Well-tuned reminder of The timeless joy of Rossini.
His "La Gazza Ladra" overture (drums snapping like fireworks) the perfect soundtrack to Stendhal's account in "The Charterhouse of Parma" of the teenage Fabrizio's epic stumble through the battle of Waterloo...Stendhal's funny, gossipy, opinionated biography of R. (quoted below) the first book I ever bought in NYC (at the Strand fall '95, along with the WPA guide and a still-unread Hermann Broch novel)--his accounts of the opening nights, and he went to a lot, really "put you there", as at Waterloo...
"Again, it would be almost impossible to describe the enthusiasm and delirium of the Milanese audiences on first hearing this masterpiece. The pit, having clapped and cheered to the echo, having shouted for five whole minutes on end, having in fact created such an uproar and pandemonium that no conceivable stretch of the imagination can visualize it, found itself in the end utterly exhausted, too physically weak to cheer a moment longer . . . "
" . . . I am always struck by a note of rustic energy, by a strong flavor of the countryside, above all by a complete lack of urban sophistication . . . I like to think that, if there were music in Washington or Cincinnati - music which were genuinely national, and not merely imitative - it would betray the same characteristic absence of artificiality and sophistication. "
Must rummage around for Pynchon's great paragraph on R. in "Gravity's Rainbow"...
(later: here it is, poached from a board so no page ref.--
"The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels GOOD listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinny old fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, LOVE OCCURS. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled -- listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Saure had to shout his head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together...." )
