Music Director James Conlon on The Anonymous Lover / L’Amant Anonyme 

With the vanishing of the name, goes the disappearance of the object, the slice of art, the fragment of literature, the portion of music. With the fading of the thing, so the name is gradually effaced from memory, and whatever there was, becomes anonymous.   I have long taken a special interest in music by composers whose names…

He was very well known in his time and then, after his death, gradually forgotten. This was partially due to a change in musical tastes, largely affected by the aftermath of the French Revolution.  But unquestionably,  racial prejudice played an important role in the long-term fate of his works. One contemporary critic (may he remain anonymous) serves as an onerous example of that bigotry: “It’s as if nature served the mulatto in a particular fashion, lending them…

They met when the younger Mozart came to Paris in 1778 for the third time. It is a matter of record that they both lived and dined under the same roof from July 5 (two days after Mozart’s mother Anna Maria died) until September 11. They were lodged together in the home of the Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm, a critic and Bavarian friend of Leopold Mozart…