Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians
Speculation in French revolutionary fiduciary currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date (1802) for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders
With his guide to the Ziph language, and with the death of a Savoyard organ-grinder’s white mouse, of which he was probably not the author in any sense.
Newly uncovered evidence shows that, following the fire which destroyed his Russian theatrical business in 1836, he and his family pursued a career in London and Europe, before repeating their Petersburg triumphs in the USA and Australia. Also, a very curious copyright case.
More inanity from the Hackney organity.
More monkey mess from the peripatetic Homerton/Hackney barrel organ.
Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.
Barrel/street organ stuff.
A tragic gallery dealing with 1832: contemporary/posterior mise-en-scène? Plus images of Napoleon as Polichinelle.
François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.
