Language and music: the ‘emotional signposts’ along the private and cultural way of Ion Zottos
The intellectual production of Ion Zottos, as found in his publications but also in his personal notes, was defined by a fixed notion in the equal relation between language and music, as two equal means of an artist’s expression, two equally important parts of the same process. In this framework, Ion Zottos demonstrated a conscious approach as a philologue at the disposal of music towards various cultural fields, from 17th and 18th centuries up to contemporary art music.
Testimonies for the presence of Ion Zottos in these fields are his texts on baroque church music, in particular on Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), on the opera Xerxes by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) and on the opera King Priam by Sir Michael Tippett (1905-1998), on the poet, pianist and composer Clement Harris (1871-1897), on Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) and on Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), or on the influence of music on the works of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). That is the context in which Ion Zottos also appears as a persona in the libretto of the (possibly unwritten) opera La vita Alexandrina by Bernard de Zogheb (1924-1999), a cosmopolitan writer born in Alexandria, of Syrian-Lebanese origin.
© Musicology