The Financial Times demonstrates once again with this story that it's probably the English-language newspaper with the best arts coverage of all (and yes, American newspapers were apparently too bust [typo and it stays] to ask the greatest living composer for a lunch date at his Italian villa, La Leprara:
Taking a sip of his aperitif, he gestures towards a stack of books from which I extract the relevant volume. Above the first page lies an enigmatic Italian motto La somma sapienza è il primo amore (The supreme wisdom is the first love*, that is, non-judgmental love). “When the dog [to be sung by Ian Bostridge] meets the stranger [John Tomlinson] he says: ‘My Lord, my Lord, I now know why I ran away from the woman who owned me, from the cutlet I was fed and the good life I had, because you were always in my dreams. I weep with all my soul because love is starting ... ’The dog wants to be accepted as a companion. But he also learns that you cannot love without experiencing pain.”
Hans Werner Henze's new work, "Immolazione", opens tomorrow in Rome.
* a reader helpfully reminds us that the FT writer wasn't completely up to speed on his Dante
and a wrong apostrophe mangled his "la somma sapienza" translation. Check Inferno's Canto III, in Italian and English, here.
