Oples, where you get tomorrow's news today!
Happy birthday,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a teensy bit early. Buddy was not gay, but classical music had and has a collection of queers within (and there's a good
primer here, at the GLBT Encyclopedia, that also includes a handful of women composers -- beyond the chants of
Hildegard von Bingen, already).
The 250th anniversary of the Moz's birth brings me to Toronto filmmaker
John Greyson, whose installation piece
"Fig Trees" is a modernist opera of note. Greyson, creator of the AIDS musical
"Zero Patience ," was in Montreal last week, a guest of the Concordia University
HIV/AIDS Lecture Series, and discussed the mix of pop and classical music that has inspired much of his work. There's
a write-up here (and here's my conflict of interest note: nice story, sweetie!). "Fig Trees" is inspired by
Gertrude Stein's surrealist
libretto (!) for the opera,
"Four Saints in Three Acts." It has four acts. Ho ho!
Noted Stein: "A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing and so I wanted to have Four Saints that did nothing and I wrote Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything."
Did everybody get get get get that I hope everybody I hope because now so I've got to go get get that I hope so now get