The History Blog

The New York Times has a great story about the life and art of Giacomo Puccini.

It’s coming up on the 150th anniversary of his birth, and there’s a new movie about his raucous love life being released to coincide with the anniversary.

Puccini proudly called himself a “mighty hunter of wild fowl, opera librettos and attractive woman.” Mr. Benvenuti’s film, “Puccini e la Fanciulla” (”Puccini and the Girl”), presents a newly uncovered strand in Puccini’s messy biography. It asserts that he has another living granddaughter, Nadia Manfredi, the child of another son, also named Antonio, born of an affair with Giulia Manfredi, a feisty woman of humble background who ran a hostelry in Torre del Lago popular with local farmers and transient hunters. Personal letters and other documents that Mr. Benvenuti was shown by Nadia Manfredi in early 2007 present what seems a persuasive case.

And that’s after he had a 17 year affair with a married piano student of his who bore him a son and lived with him in raunchy sin until her husband finally died and Puccini’s family browbeat him into marrying her despite the fact that he was porking half the town as he had been pretty much non-stop from day one.

Juicy gossip aside, the article covers some interesting musical ground as well. Puccini was apparently fascinated by modern musical approaches and included them in his operas.

Puccini was intrigued by the experiments of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. He took the 60-mile trip from Torre del Lago to Florence just to hear an early performance of Schoenberg’s landmark “Pierrot Lunaire” (1912), an experience that made a deep impression. And Anton Webern, no less, Schoenberg’s student, who would become the master of the radically compact and elusive gesture in 12-tone composition, once wrote to Schoenberg of his enthusiasm for Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” (1910). “A score with an original sound throughout, splendid, every bar a surprise,” Webern wrote, with “not a trace of kitsch.”

The aggressive opening chords of “Turandot” present Puccini in his tough-guy modernist mode. Yet think of the Act II scene for Ping, Pang and Pong, three ministers at the court of the ancient emperor in Beijing. It’s easy to treat it as a comic/nostalgic interlude in an otherwise intense opera. But to listen closely to this elaborate trio is to marvel at the intricate, pungent orchestral harmonies, spiked with piercing dissonance.

I never thought of it that way on account of I was too busy cringing at the racist coolie aspect. Time to listen to “Turandot” again. The non-Nessum Dorma bits, that is.

City of Rome plans ancient theme park outside of town.

“The model is Euro-Disney in Paris,” said Deputy Mayor Mauro Cutrufo, announcing plans to build a vast ancient Rome theme park just outside the city which he says could be up and running within three to four years.

The park would provide family-friendly attractions to show visitors what life was like in the Rome of 2,000 years ago.

To be built on an as yet unspecified 1,000-1,200 acre site, it would put a Roman twist on rides like Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in which visitors float on boats through a fantasy pirate world.

“You would relive scenes from the Colosseum, from ancient Rome, gladiators or maybe Julius Caesar or other things,” a Rome city official said.

There aren’t enough puking emoticons in the world to describe what I’m feeling.

Hopefully the regional government of Lazio will end this tortured madness before it begins in earnest.

The good folks over at the Orwell Prize are doing a cool thing reminscent of that WWI letters blog I posted about a while ago. They’re reposting all of George Orwell’s diary entries in real time, exactly 70 years after Orwell first wrote them.

The August entries are from his domestic diaries. The political ones kick off on September 7th. I don’t know if that’s a convention Orwell himself used, or if it’s just how they classify them at the Orwell Prize.

So far the entries are relatively mundane stuff about the weather and George catching snakes, although I don’t mean that dismissively. It’s refreshingly genuine, and I’m glad George Orwell bucked the trend and didn’t kill snakes.

The footnotes are money, complete with Shakespeare quotes to explain a passing reference.

