"The Virtuosi"

[fiefoe]

It used be titled "The Glorious Ones", and it's only natural that Harold Schonberg ran out of superlatives pretty fast. The book makes rather compulsive, if somewhat tepid reading.

<Farinelli>:
    There was something Da Vincian in Farinelli's Spanish activities. He... redesigned the opera house, imported Hungarian horses, worked with engineers to redirect the course of the Tagus River...
    In the course of the first song, he so softened the heart of the enraged tyrant, that Senesino, forgetting his stage-character, ran up... and embraced him in his own.

<Travelling in the 18th century>:
    Pascal's contribution to public transportation
    (Engineers like John Loudon McAdam, Thomas Telford).. had shown how to build roads that had proper drainage and a hard top.
    Medical men said that train travel would lead to dyspepsia, dysentery, Saint Vitus's dance, hysteria, epilepsy, inflammation of the retina, and miscarriages.

<General music history>:
    As the (19th) century went on, programs began to reflect the conservatives tastes of the middle class. Exhibit A: percentage of dead composers in the programs of the Leipzig Gewardhaus concerts: 1781-85, 13%; 1820-25, 23%; 1828-34, 39%; 1837-47, 48%; 1865-1879, 70%.
    First solo recital: Liszt, 1839.
    First public concert in England was organized by Samuel Pepys (again) in 1644.
    Mendelssohn was the one who stabilized the symphony concert once for all.

<Luigi Lablache>
    When he sang Leporello in Don Giovanni he would tuck the baritone singing the part of Masetto under his arm and walk off with him.