Klarinet Archive - Posting 000247.txt from 2005/02

From: ormo2ndtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: [kl] Italian language in music
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:27:14 -0500

A few weeks ago, I asked why Mozart used Italian in his scores. During
a subsequent off-list conversation, I happened to stumble across an
article:

> http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/shaw.html

> [George Bernard Shaw] wrote under the
> pseudonym Corno di Bassetto as he felt that
> he had no name worth signing: =A0 G.B.S.
> meant nothing to the public at the time and he
> chose Corno di Bassetto because a) he felt it
> sounded like a European title and b) because
> nobody knew what a Corno di Bassetto
> actually was. =A0 He was later to say though
> that, "if I had ever heard a note of it [then] I
> should not have selected it for a character
> which I intended to be sparkling. The devil
> himself could not make a basset horn
> sparkle".

> [snip]

> Mozart's music did not enjoy the same
> enormous popularity during the late
> nineteenth century as it does today.
> In London the most important musical events
> were the great Choir Festivals at which works
> by Bach, Handel, and particularly
> Mendelssohn were presented in
> performances with gigantic forces of singers.
> There was an over-exaggerated sense of the
> importance of Italian opera and many English
> composers actually had to have their operas
> first performed in Italian translations in order
> to be taken seriously (the first performance of
> Wagner's Der Fliegende Holl=E4nder was sung
> in Italian translation); in fact Wagner was
> rarely heard at all, and as Shaw wrote in
> 1890, "a man who has seen Die Walk=FCre on
> the stage is a much greater curiosity than one
> who has explored the Congo".

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