Pardon my impromptu hiatus there. I’m back with 2 new fans and replaced DC jack. I had actually forgotten my computer could be this neat. As is usual with technology these days, I could have bought a new laptop with what I paid for the hardware fixes, but it wouldn’t be as pimped out as this one. Besides, this is my laptop. There are many like it but this one is mine. /Full Metal Jacket

As I catch up on my news alerts, I might just write up an ante-dated story or two, so if you see stories appear from a week ago, you’re not crazy. Not because of that anyway.

But enough about me. This week the internets bring us Executed Today, an engrossing blog which discusses the circumstances behind one execution which took place on that day. Some of them were cause célèbres in their time, including Nazi executioners, spies, witches and sodomites.

Here’s the witchy one, courtesy of 17th c. Sweden.

Accused by her own daughters of carrying their children — Malin’s grandchildren — to Satanic masses, “Rumpare-Malin” obstinately refused to cop to the charge. (Naturally, not confessing was a further indicator to the court that Satan was fortifying her defiance.) Without a confession, the authorities couldn’t assuage themselves by giving her the easy-ish death of decapitation; the law required burning at the stake.* A sack of gunpowder around the neck to speed things up was the best they could offer her.

Matsdotter maintained her innocence to the stake, frustrating the confessors, and when one of her daughters called on her to admit the crime, “she gave her daughter into the hands of the devil and cursed her for eternity.”

Some years later the daughter apparently was executed for perjuring herself in this case, thereby fulfilling mom’s dying curse. Oh, and Malin’s husband was also an executee. Sodomy.

Srsly if I were part of that family, I’d be courting any dark power I could think of to make me invisible to the authorities.

Here’s a quick slideshow recap of some of the most memorable intersections of politics and the Olympics, courtesy of the New York Daily News.

The massacre in Munich is number one, natch. I’m partial to Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their begloved fists during the US national anthem on the podium in Mexico City in 1968.

In 1942, Germany took its U-boat warfare campaign right up to the US Atlantic coast. Almost a hundred ships were taken down during the active months of the torpedo campaign, and they’re all still there where they fell, often in fairly shallow water.

The campaign, which started with Operation Paukenshlag (Drumbeat), was successful for the Germans, who called the period the Second Happy Time, after an earlier phase of Allied sinkings.

Initially, there was no convoy system and little protection given to the British and American merchant ships which travelled up the coast alone from the Gulf of Mexico before assembling further north to cross the Atlantic in large numbers.

The U-boats were able to pick off ships in daylight, or at night when they were illuminated by lights from the shore. The waters off North Carolina were named “Torpedo Junction”.

Unfortunately, Davy Jones’ locker is getting broken into by looters looking for World War II souvenirs, like weapons, hacksawable chunks from the ships and subs, or even human remains.

Considering that the children of people who died on those ships are still living just miles away from the underwater grave, the thought of divers poking and prodding, maybe even stealing, skulls and skeletons is appalling. It’s not like this is some 400-year-old Spanish galleon, far removed from modern life and thus easy to dissociate from. These sailors just died 65 years ago.

Mr Hoyt added: “A lot of divers, if they find a skull, or remains, will decide that others want to see it, so will move it out and bring it up on deck, without realising it is extremely disrespectful.

“These sorts of things are definite cause for some formal investigation. The main goal of our project is to get a handle on what is there and how we can prevent these war graves from being disturbed any further.”

He added: “It is really common for items to be removed. If there is a site that is being dived, then stuff is missing. There are a few British sites that we will be looking at that we have heard from the local diving community about potentially being disturbed.”

The project Mr. Hoyt refers to in the quote is a survey of all the wrecks. They’ll record what is left and inventory anything they can find that was removed from the ships.

Remember the horrible sad fate of Australian troops who fought in the Battle of Fromelles in 1916? I posted a couple of months ago about a Scottish archaeologists finding a mass grave with remains of Australian Diggers.

Well, the exhumation is still going on, and now the Australian and British governments have decided to join forces to create a proper cemetery for the remains of the fallen.

“Having done the initial excavation, the remains are in sufficiently good order that we believe they can be exhumed as individual skeletons,” Mr Snowdon said last night.

