My writing

A correction on “The Marriage of Figaro”

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged French history translation writing on by

In my Liberty Fund article on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, I made an error. Relying on what others wrote, I said:

When he [Beaumarchais] wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Louis XVI banned it for three years. The King supposedly said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first.” Eight years later, it was, and the French aristocracy came crashing down with it.

It’s a good thing I used the word “supposedly.” I suspected a problem today when I got Lever’s biography of Beaumarchais and found a different version of the remark: “This is detestable and will never be performed; the Bastille would have to be destroyed for the performance of this play not to be of dangerous inconsequence.” “Dangerous inconsequence” is a weird phrase, so I looked up the original French and found it on Wikipedia: “La représentation ne pourrait qu’être une inconséquence fâcheuse, sauf si la Bastille était détruite.”
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Lully and music under Louis XIV

This entry was posted in History Music My writing and tagged France history music on by

Jean-Baptiste LullyHere’s my latest for the Online Library of Liberty: “The Politics of Music Under Louis XIV.” Under Louis, successful art was art which he liked, by people he liked. In music, that meant Jean-Baptiste Lully, who got monopoly privileges from the king.

There are lots of famous German and Italian composers from that period, but French composers who weren’t Lully didn’t have much of a chance. Lully finally killed himself by conducting too vigorously.