#tarare

Why would he hire a guy who couldn't write a crowd pleaser?

Mozart didn't make it in Paris when he tried. Mozart's name wouldn't attract the French audience.

Mozart worked in Vienna and Prague, and Beaumarchais didn't hear his music.

Beaumarchais tried to recruit Gluck (Marie-Antoinette's music teacher and favourite composer) but Gluck advised him to hire his ghostwriter Salieri, who ghostwrote for Gluck in Italy and France. Salieri's opera The Danaides was successful in Paris and landed him a contract with Beaumarchais.

Beaumarchais was more popular than Mozart, internationally. It was Mozart who piggybacked his fame, but apparently all these people who write articles and biographies pretend they don't know it, because "in modern America nobody knows Beaumarchais except of the fans of Mozart's operas".

The most popular musician of that generation was Paisiello, Napoleon's favourite composer, who wrote 94 operas. At the moment Paisiello worked in Russia by invitation of Catherine II. Paisiello used Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville for his opera, then Martin y Soler used The Barber of Seville for his ballet, and only then Mozart used The Marriage of Figaro. Both adaptations of The Barber were more successful than Mozart's Figaro. The more grounded question would be "why Beaumarchais didn't invite Paisiello?" but for obvious reasons nobody asks it.

Incompatibility from artistic standpoint:

Regarding operas, Mozart's opinion was that "poetry must obey the music", whereas in France the audience wanted to follow the plot and understand every word; opera producers there hired dramatic actors instead of opera singers.

In the preface for Tarare Beaumarchais wrote that he wanted French-appealing minimalist background music behind his text.

Mozart called his music melodic, memorable, so that every coachman could sing it. Beaumarchais didn't want the audience to go out of the theatre whistling melodies and not remembering Beaumarchais's text (which would drown in the operatic singing).

The funniest:

Beaumarchais could listen to Mozart's Figaro if Salieri brought him the score😁 But he brought just the libretto🤣 According to Lorenzo da Ponte’s memoir, Salieri took his libretto of The Marriage of Figaro to Paris and showed it to Beaumarchais, who supposedly praised the way Lorenzo had adapted it for Mozart's opera. However, Beaumarchais's biographers don't mention any contacts with Italy, which means he didn't need to be fluent in Italian. Did Salieri translate for him?

Lorenzo omitted that Pierre Beaumarchais was on the copyright crusade since his twenties (when he was a watchmaker and an older colleague stole a detail invented by young Pierre and advertised it as his own invention). At the moment, in his fifties, Beaumarchais was a union head and fought for royalties for authors. He fumed when someone edited scenes out of his comedies, e.g. he sued actors who refused to play the coronation scene in Tarare, and he was mad when after revolution an edited version of Tarare was staged without his approval.

I bet he fumed just like that when Salieri whipped out the libretto of The Marriage of Figaro and said "My friend Lorenzo da Ponte asks your opinion of his adaptation of your Figaro for Mozart's opera".

I knew about Tarare before reading this book, and indeed he was a significant influence on my own character Georg, another ravenous creature in human shape. Georg is significantly more of an impossible fantasy, preferring his meals alive and whole and human, s'il vous plaît (I should say bitte; Georg is the Germanic Tarare). Even so, I see so much of Georg in this version of Tarare, it's uncanny. His sweet simplicity and innocence, his insistent hunger. Even his large-eyedness (he is described in the text as having exceptionally large blue-gray eyes, but I can't help but see and hear dark-eyed Peter Lorre speaking his dialogue. It doesn't help that I imagine Peter Lorre as everything, including Georg, but shhh).

The author of this book said in an interview that she learned to ignore the inner critic voice that said "this will be too gross for anyone." But it's actually not all gory and gross. I found a lot of it intensely sensual, and not just because of my eating fetish! I practically screamed for joy when Tarare falls asleep after gorging himself and dreams of becoming a devourer of worlds:

He gropes his way to the far wall, feeling a quickening, an unbidden rush of blood to his cock. Gropes hard and stun-blind across the stonework until his sticky fingers grasp at the handle of another door, and this he opens, goes through (being alive, feeling in the darkness, he takes himself out of his trousers with a shudder of mad pleasure) and the dawnlight comes into this cool still room through a small window, and falls on stores and pickles and jams and mustards and loaves left to cool under damp white cloth and pale soft-moon cheeses and the boy, the boy Tarare, who quivers in delight and terror of himself and his so alive life and his vast, enormous appetite— * * * In his dream, Tarare eats the whole of France. His face looms over the rooftops of thatch and red tile as the sun will loom on the Day of Judgement, laurelled in cirrus. He scoops the glassy lakes up in his hands and brings them to his mouth to drink. He prises up the wheatfields with his nails and they spiral into fuzzy ribbons, like apple peel. He sees his mother then, so far below him. She comes out of their house and lifts her face upward, and the sweet waters of the Gaude and the Bourget trickle from between his fingers and fall on to her cheeks as a life-giving rain. He grasps at the sides of a mountain and wrenches it from the earth. Holding it to his ear he hears the screams of the little people in their gaily painted houses. Skinny goats roll down the scree like crumbs, unfooted, and the geese take flight. A white swan with its wings outspread passes as a glitter across the vast darkness of his pupil. And when he is full, he sleeps, with his spine curled against the Pyrenees.