The Clap of the End or The End-Clap

PETR VACLAV — IL BOEMO — 2022

Josef Myslivecek is a composer from Prag that moved to Venice and Italy to complete his own musical training and particularly to learn how to compose an opera. He was admired by Mozart, they say, but Mozart is still great though he died in and of misery and poverty, in and of being rejected by the good Austrian society, which explains why he was a free-mason. Josef Myslivecek, alias Il Boemo, was tremendously famous and popular in Italy, and even beyond in his time, the 18th century but he ruined his career, in many ways, because he thought, he felt, he practiced this conviction that to make sopranos and other female singers work, invest in the music, you have to love them and of course with your own body, in their own bodies. Debauchery comes along, promiscuity follows then and all along, and looking for always stronger adventures leads the composer to the dregs of society and there he becomes sick with syphilis that will kill him after a rather long period when he is obliged to wear a mask to cover up the damage of the disease.

His death is probably a great loss for music, and we are just rediscovering him, but his approach to opera seems to have been slightly dictated by the genre in the 18th century in Italy before the real revolution Handel and Mozart introduced in the field of opera. Opera then is a…