Ecco il nostro ‘musicologo’ presunto, e comico prediletto, che segnala la seconda puntata dell’intervista concessa alla «prestigiosa rivista Interlude, in realtà roba da dilettanti («Welcome to Interlude, created by lovers of music for those who share their passion.» LINK). La prima puntata ha creato un certo dibattito (che si legge sotto il testo, all’indirizzo: http://www.interlude.hk/front/luca-bianchini-anna-trombetta-fall-gods-engaging-mozart-myth/), e anche qui c’è stata la consueta contrapposizione fra commenti estremamente critici e pareri di lettori infoiati per il bianchinpensiero. Curioso che tale dibattito scompaia dalla segnalazione che il sondriota, esaltato dal Predota (curiosa assonanza, manca però la i), offre nella sua pagina su Facebook. Come sempre fa comodo liquidare le contestazioni. Ma non stupisce: il falsario è noto all’universo mondo e in altri siti …
21 Luglio 2019 il 12:45
Reviewed book: La caduta degli dei (The Fall of The Gods), Voll. I-II / Luca Bianchini & Anna Trombetta, Tricase: Youcanprint Self-Publishing, 2016-2017, 945 pp.
To assume, as this book does, that Mozart signed as his own several works he had bought or stolen would require that he: 1) faked his activities as reported in his correspondence and in contemporary testimonies; 2) faked his own catalogue of works; 3) planted fake drafts among his papers to have them found after his death and lead future researchers astray. We quickly land on a scenario far less credible than any improbabilities it purportedly explains.
Messrs Bianchini and Trombetta lay themselves open to the same criticism they level at their predecessors, i.e. that they have largely tampered with primary and secondary sources. The problem lays in their remarkably unscholarly and contradictory use of them, as much in their libellous smearing of anybody, whether living or dead, who stands in the way of their wild speculations. Matter of fact, it is Bianchini’s and Trombetta’s methodology that is bankrupt. Mozart’s life was substantial enough, his career bare open in front of public opinion throughout, to de¬feat any historiography that cannot locate his compositional activity or its development.
Of course, Mozart had admirers and detractors during his lifetime, but the statement that he was an incompetent, overrated composer, a middling pianist abandoned by the Viennese musical public, is simply ludicrous. To put it after Cliff Eisen: “don’t forget, he was the second most-commissioned opera composer during that decade, and he obtained postings both at the court and at St. Stephen’s cathedral”. Was his stellar reputation a late fabrication by the Nazi film industry in the 1940s? To maintain such a lunatic point, Messrs B&T would deny the credibility of a long row of obituaries appeared in the international press just after his death. Thus they devote entire (unsavoury) chapters to the ad-hoc theory that any journalist is just a corrupt sycophant. Does this apply to those journalists – a Fabrizio Basciano, to name one – who are venting their claims on the Italian daily press?
Towards the end of Vol. 2, we come to the darkest and most astonishing mystery novel on Mozart’s death. The foul plot leading to his alleged assassination was organised, B&T maintain, by the Freemasons from a secret Illuminati lodge who were anxious to secure imperial favour by promoting music by ‘Aryan’ composers at the expense of sundry ethnic groups. Like Haydn, Mozart happened to be a convenient receiver of high-quality music composed by a number of Italians, Czechs, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Mulattos, etc. If the Illuminati aimed at suppressing evidence of the plot, why didn’t they slay Haydn, too? Despite some minor variations (Fascist-style clubbing instead of poison, Illuminati instead of Jesuits), this is neither original nor better supported stuff than much previous fiction in the same vein. Moreover, B&T’s heavy reliance on the scribbler Francis Carr, one who endeavoured to ‘prove’ that both Don Quixote AND Shakespeare’s plays were authored by Francis Bacon (!), shows their blind faith in the main tenets of amateurish pseudo-science: “anything that is printed is a fact” and “anything that has footnotes is scholarly”. So does their book’s dedication to the late Giorgio Taboga, a grassroots historian of music who admittedly couldn’t read music and nevertheless preached that the whole Wiener Klassik was a complete fabrication for the glory of the Habsburg dynasty.
Last and foremost, B&T’s sheer blindness to historic evidence is rivalled only by their deafness in matters musical. Besides the upstart ‘revelation’ that a quarter tone is an interval virtually inappreciable by the human ear (whose ear? probably B&T’s), their scanty attempts at musical analysis don’t stretch beyond the limits of elementary harmony primers (parallel fifths, octaves). In their excavation of the ‘real Mozart’, they simply do not hear or describe his music other than in such derogatory terms as ‘plagiarism’ and ‘incompetence’. Add to that several egregious blunders in decoding German, English and even early-Italian expressions, as well as in general history and geography (e.g., they locate Dresden in ‘Southern Germany’). They boast they are rewriting history. Fine. But before they come to that, they should study some.