Les Arts Florissants's «Die Zauberflöte» - plus my social networks

Les Arts Florissants's historically informed version of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1791) - played with period instruments - comes serenely to the listener, at an appointed slower pace than other large-orchestral performances, and this brings forth a welcoming freshness. I highlight Dessay's Königin der Nacht - throughout, her coloraturas sound just like an instrument; which can be heard best in this version's slower-paced Der Hölle Rache aria - and Scharinger's Papageno, sung with a lot of heart. Overall, the singing in this recording is first-rate. There is a quiet period-piece dignitas here, very moving and authentic, belied by the light-hearted, gracious playing. One of the most original and precious versions of this singspiel already recorded.

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In Hell

I'm doubting if knowledge killed religion and pushed Western civilization to the path of scientific bliss. This may be pure historical interpretation through commonplace, an effect Arendt already warned about. Inasmuch as the hegemony of a knowledge based intelectual structure versus some religious based emotional structure, we might be seeing it all wrong, for to what extent is knowledge no more a process? In so far as we having come to terms with this process — for it is one—, it should be useful to keep in mind that in every period people thought of themselves as infinitely wiser than forerunners from past societies, which rings as a cautionary tale against the hubris of half-knowledge or, worst!, of philistinism, the crudness of pure ignorance.

This age is plagued by all the artlessness, all the inelegances of yesterday — the worst being the kind of Halo Effect operated by dilletantes and media darlings in the semi-private, semi-public, space of virtual communication. There really seems to exist some type of maladroitness endemic to this mucoidal space we call the social network — mucoidal in the sense of being porous, like the mouth or the anus; a liminal proscenium — pregnable and retentive, both. It is in this frontispiece that we stand civilized as in a public space, but, nonetheless, as oafish as one can be when unobserved in the recesses of domiciliary space. It is in this fake frontier that we gather to conform and to feel the amniotic freedom of bashing the ones marginalized by whatever consensus society chooses to structure itself around in any given moment, since bashing, in itself, is no longer considered a civilized behaviour, except when feigned as indignation.

In this regard I don't think we live in a more enlightened age than before or that the religion of progress will take care of all our problems. The past is full of examples in which consensus got it wrong — in some cases, harrowingly so. We suffer from shortsightedness and the desire to belong to whatever the consensus might be — myopia and monomania are this age's fifth and sixth horsemen. We lost the capabiity of discerning right from wrong, substantial from superfluous, valuable from vapid — and the nakedness of our dispensation from it, of our withdrawl from it, signals at last the true and only exclusivity of our time. The fact that we didn't kill Hell, like we would like to think: we just made it into a kiddie-ride.

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