EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS A JOKE - Noemi Manzoni

EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS A JOKE

200+ caricatures of composers in period prints

Mimicking a famous page of twentieth-century Italian literature (CE Gadda, The cognition of pain ), we could also write:
« Of caricatures, of caricatures! of cover jokes, of caricatures in cartoons at the foot of the page or on pages measuring 27 x 37.5 centimetres. Two hundred and more drawings by Verdi grinder and of Wagner who wants the bow ; by Rossini gunner and Siegfried who does the grocer . Berlioz has something electric in his metronome, Strauss in his opera. Liszt is the Jews' new Messiah (anti-Semitic!), Mahler is the Viennese Opera's new god (a great tyrant!). Whether for a sharp-witted cartoonist, or for a foreign critic, dressed as a hen or inclined in retaliation to foreign sympathies, who manage to mock all those who are masters of music, so much so can the megalomania of these take root in the realm of mockery. With caricatures, lithographed caricatures, woodcuts, sculptures of caricatures, zinc-printed silhouettes, cartoonists from all over Europe have cluttered magazines and newspapers that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century and—needless to say—withered with the Great War. Of the majority of those caricatures, when they were more 'coquettish,' one could say they were the work of famous cartoonists, and we will content ourselves with highlighting some of the most prominent, of illustrious composers and illustrious victims; with lazy eyes and flabby cheeks, with beaked noses and flaccid chins. For everything, everything! has passed through the pencil of musical satire, except the conformism of the toga critics.

p. 240

Format: 13.5 x 21

Soft cardboard cover

November 2022