#peter hall

(Harold C. Schonberg, illustration by Al Hirschfeld; The New York Times)

With all the hundreds and hundreds of books and studies written about Mozart, there still is some mystery about the man. One thing musicologists do know. He was not the delicate, angelic figure the 19th century made him out to be. In any case, Mr. Shaffer has not even attempted to give us an idealized portrait. Early in its London run the play irritated and actually offended some music-lovers and critics who prefer to think of Mozart as the Raphael of music, or any of the other Romantic conceptions about the man who may well have been the greatest musical genius who ever walked the earth. When the play opens on Wednesday at the Broadhurst, New York audiences are going to take the measure of Mozart as seen through the vision of a dramatist who spent three years reading everything about Mozart ever written in English. And what emerges? Mozart as a child-man. A Mozart with an anal fixation. A Mozart as a permanent adolescent. A Mozart who used foul language, who had a sharp tongue, who was notably ungenerous about his colleagues, who was a womanizer and, at the end, a poverty-stricken alcoholic. But also a Mozart true to himself and his musical vision. Whatever Mozart was as a man — in his real life as in the play — in music he was pure.

  There is a new fiber, a something of cedar in   ₁ a ‘something’ of red dust than the ‘nothing’ of holiness, I’d rather have   ₂ and still with a something of mellowness.   There is a combination of soft salmon pink, “picked out,” to use the common phrase.   ₃ The walls are mostly bare,   with a few items that change regularly —   ₄ neither Souls nor Bodies; they are no more than the faithful Shadows of themselves, a Something of too refined and subtle a Nature to be touched —   ₅   The wall is a something of a sketchbook for me,   ₄ a something of linen or woollen to cover the straw on which they lie,   ₆ a something of nearly transparent linen and lace that started somewhere round   ₇   in the sea of words submerged. A something of small account at any time; of no account at all when it comes to   ₈   ‘A Something else thereby’; ‘A something of Four’   ₉ how language is such a dust   ₁₀

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sources

1 Ernest Hartsock on Louis Untermeyer his Burning Bush (1928), in Bozart 1:6 (Atlanta, Georgia; July-August 1928) : 17 / more 2 Catherine Dai, Under the Phoenix Tree (1990) : 176 / more 3 Rosamund Marriott Watson, The Art of the House (London, 1897) : 16 / more 4 interview with Peter Hall, in feature on same, in Marc Valli and Richard Brereton, eds., RGB : Reviewing Graphics in Britain (2010) : 268-273 (269) / more 5 “Supplement to the Dissertations on the Religion of the Banians,” in Bernard Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Idolatrous Nations; together with Historical Annotations, And several Curious Discourses Equally Instructive and Entertaining. Vol. IV. Part II. (London, 1733) : 90 / more 6 Poor Inquiry, Ireland Appendix E : Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings Banks, Drinking [supplement to] (Parliamentary Papers, v. 32; London, 1836) : 104/ more 7 Bart Spicer, The Wild Ohio (Bantam Giant A1211, 1954) : 83 / more 8 “The Training of Engineers,” in The Engineer (August 18, 1899) : 170 / more 9 Michael Cotsell, on titles contemplated for what would be Quartet in Autumn (1977) in his chapter “Language and Loneliness : The Late Novels” of Barbara Pym (1989) : 122 / more 10 Lisa Robertson. Riverwork (2026) : 36 / more

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Three Into Two Won't Go (1969) dir. Peter Hall