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cahnAnd including Emperor Joseph II!
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
Re: Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge
Date: 2022-02-12 05:08 pm (UTC)Nothing that I saw. He cites her a handful of times, but not in the context of letter-showing. One caveat: the pdf search is only as good as the OCR. Both extraneous spaces that my scanner inserts between letters, and word-wrap at the end of the line, will defeat it. However, search did find all the mentions of Pichler listed in the respective indexes of the two volumes, so we can be almost certain Beales didn't cite Pichler as his source for any letter-showing claims. (The other possibility being that he mentioned the claim but didn't cite her by name. But that's also unlikely.)