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eccentric_hatI had a strangely thematically consistent time with this year's Candy Hearts exchange! I received a fic for Conclave and a fic where some dudes in the eighteenth century go to the opera, and I wrote a fic for Conclave and one where some dudes in the eighteenth century go to the opera. The opera-going dudes are all also pretty Catholic. I don't recall having written or received any fics about priests or operas before, or really any stories about Catholicism; things just assembled in a cluster this time around.
So, I received a lovely heartfelt post-canon Conclave gen fic:
And, to my delight, a fill for my wildcard Les Misérables request, which took the crackship just seriously enough to relish in it--I found myself picturing young Gillenormand here as rather resembling the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair:
I offered Peter Shaffer's Amadeus because it was in the tag set, and because seeing it at the Guthrie is one of my favorite memories of the theater. I can trace my habit of keeping all my theater programs back to that play, because I didn't keep that program--at least, I didn't keep it anywhere I have since been able to find it--and its contents have haunted me ever since. There was an essay in there by Shaffer (still alive at the time) about his many revisions of the play, both from the original London production to the New York transfer, then the adaptation for film, and then the newly invigorated theatrical productions after the film. The final encounter between Salieri and Mozart was the main focus of these revisions--other things changed, including what was going on with the Requiem, but the changes focused on what happens the last time Salieri and Mozart meet. We saw the 1999 version of this scene and it was transcendentally beautiful, imbued with religious force and tragedy. The film version is good too--Mozart dictating the "Confutatis" of the Requiem to a Salieri who has trouble keeping up, Mozart singing the parts in a cracked, barely-there voice--but that's better suited to film, which had editing to keep the scene interesting. In the play, in this my favorite version of the play, Salieri picks up the pages of the Requiem and reads the music to himself, asking how you can say a Requiem for Mozart when he's proven himself immortal, and suddenly brought to his knees by grief for, instead, his own past self, for his boyhood of innocent music-making and love of God.
Well! That's the version I saw, that's the revision that was explained in the program I didn't keep, but it's not the version I found whenever I picked up a copy of Amadeus in a bookstore or library. This year, when I went to the library catalogue for a copy of the play to review for this assignment, I found a book containing the text of the original New York production. (Starring Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, can you imagine. Shaffer says in the intro to the book that this production was filmed, but casual searches haven't turned that up.) It's still lovely, of course, even if it felt incomplete to me--and reading a play is always an incomplete experience, anyway. I didn't really know where to go from there. The request I'd been assigned was quite open-ended, though they had requested Mozart/Salieri specifically. So I had to find a way to write a shippy fic, but I didn't see where to put one. The relationship between those two is sketched out in its entirety in the play, even though it's changed in every version; we see their first meeting and their last, and Salieri is relentless throughout in his resentment of Mozart, his rage at God, and his defiance of both of them. It's a very charged dynamic but I didn't see how I could puncture that cloud of rage enough, or just relax him enough, to let love or attraction or desire find expression.
I sat on that problem for a while. I watched the video of Julie Taymor's Magic Flute. (It's okay. There are some characters, Tamino in particular, whose makeup seems to be trying to change their ethnicity, which seems like a strange and entirely unforced error; happily the wizard isn't in blackface, but he's still Grossly Fat in a way that, again, really didn't need to happen. Also, it turns out that The Magic Flute makes no goddamn sense.) I listened to Figaro and to some symphonies and piano concertos. (I know Mozart was big on opera, but for my money the instrumental works blow the operas absolutely out of the water.) I read a bunch of smarmy and uninformative posts online about how we should be aware that Amadeus is fiction (we know, we know!) that didn't address the historical material Shaffer actually included (the quotations about the elderly Salieri from Beethoven's conversation books are real!). And in searching for more information--I don't know how it happened, as I was just trying different combinations of search terms in Duck Duck Go--I stumbled across a PDF of the 1999 revision of the play. My version, the Guthrie version, with the final version of the confrontation scene. I downloaded and printed a copy and was so happy I kept telling people I had found this thing even though I was not going to tell them about the fanfic.
I passed an exceedingly busy January and early February, with a busy month at work plus two musical ensembles, a nonprofit board, and prepping a workshop I had volunteered to teach, so I sort of kept accruing Mozart thoughts and not really writing anything.
Eventually the deadline was getting close enough that I couldn't avoid it anymore, so I sat down with my recipient's requests again and noticed a mention of daemon AUs, and thought, that might be what I have to do. Maybe I just change the universe enough it opens up a space for things to be different.
I had some false starts with that, but once I spent time on it, the writing went rather quickly. Early in the play, Mozart chases Constanze around pretending he's a cat and she's a mouse; so I gave him a cat daemon, and then Salieri had to have one too. Naming them was great fun (I looked up lists of saints associated with music; Mozart's daemon got a saint's name; Salieri's didn't because I didn't find a suitable Italian name on the list that pre-dated my story, but I did find a perfect namesake nevertheless). My recipient doesn't like first person, so I had to lose Salieri's narrative voice from the play, but instead I had his visible soul running around, betraying things to the audience and to his peers that changed everything.
