I Want to Hear It Again!

A thought occurred.

As the above photo shows, I was recently at the Seattle Symphony's performance of concertos by Beethoven and Mozart. Both spent their creative lives in Vienna. Beethoven because his native Bonn was a mess, and for Mozart because that's where the prestige and money was. During the pre-concert talk, it was noted that Mozart was more popular in Prague than Vienna, that while The Marriage of Figaro had middling success in Vienna, it was incredibly popular in Prague.

That got me thinking.

In this day and age of recordings and streaming, being able to hear a favorite song, or opera, again and again is easy. Even back in the dark days of the 70's, when you had to troop down to the record store and hope they had what you wanted, once you acquired the single or LP, you could listen to it until you were sick of it, found something new, or the record player failed.
For me, I had to because what I really liked was never played enough on the radio while dreak like, Billy, Don't be a Hero, or Seasons in the Sun, seemed to be played all the time. Better to buy the record and listen as much as I wanted to what I wanted.

But what did they do before recording?

Say you scored a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro in Prague and were blown away? What then? There was no buying the record or hoping to hear it on the radio. No going on Spotify and adding it to your list of favorite operas. If fact, it was near impossible to even score the score, assuming you had any inkling or talent for reading a musical score and hearing it in your head.

You're doomed, man!

I suppose if you had the money and the time, you could score a ticket to every performance, but if all you could afford is the one time... that's all there was. Otherwise you were out of luck.

What does all this mean? Well, if it has to mean anything, it's that modern life has a few upsides like being able to listen to the Eagles or Billie Eilish over and over till your ears bleed.

©2020 David William Pearce