Sunday, July 18, 2021

July 18 - Giovanni Battista Bononcini; Pauline Viardot (The Musical Birthday Series, 3rd Annual Cycle)

Previous posts for July 18th are found here: Pauline Viardot (2019) and Richard Branson (2020)

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Giovanni Battista Bononcini] (18 July 1670 – 9 July 1747) was an Italian composer, cellist, singer, and teacher.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take What You Can Get

 

From 1720 to 1732 he was in London, where for a time his popularity rivaled Handel's. Their competition inspired a witty verse epigram that made the phrase "tweedledum and tweedledee" famous. -- adapted form Wikipedia 


Bononcini is mentioned in history books

  As a one-time Handelian rival.

It isn’t the best of historical nooks,

  But it gives him a kind of survival.


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Pauline Viardot (18 July 1821 – 18 May 1910) was a great mezzo and a minor composer.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hobnobbing


Toward the end of her life, the opera diva Pauline Viardot took stock of her vast social network. She wrote a three-page, multicolumn list of everyone she had ever met, worked with or loved.

She ended up with over 300 names, a who’s-who of 19th-century icons: composers like Rossini, Liszt and Schumann; novelists like George Sand, Victor Hugo and Ivan Turgenev, her lover; Giuseppe Mazzini and Napoleon III. --- Hilary Poriss, New York Times, July 16, 2021



Pauline Viardot,

Who got to know

  A most impressive crew,

Compiled a roll

Which on the whole

   Reads like a Who Was Who.

 

 

 

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