I haven't really fixed anything in this story--having a daemon would not have repaired Mozart's health--though I didn't directly address his death, either. Mostly I rewrote canonical scenes, going askew from canon with this new context. I didn't even write up as far as the pivotal final scene that I care about so much, but I didn't need a new version of that. I do wish I had done more with the women--it's frustrating that Shaffer had time for so many of Salieri's colleagues at court, but both his wife and his eventual mistress are mute roles, showing up onstage to demonstrate that they exist but showing few personal characteristics of their own. Especially Signora Salieri. I tried to come up with some ideas about her, but canon gives us so little there's not even anything to subvert. I would have liked to write more about the music, too--we went into dress rehearsal for a choir concert right after this exchange revealed, and I found myself thinking about Mozart as a teacher/performer/technical expert. It would be fun to show off that side of him, but I would have to know way more about eighteenth century performance practices, and then come up with something smart for expert musician characters to say about it. Not in the cards for this story. I'm really pleased with what I produced, though. It's the first time in a long time that I've felt personally delighted by something that I wrote.
The end product was this:
You can, or at least I can, see some of my real-world feelings toward the Catholic Church peeking through in this fic, especially the beginning (I only wish the archdiocese of Minneapolis and Saint Paul had gotten someone like Aldo Bellini installed when Nienstedt stepped down), though nobody seems to have particularly noticed. Mostly it's about two old friends having poignant coffee. I wrote most of this the day the collection opened, and was happy that I found a simple enough central metaphor that I didn't have to spend long seeking a title or summary:
So, I received a lovely heartfelt post-canon Conclave gen fic:
The doorway into thanks (878 words) by maharetr
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Conclave (2024)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Vincent Benítez & Thomas Lawrence (Conclave)
Additional Tags: Prayer, Shame, Grief/Mourning, so many feelings
Summary: Benitez did not immediately take his rapt gaze from the turtles. “Are they escaping because they’re bored? Or because they don’t feel safe, maybe?”
And, to my delight, a fill for my wildcard Les Misérables request, which took the crackship just seriously enough to relish in it--I found myself picturing young Gillenormand here as rather resembling the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair:
Two Gentlemen of the Paris Opera (1168 words) by strikethesunSo those were a delight. Of course I spent the month-and-change before Valentine's Day thinking only in a vague, anticipatory way about what I would receive, while focusing my bits and bobs of spare time and attention on what I was going to write.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Luc-Esprit Gillenormand/Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel (Les Mis - Hugo)
Characters: Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, Bishop Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel
Additional Tags: missing chapter, Post-Opera Flirting, Strongly Implied Offscreen Slash, First Meetings, invented backstory
Summary: Over the course of, according to M. Gillenormand, a rather tedious opera—he has not recorded the name, but his scant description leads one to believe it was a work of Rameau’s—the young, dashing bourgeois appears to have become utterly engrossed in the appearance of a gentleman he did not recognize who was seated nearby.
A hitherto lost chapter of Les Misérables in which M. Gillenormand and M. Myriel have a memorable meeting.
I offered Peter Shaffer's Amadeus because it was in the tag set, and because seeing it at the Guthrie is one of my favorite memories of the theater. I can trace my habit of keeping all my theater programs back to that play, because I didn't keep that program--at least, I didn't keep it anywhere I have since been able to find it--and its contents have haunted me ever since. There was an essay in there by Shaffer (still alive at the time) about his many revisions of the play, both from the original London production to the New York transfer, then the adaptation for film, and then the newly invigorated theatrical productions after the film. The final encounter between Salieri and Mozart was the main focus of these revisions--other things changed, including what was going on with the Requiem, but the changes focused on what happens the last time Salieri and Mozart meet. We saw the 1999 version of this scene and it was transcendentally beautiful, imbued with religious force and tragedy. The film version is good too--Mozart dictating the "Confutatis" of the Requiem to a Salieri who has trouble keeping up, Mozart singing the parts in a cracked, barely-there voice--but that's better suited to film, which had editing to keep the scene interesting. In the play, in this my favorite version of the play, Salieri picks up the pages of the Requiem and reads the music to himself, asking how you can say a Requiem for Mozart when he's proven himself immortal, and suddenly brought to his knees by grief for, instead, his own past self, for his boyhood of innocent music-making and love of God.
Well! That's the version I saw, that's the revision that was explained in the program I didn't keep, but it's not the version I found whenever I picked up a copy of Amadeus in a bookstore or library. This year, when I went to the library catalogue for a copy of the play to review for this assignment, I found a book containing the text of the original New York production. (Starring Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, can you imagine. Shaffer says in the intro to the book that this production was filmed, but casual searches haven't turned that up.) It's still lovely, of course, even if it felt incomplete to me--and reading a play is always an incomplete experience, anyway. I didn't really know where to go from there. The request I'd been assigned was quite open-ended, though they had requested Mozart/Salieri specifically. So I had to find a way to write a shippy fic, but I didn't see where to put one. The relationship between those two is sketched out in its entirety in the play, even though it's changed in every version; we see their first meeting and their last, and Salieri is relentless throughout in his resentment of Mozart, his rage at God, and his defiance of both of them. It's a very charged dynamic but I didn't see how I could puncture that cloud of rage enough, or just relax him enough, to let love or attraction or desire find expression.
