. He sure didn't want me to check out of the partnership with God. As far as mortification of the flesh, I do have blisters from walking around all day...

BAROQUE!!! Everything here is Baroque!

I can't post a picture yet because they haven't set up the wireless internet access which is supposed to come next week and I haven't found a computer where I can put my USB drive and transfer any photos. But go to google and look for St. Peter's church in Vienna. That's where we went yesterday (among other places) and that is the building that best represents my totally overwhelming Baroque experience of Vienna so far.

Mozart's dad, Leopold, took him to Vienna for the first time when he was about six so that everyone could see what an amazing genius he was. "Everyone who comes to Vienna is charmed into staying here," wrote Leopold in 1762. Great keyboard players would often try to avoid the Mozart family because they didn't want to admit how great little Wolfgang was. As long as they didn't see him in person they could pretend everyone was just making up stories about this little kid who could sit down and sight read some amazing piece of music, or improvise like a grownup, or whatever.

Later in his life Mozart was always trying to sneak away from Saltzburg. He called Vienna "The best place in the world."

All I can say so far is I am overwhelmed. I went into St. Peter's church, built on the site of what many claim is the oldest Christian church in the city (certainly Charlemagne built a church on the site at some point). This version was built in 1702 and designed by Lukas von Hildebrandt, the fabulous Baroque architect. Today it is the center of Opus Dei activity. NO, you silly Da Vinci Code fans, they are NOT creepy people who whip themselves and commit heinous crimes. They are devoted to making everyday acts (like wiping your kid's nose or playing in a frisbee tounament) into acts of holiness. That is the whole central theme of Opus Dei.

The Baroque movement was right at the time of the counter-reformation, as you folks who just finished ninth grade know. It was a time when the Catholic church was trying to get everyone to come back to the fold. New religious movements like the Jesuits and the Carmelites were started, books were banned (you know, books by Martin Luther and people like that), and lots and lots of new art was commissioned. This Baroque art is really some of my favorite: extravagant, limitless, depicting great kings and saints, great mystical emotions, miracles, flames, disguises, soap bubbles, and so forth. Lots of gold, chiaroscuro, ornamentation, and so forth. The effect is supposed to be something that makes you fall to your knees in awe and run back to the Pope. That is certainly the effect it had on me.

Of course, the entire city of Vienna and my entire experience here so far has been Baroque in the sense of being completely overwhelming: practicing my schlock German, learning the names of my fellow participants, figuring out if I can get into the opera to see Don Carlos, Rigoletto, the Magic Flute, etc., finding a person in the middle of the street playing Chopin on a grand piano...

MOZART AND ROUSSEAU
(That's Rousseau, not Mozart, by the way.)

Nicholas Till's book Mozart and the Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1992, reprinted with author's permission for use at the NEH seminar) opens with a conundrum: what is that chorus of peasants doing in The Marriage of Figaro, traipsing in and out of the Count's chateau, at one point even entering the apartments next to the Countess' bedroom? No genuine 18th century peasants would be allowed anywhere near the chateau.

I was particularly interested in this question since I myself played a peasant gal in that very chorus during a bizarre English production of The Marriage of Figaro at Bryn Mawr College in 1984. I didn't realize at the time that my character (an anonymous soprano maiden whom I had secretly named Esmerelda and for whom I had, naturally, invented an elaborate romantic subplot involving the count's long-lost-ne'er-do-well brother) had no business romping through the Countess' flowerbed singing about how wonderful the Count was for abandoning the droigt de signeur.

Till hasn't bothered to answer this question yet, which of course has kept me in suspense, riveted to the text during the entire flight from Seattle to Toronto (where I am currently sitting in a bar watching the World Cup). What he has told me is that Mozart, born into the crazy world of progressive "enlightened despots" (your first vocabulary word, 10th graders) Maria Theresa and Joseph II, felt a tension between the medieval past of stability and the great economic changes caused by the rising bourgeoisie, making tons o' money (the bourgeoisie, not Mozart, who was always broke), needing free trade and free governments. These absolute monarchs like Maria Theresa and her son-in-law's (great?) grandfather Louis XIV, offered a kind of stability to the bourgeoisie.

