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      ‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer

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      A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      Joni Mitchell to Be Honored With Gershwin Prize and Tribute Concert

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      The award from the Library of Congress comes amid a wave of recognition for the singer-songwriter, who performed in public last year for the first time since a 2015 health scare.Joni Mitchell, the revered singer-songwriter who has recently begun tiptoeing back into the public eye, has been named this year’s recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, an award delivered by the Library of Congress, the institution announced Thursday.Mitchell, 79, has received a wave of accolades over the past few years, including recognition at the Kennedy Center Honors; a tribute from MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity; and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. The commendations have made once-rare public appearances by Mitchell not so rare. In July, she performed in public for the first time since she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, stunning attendees at the Newport Folk Festival — and viewers of the viral videos filmed there.As part of the Gershwin Prize, Mitchell will be honored with a tribute concert on March 1 in Washington, D.C., that will air on PBS on March 31. Typically, honorees perform at least one song at the event.Mitchell, who was one of the defining singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s, was already expected to return to performing later this year. The musician Brandi Carlile, whom Mitchell has referred to as her “ambassador,” announced last year that Mitchell would headline a concert at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State in June, a day after Carlile anchors her own show there.Recognition for Mitchell’s creative achievements has surged in recent years, as her 1971 album “Blue” was widely celebrated for its 50th anniversary and the musician started an ongoing project called the Joni Mitchell Archives, which unearths rich collections of previously unheard music.Performing alongside Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Mitchell sang some of her most beloved songs, including “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Both Sides Now” and “A Case of You.” Writing in The New York Times, the critic Lindsay Zoladz called Mitchell’s resurgence “heartening,” noting that “it allows a beloved if somewhat underappreciated artist to receive her laurels while she’s still living.”“Younger artists got the chance to pay earnest homage to their elder; a mature woman who was not yet finished reinterpreting her life’s work reclaimed the stage,” Zoladz wrote.The Gershwin Prize was established in 2007 to honor living musical artists whose contributions to popular music “exemplify the standard of excellence associated with George and Ira Gershwin.” The recipient is chosen by the librarian of Congress — currently Carla Hayden — who receives advice from scholars, producers, songwriters and other music specialists. Previous recipients include Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. More

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      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

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      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

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      A Music Historian Takes a Top Job at the New York Public Library

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      Brent Reidy, the new director of Research Libraries, said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old library by reaching a younger generation.The New York Public Library on Thursday named Brent Reidy as director of its Research Libraries, putting the 40-year-old music historian at the helm of four vast public research centers whose holdings encompass 17th-century Shakespeare folios and sheet music belonging to Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie and Mozart.Reidy, who has been serving as interim director since William P. Kelly retired in April, will preside over the collection, acquisition and preservation strategies at the Research Libraries, which have a budget of $145 million and welcome four million visitors a year. The position gives him an outsized voice on the direction of national humanities research.An amateur jazz pianist who unwinds by playing John Coltrane, Reidy said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old institution by appealing to a new generation of library goers. Among his priorities, he said, is the continued digitization of the Research Libraries’ holdings, which has become even more imperative during the coronavirus pandemic as users gravitated online. Attendance at the Research Libraries was 30 percent below the average attendance before the pandemic and had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, he added, a challenge facing cultural institutions across the country.“I want people to realize that you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. to have access to our collections — you just need a library card,” he said in an interview.Reidy has been an ardent supporter of federal funding for the arts. During the Trump administration, he criticized its attempt to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, citing former President John F. Kennedy’s assertion that artistic freedom was essential to nourish American culture.Reidy will be responsible for four public research centers — the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center — which collectively have 47 million items in their collections. Among their treasures are Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; an original Gutenberg Bible from 1455; an unpublished chapter from Malcolm X’s autobiography and an extensive James Baldwin archive.Among the treasures at the library’s research centers is Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.Robert Kato/New York Public LibraryReidy studied music at Dartmouth College before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from Indiana University, where he explored national cultural policy under the Kennedy administration, the subject of an upcoming book. Every week, he makes a pilgrimage to the library’s collection of manuscripts and scores belonging to John Cage, the eminent American composer of Minimalist music. “It helps me to de-stress,” he said.A native of Scotia, a village in Schenectady County, N.Y., Reidy said his passion for libraries and books was first ignited as a boy when he would go to the Schenectady County Public Library. With the encouragement of his father, he recalled that he bought about 1,200 LPs from the library, including classical and jazz albums, which he cataloged in the basement of his childhood home. More