I sat on that problem for a while. I watched the video of Julie Taymor's Magic Flute. (It's okay. There are some characters, Tamino in particular, whose makeup seems to be trying to change their ethnicity, which seems like a strange and entirely unforced error; happily the wizard isn't in blackface, but he's still Grossly Fat in a way that, again, really didn't need to happen. Also, it turns out that The Magic Flute makes no goddamn sense.) I listened to Figaro and to some symphonies and piano concertos. (I know Mozart was big on opera, but for my money the instrumental works blow the operas absolutely out of the water.) I read a bunch of smarmy and uninformative posts online about how we should be aware that Amadeus is fiction (we know, we know!) that didn't address the historical material Shaffer actually included (the quotations about the elderly Salieri from Beethoven's conversation books are real!). And in searching for more information--I don't know how it happened, as I was just trying different combinations of search terms in Duck Duck Go--I stumbled across a PDF of the 1999 revision of the play. My version, the Guthrie version, with the final version of the confrontation scene. I downloaded and printed a copy and was so happy I kept telling people I had found this thing even though I was not going to tell them about the fanfic.
I passed an exceedingly busy January and early February, with a busy month at work plus two musical ensembles, a nonprofit board, and prepping a workshop I had volunteered to teach, so I sort of kept accruing Mozart thoughts and not really writing anything.
Eventually the deadline was getting close enough that I couldn't avoid it anymore, so I sat down with my recipient's requests again and noticed a mention of daemon AUs, and thought, that might be what I have to do. Maybe I just change the universe enough it opens up a space for things to be different.
I had some false starts with that, but once I spent time on it, the writing went rather quickly. Early in the play, Mozart chases Constanze around pretending he's a cat and she's a mouse; so I gave him a cat daemon, and then Salieri had to have one too. Naming them was great fun (I looked up lists of saints associated with music; Mozart's daemon got a saint's name; Salieri's didn't because I didn't find a suitable Italian name on the list that pre-dated my story, but I did find a perfect namesake nevertheless). My recipient doesn't like first person, so I had to lose Salieri's narrative voice from the play, but instead I had his visible soul running around, betraying things to the audience and to his peers that changed everything.
I haven't really fixed anything in this story--having a daemon would not have repaired Mozart's health--though I didn't directly address his death, either. Mostly I rewrote canonical scenes, going askew from canon with this new context. I didn't even write up as far as the pivotal final scene that I care about so much, but I didn't need a new version of that. I do wish I had done more with the women--it's frustrating that Shaffer had time for so many of Salieri's colleagues at court, but both his wife and his eventual mistress are mute roles, showing up onstage to demonstrate that they exist but showing few personal characteristics of their own. Especially Signora Salieri. I tried to come up with some ideas about her, but canon gives us so little there's not even anything to subvert. I would have liked to write more about the music, too--we went into dress rehearsal for a choir concert right after this exchange revealed, and I found myself thinking about Mozart as a teacher/performer/technical expert. It would be fun to show off that side of him, but I would have to know way more about eighteenth century performance practices, and then come up with something smart for expert musician characters to say about it. Not in the cards for this story. I'm really pleased with what I produced, though. It's the first time in a long time that I've felt personally delighted by something that I wrote.
The end product was this:
Cattivo (2746 words) by Eccentric_HatAfter that was up and beta'd, I tried to write some treats, and I ended up writing one. I have much, much less to say about this story than the last one, though I am fond of it. I wanted to write something for Conclave, having a sense that this is the moment to do so, and the only person besides me who had requested that fandom was requesting / ships. So I once again had to find a way to write something shippy enough it would meet the brief, although I wasn't really interested in sex-at-the-Vatican. I settled on giving two of the main characters a past relationship. This is the easy answer for me, a person who loves writing about people's relationship to the past; once it was posted, the fandom found it and said "ow." I'm sorry, but not very sorry.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Amadeus - Shaffer
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/Antonio Salieri
Characters: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Constanze Weber Mozart
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons
Summary: Salieri took righteous offense at Mozart, at his unjust measure of genius, at what it meant for himself. Salieri's daemon had a slightly different response.
You can, or at least I can, see some of my real-world feelings toward the Catholic Church peeking through in this fic, especially the beginning (I only wish the archdiocese of Minneapolis and Saint Paul had gotten someone like Aldo Bellini installed when Nienstedt stepped down), though nobody seems to have particularly noticed. Mostly it's about two old friends having poignant coffee. I wrote most of this the day the collection opened, and was happy that I found a simple enough central metaphor that I didn't have to spend long seeking a title or summary:
Fulcrum (1151 words) by Eccentric_HatOverall, an exceedingly good Candy Hearts. I didn't really have time for any of this, but it was a major bright spot in a strange winter.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Conclave (2024)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aldo Bellini/Thomas Lawrence (Conclave)
Characters: Aldo Bellini (Conclave), Thomas Lawrence (Conclave)
Additional Tags: Past Relationship(s)
Summary:Give me a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-01 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-01 08:56 pm (UTC)