Larry Zazzo
speaker
193 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 May
Larry Zazzo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think it's really important to mention that it's an issue of borrowing.
I mean, what we think of as being such genius and such unique, these great melodic hooks that we think are so original.
Messiah, in fact, Handel borrowed from Italian duets.
So one of the famous choruses is, For unto us a child is born.
And everybody has it in their head.
The original was an Italian duet which begins, No, di voi non vo' fidarmi.
And that's why it begins with for, which is a little bit odd from an English standpoint, right?
It handles a German.
But because it comes from another duet, somehow that makes it more memorable to us, I think.
He was mainly a composer of operas.
He wrote 42, depending on how you count, 42 operas, basically two a year between the 20s and 1741, which is when he wrote his last opera.
And right when he was composing Messiah, he was at a bit of a crisis where he was writing something for Dublin.
He did not have access to his usual music.
cohort of extremely versatile opera singers trained in Italy.
Some of them were castrati.
He did have one Italian singer, Avoglio, but he didn't really know who his other singers were.
Why didn't he have access to them at that time?
Well, the opera company closed down and they were terribly expensive and he couldn't afford to bring them over even if he had them, Ruth.
And there was a war on it, right.
So they put their fees up even more.
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