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      Lizzo Plays New Notes on James Madison’s Crystal Flute from 1813

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      A classically trained flutist, the singer, rapper and songwriter spent more than three hours admiring the flute collection at the Library of Congress. Madison’s instrument was made for the second inauguration by a Parisian craftsman.Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”Lizzo responded without much hesitation.“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813.Library of CongressMadison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.” More

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      Galileo Forgery’s Trail Leads to Web of Mistresses and Manuscripts

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      The unmasking of a fake Galileo manuscript this summer brought renewed attention to a colorful, prolific early-20th-century forger named Tobia Nicotra.When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake, it brought renewed attention to the checkered, colorful career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.His explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds, was somewhat unusual, at least according to an account of his trial that appeared in The American Weekly, a Hearst publication, in early 1935.“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets reported, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches and photographs of the women — one of whom was said to be a “novelty dancer,” and another an “expert swimmer” — with fresh flowers in front of each. “The pictures in some cases displayed their physical attractions with startling frankness, but they were in general highly artistic,” the article noted.“Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”Over the years Nicotra’s counterfeits have fooled collectors and institutions, sown confusion, and been denounced by the esteemed Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who collected musical manuscripts and who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra as a forger. Now Nicotra is back in the news, thanks to the Galileo forgery in Michigan, which was unmasked by Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University who showed that the paper it had been written on had a watermark dating from the late 18th century, more than 150 years after Galileo supposedly wrote it. He also linked it to several other Nicotra forgeries.“Either he thought he was just invincible, or he was maybe just incredibly desperate,” Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra. While other forgers have been more prolific, Wilding said, few have been as daring — or as talented.“Everything Nicotra does is plausible; there are no jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try and get it right.”This manuscript was one of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions when it was thought to be by Galileo. It was unmasked this summer as a 20th-century forgery, most likely by Nicotra.via University of Michigan LibraryThere is relatively little concrete information about Nicotra, and, given that he was a professional forger, the existing documentary evidence must be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts just seem to slip away from him,” Wilding said. While some accounts say he was 53 at the time of his trial, a birth certificate suggests he may have been 44. Contemporary news accounts, and interviews with several scholars who have studied him, however, begin to give some sense of the man and his prolific career.A courtroom sketch of Nicotra that appeared in The American Weekly portrays him as a balding, thin-faced man with glasses perched on a pointy nose, sporting a mustache and goatee, and wearing either a thick scarf or some kind of furry, Astrakhan-like collar on his coat.Nicotra cast a wide net in the types of documents he counterfeited, and seems to have possessed real talent and learning. He forged a poem he claimed was by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, musical manuscripts by leading composers, and was even said to have started a minor international incident by creating a fake Columbus letter identifying his birthplace as Spain, not Italy, prompting the mayor of Genoa to write a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.An account of his 1934 conviction by The Associated Press, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Autograph Faker Gets Prison Term,” described how Nicotra operated: “His method was to visit the Milan Library and tear out the fly leaves of old books or steal pages of manuscript and write on them the ‘autographs’ of famed musicians. The librarians of Milan testified that he had ruined scores of their books.”In 1928, he sold what appeared to be a signed Mozart aria called “Baci amorosi e cari,” supposedly written by the composer at age 14, to the Library of Congress.“It was so special because first of all it was unknown, so it wasn’t reported in any of the thematic catalogs of Mozart at that time,” Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, said in an interview. “He claimed that he found this manuscript and then published the song.”The library paid $60 for the document, which was later believed to have been composed by Nicotra himself.Nicotra said he was the son of a botany professor, and he wrote in one letter that he had graduated with a music degree from a conservatory in Naples in 1909. “We don’t know whether that’s a true fact or not,” Wilding said.When he published his biography of Toscanini in 1929, early critics noted that it contained a number of errors. It is seen as even more unreliable today.“It’s mostly invented conversations and so on,” said Harvey Sachs, the author of a definitive 2017 biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.” “Just made-up stuff.”His conviction in 1934 made headlines around the world, including in The New York Times.In 1932, Nicotra toured the United States while masquerading as Riccardo Drigo, an Italian conductor and composer who had been the conductor of the Imperial Ballet in Russia and who may be best remembered for the arrangement of “Swan Lake” he created after Tchaikovsky’s death. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra had been “feted widely in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Czar of Russia.”) Apparently no one realized that Drigo had died two years earlier, in 1930.“My main way of characterizing him would be ‘bold,’” said Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014. “He was able to carry on with this for a good number of years.”Nicotra was also known for forging works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an early-18th-century composer who died at the age of 26 and whose posthumous fame attracted forgers. One Pergolesi forgery wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s auctioned it in 2017, it described it as an “intriguing forgery, once thought to belong to the hotly debated Pergolesi canon” and cited authorities who list it as “created by the prolific forger Tobia Nicotra.” It fetched $375.The discovery of the Galileo leaves open the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, which he was quoted as saying could number as many as 600.“I don’t know if he did 600, but I’m sure he did more than the little we’ve found so far,” said Richard G. King, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Music, who has been researching Nicotra. “I don’t think people are willfully hiding these things, but it’s just hard to find them.”Unless an institution has a record of buying documents from Nicotra, Wilding said, it may be hard to identify other forgeries. He suggested that documents by figures Nicotra habitually forged that lack clear provenance before the 20th century “are probably really worth looking at very, very closely.”Nicotra eventually ran afoul of the law after selling the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who persuaded detectives in Milan to investigate the case. Nicotra was convicted, fined 2,400 lire and sentenced to two years in prison.Some accounts suggest that Nicotra was let out of prison early, because the Fascist government wanted his help forging signatures. That story, notes Wilding, “is just too good to be ignored, and maybe too good to be true.” More

