Frederick the Great, discussion post 6

[cahn]

...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.

(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)

Frederick the Great masterpost

Comments

Re: Tarare: Salieri and Mozart (and of course Shaffer)

[selenak]

I can barely read notes, so I love your musical expertise here! I'm curious about the opera now. I haven't listened to an entire work by Salieri before, either, but I did listen to some Salieri arias from different pieces, because Cecilia Bartoli did an entire album of them which was very well received, and I heard some of those arias on classic Radio.

Gluck was who Salieri learned his trade from, so it makes much sense you're reminded of him!

Entführung aus dem Serail was the second opera I ever heard, after The Magic Flute, because of course German school kids are introduced to opera via the later - it's a fairy tale, it's in a language they can understand, and it's Mozart! Then Entführung, because again, understandable for Kids. Will you do a post on it?

Re: Tarare: Salieri and Mozart (and of course Shaffer)

[cahn]

ahahahaha well, I will own to having musical expertise in violin (there was a time where I could probably have gone professional if I'd been OK with practicing as much as I practiced in high school for the rest of my career, which I was like, nope) but that's a very different beast from expertise in opera! (Indeed instrumentalists, at least violinists, unless they live in that world, tend to know far less than you'd expect about opera.) You know more about opera than I do -- I had seen the odd opera or two for various reasons in college/grad school, then I took singing lessons about fifteen years ago and my teacher made me watch the late Mozart operas, including Flute (that was also when I took my two semesters of Italian, which was supposed to help me pronounce words (spoiler: it didn't really)), and I managed to listen to/like a couple of other things like Iphigenie en Tauride and Eugene Onegin and love them, but it wasn't until discovering Verdi last year that I entered the obsessive period I'm in now :) (See also: you have actually listened to Salieri arias! Whereas I am all "arias are kinda boring!" I am really rather an opera philistine.) What I do have is a lot of judgmentality and Opinions about the music I listen to, and no fear of using it :P :)

Do you have Spotify, though? (I know it exists in Germany!) It has changed my musical listening life, in the sense that now I can listen to eeeeeeeverything, like four different versions of Don Carlo(s) (it's got a lot more, I just got tired listening after that) or everything Simon Keenlyside has ever recorded :P Or Tarare! I highly recommend Spotify! :)

I'll do a post on Entführung but probably not until actually watching it, which... umm. Not sure when that's going to happen. (It will happen! But eventually.) I usually listen at work, which means that I've only got half my mind on it and miss a LOT, which usually comes out when I watch it :) (Although one of the barriers to listening to Entführung has been that Mozart operas are so sparkly that I have trouble listening to them at work because I want to pay attention! The other reason I was able to listen was that I had a really dull task (literally copying stuff which because of various reasons I couldn't just cut and paste) where I only had to give it minimal attention.)