After watching last night's episode of Project Runway, I thought about how often exceptionally gifted, intelligent, perceptive, and discerning persons come across as snarky. I think you know which contestant I'm talking about. I have to admit I'm a fan of a turn of phrase that, were one or two words removed, might seem like a nonchalant pleasantry.

Leopold Mozart, Wolfie's pop, seems to have been a master of this. In this letter to his sister, he describes one of the most famous and virtuosic sopranos of his day, Lucrezia Agujari (1746 - 1786). Total boner at first:

We made the acquaintance of a singer in Parma, and also heard her to great advantage in her own house—I mean the far-famed Bastardella. She has, first, a fine voice; second, a flexible organ; third, an incredibly high compass. She sang the following notes and passages in my presence:

[Click for a larger view]

I mean, really: "flexible organ"? Come on, Moldy Leopoldy! You're showing! Ok. Then, hilariously, he offers this description of her some years later:

[She has a] wild look in her eyes, like that of people who are subject to epilepsy, and she limps with one foot. Otherwise she has a good presence, a good character and a good reputation.

WHAT? Is this only funny and horrible to me? Am I the only one imagining your old-biddy auntie who somehow always manages to make compliments feel like fork stabs? "She looks retarded and has clubfoot, but she's nice." What a cock! If I ever found some fish-eyed gimp chick who ran around singing high-high C's and jumping two and a half octaves down after a rapid ascending scale, I'd give her a tiara and crown her Queen of Motherfucking Everything.

It is interesting to note that Aldous Huxley mentions Agujari (though with an alternate spelling) in his Brave New World. After bathing, Lenina is being scented and serenaded by, well, a "scent organ":

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio—rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up. In the synthetic music machine the sound-track roll began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin, super-cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the air with its agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars—and then, against this instrumental background, a much more than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard's Forster's low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the Ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in history, once piercingly gave utterance.

Oh, man. Huxley totally makes me want to try LSD! Sorry this post sucks so much, but I'm busy downloading ten different live versions of Semiramide, including one of the Meyerbeer version on accident!