composer. After two decades, he moved to Hanover, where he had more of the same. He seemed to drift away from music while he devoted himself to politics, working for the Catholic cause in a country whose rulers had decided to turn it Protestant.
“Ernst August,” she said out loud as she came upon reference to the duke of Hanover: yes, she remembered him. Here the writer of the article opened a parenthesis (and explained that Ernst August’s people built him the most sumptuous opera house in Germany, not to delight him but to attempt to keep him from taking his yearly, and ruinously expensive, trips to Carnevale in Venice). His son, Georg Ludwig, was to become George I of England. Like most people trained in research, Caterina willingly gave in to its intoxication and sent Google running off after Georg Ludwig: wasn’t there some scandal about his wife? Soon enough, there she was, the beautiful Sophie Dorothea, the greatest beauty and most desirable marital catch of the era; married at sixteen to Georg Ludwig (another parenthesis explained that they were first cousins) before being caught in adultery, divorced, and imprisoned for more than thirty years until her death. It all made fascinating reading, but it didn’t tell her much about Steffani.
Caterina went back to the original window and continued to read about Steffani’s life after his virtual abandonment of music. He shuttled about endlessly on diplomatic missions here and there. He spent six years in Düsseldorf, concerned chiefly with political and ecclesiastical matters, producing his last three operas there. He appeared to have prevented a war between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, both of them embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, and who remembered what that was all about? He had spent a good deal of his nonmusical life attempting to persuade various North German rulers to return to the arms of Holy Mother Church. She looked up from the computer and let her eyes trail to the facade of the church of Santa Maria della Fava. Suddenly her soul was enwrapped by Vivaldi, an aria for Juditha triumphans , what were the words? Transit aetas / Volant anni / Nostri damni / Causa sumus. How gloriously simple the score was: mandolin and pizzicato violin, and a single voice warning us that time passes, the years fly by, and we are the cause of our own destruction. What better message to give to the leaders of those empty churches? We are the cause of our own destruction.
“Would you like another half hour, Signora?” the young Tamil at the cash register called to her. “Time’s up in five minutes, but you can stay online for another half hour for two euros.”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for asking, though,” she said and resisted the urge to look for the aria being sung on YouTube. Steffani moved back to Hanover in 1709, but there was no further mention of his music, only travel and political involvement. Almost no more music. Was genius painful, she wondered? Did it, at some point, simply cost too much for the spirit to continue to create? As she watched, the screen went blank, taking with it Steffani, his music, the church he served, and all of his desires to restore that church to her former power. She picked up her bag, thanked the young man at the desk, and started toward the library.
It took her no more than ten minutes to get there; to pass in front of the two caryatids and into the lobby of the Marciana was to pass from the constant crowding of the Piazza into the calm tranquillity that thoughts and the books that contained them were meant to give. She stood for a moment, as if she were a diver waiting to decompress, and then she approached the guard and mentioned Ezio’s name. He smiled and waved her through an apparently deactivated metal detector and into the foyer of the library.
One of the guards must have phoned him, for by the time Caterina got to the head of the stairs, Ezio was there, coming toward her with outstretched
“Ernst August,” she said out loud as she came upon reference to the duke of Hanover: yes, she remembered him. Here the writer of the article opened a parenthesis (and explained that Ernst August’s people built him the most sumptuous opera house in Germany, not to delight him but to attempt to keep him from taking his yearly, and ruinously expensive, trips to Carnevale in Venice). His son, Georg Ludwig, was to become George I of England. Like most people trained in research, Caterina willingly gave in to its intoxication and sent Google running off after Georg Ludwig: wasn’t there some scandal about his wife? Soon enough, there she was, the beautiful Sophie Dorothea, the greatest beauty and most desirable marital catch of the era; married at sixteen to Georg Ludwig (another parenthesis explained that they were first cousins) before being caught in adultery, divorced, and imprisoned for more than thirty years until her death. It all made fascinating reading, but it didn’t tell her much about Steffani.
Caterina went back to the original window and continued to read about Steffani’s life after his virtual abandonment of music. He shuttled about endlessly on diplomatic missions here and there. He spent six years in Düsseldorf, concerned chiefly with political and ecclesiastical matters, producing his last three operas there. He appeared to have prevented a war between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, both of them embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, and who remembered what that was all about? He had spent a good deal of his nonmusical life attempting to persuade various North German rulers to return to the arms of Holy Mother Church. She looked up from the computer and let her eyes trail to the facade of the church of Santa Maria della Fava. Suddenly her soul was enwrapped by Vivaldi, an aria for Juditha triumphans , what were the words? Transit aetas / Volant anni / Nostri damni / Causa sumus. How gloriously simple the score was: mandolin and pizzicato violin, and a single voice warning us that time passes, the years fly by, and we are the cause of our own destruction. What better message to give to the leaders of those empty churches? We are the cause of our own destruction.
“Would you like another half hour, Signora?” the young Tamil at the cash register called to her. “Time’s up in five minutes, but you can stay online for another half hour for two euros.”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for asking, though,” she said and resisted the urge to look for the aria being sung on YouTube. Steffani moved back to Hanover in 1709, but there was no further mention of his music, only travel and political involvement. Almost no more music. Was genius painful, she wondered? Did it, at some point, simply cost too much for the spirit to continue to create? As she watched, the screen went blank, taking with it Steffani, his music, the church he served, and all of his desires to restore that church to her former power. She picked up her bag, thanked the young man at the desk, and started toward the library.
It took her no more than ten minutes to get there; to pass in front of the two caryatids and into the lobby of the Marciana was to pass from the constant crowding of the Piazza into the calm tranquillity that thoughts and the books that contained them were meant to give. She stood for a moment, as if she were a diver waiting to decompress, and then she approached the guard and mentioned Ezio’s name. He smiled and waved her through an apparently deactivated metal detector and into the foyer of the library.
One of the guards must have phoned him, for by the time Caterina got to the head of the stairs, Ezio was there, coming toward her with outstretched
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