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      National Endowment for the Humanities Announces $31.5 Million in Grants

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      The third round of funding for the year will support 226 projects across the country.A PBS documentary on the 400-year history of Shakespeare’s plays, a New York Public Library summer program for educators on efforts to secure equitable access to education in Harlem in the 20th century, and research for a book on the history of red hair are among 226 beneficiaries of new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Tuesday.The grants, which total $31.5 million and are the third round awarded this year, will support projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites in 45 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Canada, England and the Netherlands.Such projects include a documentary, to be co-produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, about the Colfax Massacre — named after the town and parish where dozens of former slaves were killed during Reconstruction. Another, at Penn State, uses computational methods to analyze the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists. Funding will also go toward research for a book examining how different cultures have envisioned Jesus, both in his own time and throughout history, by Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at Princeton University.Shelly C. Lowe, the endowment’s chairwoman, said in a statement that the projects, which include educational programming for high school and college students, “will foster the exchange of ideas and increase access to humanities knowledge, resources and experiences.”In New York, 31 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $4.6 million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a new permanent exhibition exploring 400 years of Brooklyn history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as books about St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and the Hospital of the Innocents, a 600-year-old children’s care institution in Florence, Italy.Funding will also go toward the development of a podcast about the Federal Writers’ Project, a U.S. government initiative that provided jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression, by the Washington-based Stone Soup Productions. Another grant will benefit a history of the Cherokee Nation being co-authored by Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State, and Rose Stremlau, a historian at Davidson College in North Carolina.The grants will also benefit the Peabody Collections, one of the oldest African American library collections in the country, at Hampton University, and a book by John Lisle on a 1980s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency over its Cold War-era MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control. More