Technically, if I wish to be painfully precise about word meanings, I cannot feel nostalgia for something I have not experienced. I can't long to return to a place or time where I have not been. But I can have a love of learning about things that happened before I was born or when I was too young to know about them. Harry Heuser puts it perfectly as "keeping up with the out-of-date" in his Broadcastellan Blog.
I knew nothing of Joseph Schmidt until I watched a most fascinating TV documentary. A Rumanian born operatic tenor, he was apparently an earlier version of Mario Lanza. A superb singer, very good actor, romantic movie star, much loved in Germany and the Netherlands during the '30s. All this in spite of being only five feet tall, standing on a platform so as not to be dwarfed by his leading ladies. He died in 1942.
Does anybody remember Joseph Schmidt these days? Does anybody care? I care. That's why I blog.
His story: http://www.dutchdivas.net/tenors/josephschmidt.html
I care, too. I just listened to Schmidt singing on the Magic Key program; live from Amsterdam, his performance was broadcast on 3 November 1935:
ReplyDeletehttp://ia311206.us.archive.org/0/items/TheMagicKey/MK-351103SleepingBeautyWaltz.mp3