Mozart the Dramatist by Brigid Brophy

Author:Brigid Brophy [Brigid Brophy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571304721
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

* Schikaneder’s authorship, asserted by the original playbill, was afterwards challenged. (See Einstein: Mozart …, 23; E. J. Dent: Mozart’s Operas, 14.) Die Zauberflöte’s is just the type of libretto that is most certainly the result of collaboration: I shall avoid controversy by referring to its authors in the plural.

† (Act II, No. 15.) Likewise one of the priests (in the dialogue before No. 11, Act II).

‡ This was, at least, the statement of Diodorus Siculus (I, 11) and the inter pretation known to the eighteenth century. Frazer later argued that Osiris was not originally the sun and may even have been the moon (Adonis Attis Osiris, Volume II).

§ The words are from the fifteenth-century ‘Cooke’ manuscript (published by Matthew Cooke in 1861) in the British Museum. (See Encyclopaedia Britannica, Freemasonry.)

¶ See, for the history (but not the procedure, about which it is cagey) of Masonry, the article by William James Hughan, himself a Mason, in the 1910–11 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

|| Claims that Masonry went back to Solomon and Moses were published in London in 1723 (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Freemasonry).

** The French branch dispensed with this requirement in 1877, but thereby brought itself into schism with the (maternal) English branch.

†† Presumably Thomas Lediard (1685–1743): ‘miscellaneous writer; attached to the staff of the Duke of Marlborough, accompanying him on his visit to Charles XII of Sweden, 1707; returned to England before 1732; produced various historical and biographical works, 1735–6; author of a pamphlet dealing with a scheme for building bridge at Westminster, 1738; F.R.S., 1742; “agent and surveyor of Westminster Bridge”, 1738–43; author of several works in German and an English opera “Britannia”’ (Concise Dictionary Of National Biography).

‡‡ THE LIFE OF SETHOS, TAKEN FROM PRIVATE MEMOIRS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. Translated from a Greek MANUSCRIPT into FRENCH. And now faithfully done into English from the Paris EDITION; By Mr. LEDIARD. In TWO VOLUMES, LONDON: …. M.DCC.XXXII.

§§ In myth and cult Isis and Osiris were inseparable. (They were at once husband and wife, and brother and sister. Osiris, after his murder, owed the piecing-together of his dismembered body or even his actual resurrection to Isis.) The mysteries, however, belonged to Isis alone. Apuleius is first initiated into her mysteries, and then by a separate act consecrates himself to Osiris. The distinction is preserved in both Sethos and Die Zauberflöte, where Sarastro prays to Isis and Osiris, but the consecration the initiate achieves is that of Isis (‘Der Isis Weihe ist nun dein!’—Act II, No. 21, second Allegro).

¶¶ This point of view is evidently shared by General Franco, who, on 17 June, 1962, called communism and Freemasonry ‘the enemies of the greatness of Spain’ (The Guardian, 18 June, 1962).

|||| The high priest in Sethos gives a characteristic account of the enlightenment’s attitude towards hereditary monarchy, which is justified on grounds of convenience. He finds that the principle of primogeniture in royal successions ‘is even for the advantage and ease of the publick’, since it makes for a more peaceful transition than ‘the difficult and often dangerous estimate of personal merit’ (Lediard’s translation, Volume I, p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.