In the Massanuttens – The French film biography of Mozart’s sister – Biden’s bid for re-election – Donald Trump advocates firing squads – One more Russian defenestration – In-fighting in North Korea – Evening statistics
Tuesday was crowded with incident, as Oscar Wilde would say. Much of the day was taken up with a hike that went up to Signal knob and then down to Mudhole Gap (somewhat more attractive than its name would lead one to believe), taking the Mudhole Gap Trail nearly all the way back to Rte. 678, but stopping just short of it to connect with the Tuscacora Trail and back to the parking area – about 16 miles in all. It was chilly in the morning but it warmed up quickly, and I had divested myself of both jacket and sweater by the end of the hike. The view of the Shenandoah Valley down to Strasburg immediately below and stretching for miles both to the north and to the south, is beginning to become overgrown as the trees on the mountain slope immediately below it are gradually becoming taller, but it remains magnificent nonetheless.
When I returned, I went back home to shower and change my clothes, and took the Metro downtown, where I met with AD, EB, and WG to see “Nannerl,” a film about Mozart’s sister. I was not sure what to expect. She died in obscurity and her life does not, at first glance, provide much of cinematic interest. She seems to have had ambitions of becoming a composer in her youth, but nothing composed by her has survived. After the years of performing with her brother as a pair of child prodigies, she stayed at home in Salzburg with her mother and earned a living teaching the piano. At the age of 32 she married a widower in his fifties, with five children from his two previous marriages, whom she helped to raise, along with three children of her own. Only one of these lived to maturity. Eventually she became a widow and supported herself again by teaching music; also she came in contact with Mozart’s widow and the latter’s second husband, and provided information to aid them in writing Mozart’s biography. She lost her eyesight towards the end of her life, but was not (as the film mistakenly states) impoverished; even though she lived rather frugally, she left a considerable fortune to her surviving son.
As EB pointed out, in some ways she provides a real-life example of Virginia Woolf’s account of a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own, who has talents similar to her brother’s but whose sex provides an insuperable barrier towards realizing them. Maria Anna Mozart did not, of course, die young after being seduced and abandoned by an unscrupulous fellow-artist, as Woolf’s Shakespearian sibling does, but all accounts of her from those who saw her perform in early years speak of her extraordinary musical gifts, while Mozart’s own correspondence mentions his sister’s early works with enthusiastic praise. One might have expected her to have left at least a few extant works that could have borne comparison with her brother’s early symphonies and concertos or at the very least have shed light on his compositional methods. But she gave up any such attempt, quite understandably. In her day it was virtually impossible for a woman to earn a living as a composer. (As indeed it was for many years afterward. Clara Wieck Schumann, who was born approximately 70 years after Maria Anna Mozart, wrote several beautiful works [personally I greatly prefer her music to her husband’s], but she obtained fame and income through her work as a performer, not as a composer. “I once believed that I possessed creative talent,” she wrote. “But I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” Sadly, most of her own music was never played by anyone else during her lifetime.)
So what does one do when confronted with the prospect of making a film about a person to whom nothing much happened and who was pretty much relegated to the sidelines during her adult life? Why, make something up, of course! There is not the slightest evidence that the Mozart family had contact with any of the sons and daughters of Louis XV of France, but in “Nannerl” the titular figure forms a friendship with Louise, the King’s youngest daughter, and eventually becomes involved in an affair (albeit one that is, unusually for a French film, Platonic) with the recently widowed Louis the Dauphin, the only surviving son of the king. The film is well-acted, the sets are handsome and imposing, the music that accompanies the scenes is hauntingly lovely; but the discrepancy between the events being portrayed and what actually happened (or rather what didn’t happen) is so glaring that, for me at any rate, it greatly detracted from my enjoyment of the film.
I have commented previously, upon seeing another French film “biography” of Vincent Van Gogh, about movie-makers’ tendency (and French movie-makers in particular) to distort reality in order to conform with their preconceptions. It is axiomatic that any great artist must by definition be a great lover; therefore, let Vincent Van Gogh be portrayed as a man who causes every woman who crosses his path to swoon over him – even though in reality he had little success with women and was once turned down in a proposal of marriage with insulting speed and decision. Similarly, it is not sufficient simply to show Nannerl dappling in composition and then sadly coming to the conclusion that attempting to obtain musicians to perform her works and to induce audiences to hear them is a wasted effort; no, she must go about in masculine garb to the Palace of Versailles and in this disguise conduct a performance of her works to admiring listeners among the French nobility, all of this undertaken with the connivance of no less a personage than the heir to the throne of France. Incidentally, Maria Anna Mozart was born in 1751 and she is said in the film to be “nearly 15” when she meets the recently widowed Dauphin, who in fact lost his first wife in 1747. I daresay the movie-makers would have had Nannerl play some of her music to console Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette through their last months during the French Revolution if they could have stretched the calendar far enough.