Planning for the cemetery will begin immediately, and subject to the approval of French authorities, recovery of the remains could commence in the middle of next year. Work is under way to confirm the names of those believed buried at the Pheasant Wood site.

The Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia is putting on an exhibit about the history of African American maritime experience, and it’s not about slavery for a change.

Black Hands, Blue Sea examines the contributions black Americans have made to seafaring.

Black Hands, Blue Seas brings together art, documents, tools, memorabilia, photographs, music, video, and literature to trace the rich maritime heritage of African Americans, from inventors and abolitionists to naval heroes and explorers.

Videos include historic footage, recent interviews, and music, while audio programs feature songs, poetry, and first-hand accounts of black mariners’ experiences.

It’s not just about men, either. Check out this neat picture of women shipyard workers about to weld their first piece of steel in 1943:

The exhibit began at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, but Independence has added some local Philadelphia elements as well, like the story of Arctic explorer Matthew Henson.

On Tuesday, July 29, the United States House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and the oppressive system of segregationist laws in post-Reconstruction America known as Jim Crow.

The drafter of the bill, Rep. Steve Cohen, (D) Tennessee, had written a letter to President Clinton back when he was making noises about expressing “regret” for slavery suggesting that he apologize for slavery and Jim Crow both. Nothing came of it then, but once Mr. Cohen made it to the House, he decided he’d take matters into his own hands.

From Rep. Cohen’s introduction of the bill:

This Congress did the right thing in apologizing for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and in encouraging the Japanese Government to apologize for the use of “comfort women.” But the fact that this government has not apologized to its own citizens, African-Americans, for the institution of slavery and for the Jim Crow laws that followed and accepted that fact and encouraged changes in our dialogue and understanding in the actions of this country to rectify that is certainly a mistake. And today we rectify that mistake. This is a symbolic resolution but hopefully it will begin a dialogue where people will open their hearts and their minds to the problems that face this country, from racism that exists in this country on both sides and which must end if we’re to go forward as the country that we were created to be and which we are destined to be. So it is with great honor that I speak on this resolution and urge the members of this body to pass this historic resolution, recognize our errors, but also recognize the greatness of this country, because only a great country can recognize and admit its mistakes and then travel forth to create indeed a more perfect union that works to bring people of all races, religions and creeds together in unity as Americans part of the United States of America. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the time and I urge my colleagues to vote unanimously to pass this resolution today. Thank you.

I’m surprised by this story because I heard nothing at all about it on the news when it happened. A Google News search now confirms that this story has barely been published.

Like it’s not bad enough they moved their royalties company and its mountain of taxable cash to Amsterdam, now Bono and the Edge have persuaded Ireland’s planning board to let them wipe their asses with Dublin history.

The planning authority ordered the developers to preserve the facades of six buildings: the 1930s Art Deco original hotel and five other adjacent Georgian and Victorian properties being swallowed up by the future Clarence. It also ordered that an archaeologist be on the construction site at all times.

The planning panel said Foster’s envisioned hotel “would provide a building of unique quality and architectural distinction” that would “in time become a significant feature in vistas along the Liffey (River) and would ensure the continued historic hotel use of a signature building.”

Can you say rationalization, boys and girls? I knew you could.

The approved $235 million plan will gut the original Clarence hotel and the adjacent buildings, replacing them with a giant mongo 166-room hotel with a giant mongo glass-roofed atrium and some ridiculous giant mongo “sail” on the roof.

Two of the Georgian buildings are classified as protected, which makes this abomination a glaring violation of current conservations laws as well as good taste. According to the city regulations, no protected structure can be demolished short of “exceptional circumstances” like the building being in danger of collapse.

Lining Bono’s already fat pockets does not count as exceptional frikkin circumstances.

The tall building in the middle is the current Clarence. On the left are the Georgian buildings Bono will be gutting. On the right are the former Dollard printing works.