But one thing leads to another.
I glanced at the intro's biographical note by Scott Goddard as I was photographing this book to list on eBay (I have a second copy, for its beauty).
The first phrase was so catching– The story of Weber's life should be told rapidly, with short breaths taken in pain– I not only read the whole thing, I went and found the music on youTube.
("Short breaths taken in pain":
Weber died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine. His dates, 1786 –1826, play leapfrog with Jane Austen's 1775–1817 [forty-one years old].)
"an unusually strong ancestry of musical aunts"--I laughed. There is no sentence in the bio that needs improvement.
So, I listened to Daniel Barenboim conducting Weber's Overture to Oberon, and, to nonmusical me, it sounded familiar, like what I expect classical music to sound like.
In the comments, however, was something unfamiliar--a commenter saying they came there because of Sabahattin Ali, with 35 likes:
"I'm very pleasure that I saw here more people found this work after that book like me"What book?
Who's Sabahattin Ali?
According to this article in the Guardian, Ali was a Turkish writer who was assassinated in 1948 for criticizing the one-party State, but whose 1943 novel, Madonna in a Fur Coat, remains a bestseller in Turkey.
In that novel, the hero mentions overhearing Weber's overture on the radio. (This is awkward because it's a Google translation of the Turkish--the book's translated but I can't find this bit in English.)
"One evening, on my way home, I stopped by the neighborhood grocery store and bought some items.
Just as I was going out the door, the bachelor's radio, which was rented in a room across the street, started playing the overture of Weber's Oberon opera. I almost dropped the packages I had on the floor. One of the few operas we went with Maria. That was it, and I knew he had a special love for Weber; he would always whistle his overture on the way.
I felt a fresh longing as if he had only left him yesterday. The pain of the most precious thing lost, wealth, all kinds of world happiness is forgotten in time. Only missed opportunities never come to mind. And it hurts every time you remember it. It's probably because "it wasn't like that!" If there is no thought, man is always ready to accept what he considers destined."
--Madonna in a Fur Coat, Sabahattin Ali
And... wrapping back around to Elizabeth Friedlander:
her design for Penguin's 25th anniversary in 1960, via "Elizabeth Friedlander: one of the first women to design a typeface" (lots of images). Of her work, the article says, "What ties the series together is that, however hard to read, they each maintain continual cycles and loops, much like history."
Is the penguin jumping rope?