If any further proof is needed that the film-makers were completely out of touch with the era they ostensibly portrayed, a speech in one scene given by one of the professors in the Academy of Music puts all doubts to rest. The good professor states that anyone who has technical knowledge of musical techniques but who composes without passion is to be pitied. That concept simply did not exist in the 18th century. Music, both to composers and to their audiences, was a craft. Composers could, and did, invest their compositions with a great deal of emotion and many violent quarrels erupted about the respective merits of various composers (the one concerning the superiority Gluck to Piccini or vice versa rocked Paris for months on end), but no one at that time considered passion for its own sake to be an attribute to strive for. “The great emotional wallow,” as C. S. Lewis stigmatized it, did not emerge until the Romantic era of the 19th century, though admittedly it has dominated the arts ever since.
But what does historical accuracy matter, it may be asked, if the film tells a good story? The answer is that if the story were frankly presented as a fiction it would matter very little; but the distortion of historical personages to suit one’s personal convenience should not be dismissed so lightly. When living men and women are subjected to such a process, it is called slander, and so-called biographies such as these are not any the less slanderous because the people they depict are no longer alive.
It is, alas, no slander but a sober matter of fact that Biden, now aged 80, is pursuing plans to campaign for the Presidency in 2024 and, to that end, has just undergone a physical examination, whose results are yet to be announced. What he expects to gain by such an undertaking, goodness only knows. Few people have received his bid for re-election with enthusiasm. According to a recent survey, only 22% of the populace believe that he should run at all; and even among the Democrats only a scant 37% of them endorse this effort. During recent months his fits of coughing have become more frequent, and his gait has become noticeably stiffer and more halting, the result of a combination of spinal arthritis and nerve damage to his feet. These symptoms have led one observer to remark “the guy can’t walk, let alone run.”
There has been a bit of an outcry following a report that Donald Trump is planning to introduce firing squads as a method of capital punishment to be used as an alternative to the lethal injection that is currently in use, and even (according to one source, which however is not confirmed elsewhere) that such punishments should be televised. (There are a handful of states that technically allow this method of execution, although it was last used well over a century ago.) I can only hope that Trump will reinforce precept with example by presenting himself to one such squad if convicted of sedition.
Those wacky Russians, they just keep losing their balance whenever they desert the ground floor of any building. The body of 58-year-old Marina Yankina, who headed the Financial Support Department of the Russian Defense Ministry in St. Petersburg’s Western Military District, was found in the Kalininsky district of St. Petersburg as a result of an unexplained fall from a window, some 160 feet above the pavement. In the past few months, many officials in Russia have met their ends in this bizarre manner: tycoon Pavel Antov, who fell from a window at the hotel in the city of Rayagada, India; former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute Anatoly Geraschenko, who fell “from a great height” down a flight of stairs in the institute building; Lustoil chairman Ravil Maganov, who fell from a window in a hospital in Moscow. I keep urging Russians, and especially any Russians who have criticized Putin in public, to stick to basements whenever they can; but so far they haven’t taken any notice.
Another person who should be on her guard is Kim Yo Jong, the once-powerful sister of Kim Jong Un. I say “once-powerful” because recently Kim Jong Un has been parading his 10-year old daughter Kim Ju Ae in public at various key events and has even issued five new stamps with her image on them, a pretty clear indication that this child is his designated successor. As previous experience has shown, being a once-powerful family member of Kim Jong Un is not a good position to occupy. Kim Jong Un has had both his uncle and his half-brother eliminated once he decided that they might become threats to his grasp on the nation’s political power, so Kim Yo Jong has good reason to hope that Kim Jong Un will not be turning his fraternal attentions towards her in the near future.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 678,223,481; # of deaths worldwide: 6,787,167; # of cases U.S.: 104,898,749; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,141,524.