"Too many notes, Mozart"

[Mark Kohut]

I remember when THAT was all over the Gravity's Rainbow judgment and still
is by many readers. Still is re V., Vineland too, of course and most
especially Against the Day.

All wrong.

"The peculiar thing is that this charge of "an excess of art", which was
used to cudgel Bach in his last years, was one that dogged Mozart
throughout his maturity.

The famous complaint of Emperor Joseph II about The Marriage of Figaro -
"too many notes, Mozart" - is generally perceived to be a gaffe by a
blockhead. In fact, Joseph was echoing what nearly everybody, including his
admirers, said about Mozart: he was so imaginative that he couldn't turn it
off, and that made his music at times intense, even demonic. Hence Mozart's
bad, or cautionary, reviews: "too strongly spiced"; "impenetrable
labyrinths"; "bizarre flights of the soul"; "overloaded and overstuffed".
Advertisement

Still, in the end, the reputation of Mozart in his own time was about what
it is today: he was considered an incomparable master. "

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 11:43 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Exactly :)
>
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 10:40 AM Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> They? Them?
>>
>> 2017-05-09 17:35 GMT+02:00 rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Maybe if they'd cut 250 pgs minimum from BE I'd agree.
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 5:32 AM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I like the idea that historical fiction can be prescient. It's sort of
>>>> Pynchon's M.O.
>>>> Not that he treats the past as an equation whose result is the
>>>> present, and that we could have predicted our now by better analysing
>>>> what led to it (which is a lot of historical fiction). It's more like
>>>> reverse science fiction. In SF the future is usually a way of thinking
>>>> about our current historical moment. In Pynchon the past is no more
>>>> real than SF, but is a most useful fiction through which to ken our
>>>> circumstances, if the light is right.
>>>> Anyway Bleeding Edge has it all.
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 6:53 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > Mr. Auerbach has latterly suggested that the election of Donald Trump
>>>> is a
>>>> > Decoherence Event ala his mythos  of Pynchon's vision. Just FYI.
>>>> >
>>>> > Declared BLEEDING EDGE to be prescient, which, when I think about dark
>>>> > money, the deep web in BE and Cambridge Analytics, unsolved
>>>> mysteries, what
>>>> > is the truth?,  seems righter than ever.
>>>> >
>>>> > Sent from my iPad
>>>> >
>>>> > On May 8, 2017, at 7:46 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > One of the best early considerations of BE, fer sure
>>>> >
>>>> > On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 1:06 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> >>
>>>> >> https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/861623079067365378
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170509/f8215319/attachment.html>