Austria in the 18th century was rushing headlong into the "modern" age, leading to a big psychic shakeup, a rejection of the past while still somehow yearning for security and morality. Mozart expresses this tug-of-war perfectly, according to Till, in both his music with its tension, resolution,and symmetry, and through the dramatic choices he makes in his operas.

So what does all this have to do with Rousseau? La Finta Giardiniera (The Fake Gardenerette) (I just made up the word "gardenerette" as a translation for the diminutive feminine Italian word for gardener), Mozart's first "mature" operatic work, whose complete manuscript just turned up for the first time in its original version in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, has a plot which reflects the suffering and ultimate triumph of a virtuous heroine, like the popular "Pamela" books of that era. Mozart uses his heroine, Sandrina, to evoke in the audience a "moral sentiment" something like Hume's "ethics of feeling" which 18th century moral philosophers were always harping on about. This was the beginning of Romanticism, as these folks distrusted Descartes and all that "reason is the sole guide to truth" ridiculous stuff we teach you as the first principle of the Enlightenment.

Rousseau went even further with this idea, and said that society corrupts us. How can we focus on our inner feelings, our moral sentiment, the "nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being" (as Wordsworth said in Tintern Abbey) when we are too busy learning Emily Post's rules of ettiquette so we can be bourgeois gentilhommes and impress people at the Tennis Club? This anti-establishment idea was soon followed by the good old sob story The Sorrows of the Young Werther, Sturm und Drang, and the "cult of Rousseau" where a bunch of 18th century proto-La Leche League breastfeeding hippies let down their hair. During the second act of The Phony Gardeneress, the two main characters run off into the forest and go temporarily insane. I am not joking. Who knew Mozart even wrote this opera? I never heard of it before. Anyway, so they flip out and go crazy, turning into loony neo-classical noble savages who think they are prancing around in some sort of Greek myth and God knows what kind of arias they sing at that point.

Fortunately, by the end of the opera they return to the English-style garden, cultivated but not too cultivated, a little wild and a little restrained, a marriage of Nature and Society, which of course Rousseau was advocating all along. Remember the Social Contract? He didn't want us to just rip off our clothes and run around having nude picnics in the forest, did he? No! He wanted Civil Liberty and Moral Liberty, not just Natural Liberty. (11th graders, tell your parents the difference between those three if you can)

Mozart, according to Till, not only understands and agrees with Rousseau, but is using this crazy gardening opera to advocate that lovely balance between the wild uncultivated hippie wilderness and the overly controlled Linnean Versaillesque gardens with those creepy topiaries. My question for the day is: do you think there can be a balance between these two? Can we continue to cultivate our gardens of courtesy and common sense while remaining true to our noble, wild and crazy inner savages? Post me a comment and let me know what you think.

Till's writing style is wonderfully inspiring and I will keep you updated on what else he says about why the peasants shouldn't be there.

Okay, so this has nothing to do with Mozart or Vienna (except for the fact that I am leaving tomorrow at 5 am) but today Rowan graduated from 8th grade, and there she is! You can't really see the amazing dress or hear her amazing singing voice singing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" but you can imagine how great it was, or maybe you were there if you are a student or teacher at Northwest.

The main thing is that this is the first picture I took with my new camera, which is a Nikon Coolpix P2 that was given to me as a form of direct barter. Do you remember the economic element of society, from the beginning of 9th grade, and how there are two types of barter? Indirect barter is using a symbol like money, but direct barter is where I provide goods or services, like, say, helping someone with some legal papers, and they provide me with some goods or services in return, like, say, a digital camera. The best kind of direct barter is where each party feels that he or she has received the better deal. Which I definitely feel since I didn't even have to pick it out for myself. It's a much better camera than I would have chosen. It will take me five weeks just to figure out how to use it. It has every feature known to man.

Of course, I have downloaded the pictures onto my laptop. Once I get to Vienna, it may be somewhat more complicated since I don't know how I will get photos from my laptop to the other computer. Maybe I should bring a USB drive.