Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DIDN'T KNOW Mozart was a person: I thought it was just another name for music," the six-year-old girl who made this remark summed up the phenomenon of Mozart better then all the superlatives that have been used to elevate the man's achievement. The business of finding Mozart "the person"--looking for the musician behind the music, making sense out of the limited store of facts and rumors--has occupied countless biographers over the years. And it is undoubtedly a formidable task to get the measure of a man whom Wolfgang Hildesheimer, the latest to make...
...will not get close to Mozart," he states at the outset, and it is true Despite the interesting analysis of music and letters which pervades the text, the most frequent effect it produces is frustration--sometimes at a particularly annoying interpretation (as when Hildesheimer relegates The Magic Flute to "the lower ranks of sentiment") and sometimes simply at the inadequacy of the existing evidence on Mozart's life and thought...
Along with the frustration comes frequent disillusion; Hildesheimer does not balk at exploding romantic preconceptions. A famous reflective letter which Mozart wrote soon after his father Leopold's death--usually taken as evidence that the composer underwent profound emotional stress--is here traced directly to one of the era's popular books on philosophy; in addition, Hildesheimer observes. Mozart's first composition after the letter was "A Musical Joke." Hildesheimer also presents his own interpretation of Mozart's notorious tendency to indulge in "fecal comedy." The crude giggly figure of Mozart seen in Peter Sheffer's play "Amadeus...
...circular discussion of different aspects of the man, rather than unfolding in a sequentially predetermined order. In this sense it is an unorthodox biography. There His no chapters, no neatly presented "phases," no strictly chronological pattern in Hildesheimer's story. His introductory remarks on the problems of writing about Mozart spill over, undivided, into the first chosen issue of the biography...
Music director Stuart Malina '84 has brought to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro a highly professional polish the tradeoff, as usual being some loss of student and House flavor. Three of the five main voices are Boston-area professional musicians; they carry the main musical burden for more than three hours. But in no sense do they overshadow the two undergraduate leads. Sebastian Knowles as Figaro and Nan Hughes as the lovesick pageboy Cherubino. Indeed these two make it obvious that casting professionals is not the only way to go. The valiant, largely student orchestra conducted by Malina...